From aircraft carrier to football field, Texas State’s Tyler Huff followed his dream

Texas State senior tight end Tyler Huff was on an aircraft carrier thousands of miles from home when the dream of playing college football really set in. Stationed near Tokyo on his first deployment in the Navy in 2014, Huff watched from across the globe as former Pop Warner and high school teammates played college football at the highest level. 

With Texas State preparing to play South Alabama on Saturday, a day after Veterans Day, Huff reflected, “They were living the dream I wished I was living. Growing up, I always thought making it to a DI university (to play football) was so unachievable, but now that these guys that I played with are actually doing it, I was, like, ‘Wow, why can’t I do that?’”

The answer: He could and would. 

Now a 27-year-old college football player, Huff had a journey from the Navy to Saturdays in the Sun Belt Conference that was anything but orthodox. There were setbacks, detours and several days when he thought his career was finished. 

As he heads down the final stretch of what he expects to be his last college football season, Huff can point to several ways that his four-year military service has helped him as a student-athlete. In return, Huff knows his experience in college athletics has fostered growth that will be beneficial for life. Most notably, he hopes those experiences will enhance his application package to return to the Navy as an officer to become a pilot. 

“I feel like I have a competitive package to achieve being an officer,” said Huff, who’s set to graduate in May with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, his second undergraduate degree  from Texas State. The first is in applied arts and sciences.

Yet he got to this point, as he put it, in the “weirdest way possible.”

For Huff, the experience washed away the regrettable end to his high school football career. 

“I got the bad taste out of my mouth from when I quit in high school and I stopped having fun with the game,” he said. “I finally started enjoying the game more.” 

Despite Huff’s success at Saddleback, which included being named a second-team all-conference selection and Saddleback’s Offensive Lineman of the Year, he was still undersized to get the type of recruiting interest he hoped to get from schools. At around 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, he didn’t receive any offers from Division I schools. 

“After that season, I was fully content with hanging up my cleats and having that be my last season,” he said. “I really thought football was over for me at that point. I was looking for my next challenge.”

At Saddleback, Huff completed a few Olympic-level triathlons that consist of a 0.93-mile swim, 24.8-mile bike ride and a 6.2-mile run. Naturally, Huff started training for something bigger: an Ironman triathlon, a grueling race that consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run.

He also moved to Boise, Idaho, with his family and enrolled in the spring semester of 2020 at Boise State, continuing to live like he’d put a bow on his time in football. 

Life had other ideas, however. More specifically, Texas State assistant coach Brian Hamilton found film of Huff online and saw potential. 

“He gives me a call and he says he saw my highlight tape on Twitter, and he liked what he saw. He wanted to offer me an opportunity to come down here to San Marcos,” Huff recalled. “Right when I got the call and he offered me that, it was obviously a no-brainer for me. This has been a dream since I was a kid. You only get this opportunity once in life.” 

Huff is in a small group of people who can compare life within a college football locker room to that on an aircraft carrier. To him, they’re similar. It’s why he thinks his time aboard the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS George Washington helped him transition back to a college football team setting. 

“One quality I feel like the military’s really good about instilling is being able to work with anyone. The aircraft carrier has 6,000 people on it, and I’m working with different people from different parts of the world. … There’s language barriers. There’s culture barriers,” he said. “It’s kind of like a football locker room. There are people from different types of places. You have to be able to adapt and be friendly with everyone and to be able to work with everyone.”

Huff said his time in the Navy also instilled a sense of respecting that everyone is part of a unit. 

In a college athletics department, he said that team unit extends to the likes of academic advisors, facilities workers and athletic trainers, among others. 

“I just have so much respect for those people because they’re taking care of us. They’re part of this machine, too,” he said. “They’re part of Texas State football, and they’re trying to win, too. Their work doesn’t go unnoticed, and the wins are their wins, too. I think my time in the Navy really made me appreciate everyone. We’re all one team. It’s all one fight, and we’re all working toward the same goal.”

Huff has leaned on many of these groups in his mission to make an impact at Texas State. While a dream opportunity, his time as a Bobcat hasn’t been without its unexpected adversity. He tore his ACL on the third day of fall camp in 2020. In 2021, he struggled to get on the field. The team went 4-8, and he contemplated being done with football. After his coaches asked him to really think about it, however, he decided to return. 

“I knew I had more to prove to myself,” Huff said. 

This season, he’s done exactly that. Huff has played 327 snaps through nine games, more than five times the number of snaps he played in 2021.

“It’s really cool to have those opportunities to actually contribute to the team,” he said. 

There are several other, immeasurable ways Huff has contributed to Texas State. His influence on his teammates ranks near the top. 

“He brings a maturity and a leadership and a side to this game that is much needed,” Texas State head coach Jake Spavital said of Huff in a news conference this spring. 

Hamilton, the man who discovered Huff on Twitter, described Huff’s leadership to The University Star earlier this year. 

“He tore his ACL in practice (his first year here) and came back out to practice and handed out water for the rest of practice,” Hamilton said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”  

Huff has spoken in front of the team multiple times to put the opportunities presented to them as college athletes in perspective. He’s echoed the value of being able to work with a diverse set of people toward a common goal. He’s told them not to underestimate what those connections can mean later in life. He’s reinforced how the challenges of balancing football, academics and other responsibilities will benefit them beyond college. 

Photos courtesy of Texas State and Tyler Huff