“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
David Roddy has been the man in the arena that Teddy Roosevelt once spoke of a lot lately.
It’s the last day in January, and the Colorado State forward (or guard or center, depending on the day) is at the free throw line with less than two seconds to go and a chance to win the game in a rivalry showdown against Wyoming. The 6' 6", 255-pound “freight train,” as one former coach described him, stands at the line with a wry grin on his face, staring down a hoop 15 feet away with rowdy Wyoming students just behind the basket.
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The first shot? Swish. Tie game.
The second clangs short off the front of the rim. Overtime.
Roddy fouls out midway through the extra period, called for an offensive foul while backing down his defender. The junior immediately pulls his jersey over his face in disbelief. Wyoming scores the game’s next seven points and wins, 86–83, with Roddy on the bench.
Just three days later, Roddy is in the arena again. His Rams have blown a 20-point second-half lead in front of a sellout crowd at home in Fort Collins, Colo., against San Diego State, a team that beat CSU by 30 points in early January. His team now trails by one with less than 15 seconds to play. Roddy retrieves the ball that just swished through the net to put his team behind by one, quickly inbounds it and sprints up the floor behind point guard Isaiah Stevens.
Roddy’s in the right place at the right time. Stevens loses control of the ball as he penetrates inside the arc, but it comes right to Roddy. Roddy gathers, elevates and shoots.
Nothing but net.
One defensive stop later, and the students that packed Moby Arena are on the court celebrating with the big man (literally) on campus.
The next day, Roddy posts a picture of that emotional moment. The caption? “Man in the Arena.”
David Roddy was made to be the man in the arena. His muscular thighs and chiseled calves stand out the first time you see him in a gym. His broad shoulders look well-equipped to carry football pads (which they once did). His dark eyes look like they could stare through you when he gets in a defensive stance. He can sprint the length of a basketball court in four seconds, like he did in the Wyoming game to earn those late-game free throws. He can throw his body around in the paint with centers. He can cross you over off the dribble like a point guard. But most importantly, Roddy was made to compete—in whatever he does. Basketball just happens to be his focus right now.
Roddy’s father Pierre recalls the time in second grade when he received an A-plus on a test, then held it up to the entire class and exclaimed, “That’s how you get into a D-I school!” Roddy grew up with four older brothers, all of whom were athletes, which certainly fed his competitive drive. Once he got to high school at Breck School in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Roddy was a three-sport star: an all-state quarterback at 270 pounds, a Mr. Basketball finalist and a state champion in the discus throw.
His success left him with options … and some lingering doubters. Most college recruiters, both for football and basketball, had never seen a player quite like him. Basketball coaches were unsure of what to do with a 6' 6" center built more like a defensive lineman than a hoops player.
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“Everyone looks at him and says, ‘He should be a football player,’” says Dave Thorson, a former Colorado State assistant who recruited Roddy to CSU. “They looked at the height and said, ‘He’s too small to be a five-man at the high level.’”
Meanwhile, football coaches were interested in Roddy, but usually to play positions other than quarterback. “We went down to Iowa and were sitting with the defensive line coach,” Pierre recalls. “‘Why are we in the defensive line room, coach? This kid is a quarterback!’”
In the end, he had to make a choice: football or basketball, sports he says to this day he “love[s] equally.” Roddy made his choice based on relationships, ones that were more easily forged in the more personal basketball recruiting process than in football, a sport where most staffs will send out hundreds of offers a year.
“I didn’t really get too much of a close connection with [football coaches],” he says. “It was kind of cookie cutter, letters in the mail and not a lot of phone calls.”
It was the opposite in basketball, where Thorson fell in love with Roddy early in the recruiting process and didn’t rest until he could secure a commitment.
“Almost every day, [Thorson] was contacting me, texting me, multiple times. It was almost overbearing sometimes,” he says through a laugh.
Thorson was around all the time … even at football games. Whatever it took to secure Roddy’s signature.
“Those coaches loved him,” Roddy’s father says. “Thorson showed up places when he had no business showing up.”
His stock continued to rise during his final AAU season playing with Howard Pulley, a powerhouse program from Minnesota. He earned high-major offers from Northwestern and Minnesota and seemed to be getting better every weekend. Thorson and CSU head coach Niko Medved sat courtside as Roddy dominated at the final event of the summer in Las Vegas, becoming more enamored and more nervous at once.
“I’m sitting there with Niko and [Roddy] had about 35 [points], threes and dunks,” Thorson says. “We both looked at each other and were like, ‘How in the world are we going to get this guy?’”
But CSU’s persistence and the relationship Medved and Thorson built with Roddy paid off. When Roddy called Medved to commit in the fall of 2018, the coach pulled off the road and screamed.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Medved says.
Once Roddy got to campus in Fort Collins, his development took off. For the first time in his life, he was focusing on just one sport. And not only that, he was able to draw on his experiences playing football and competing in track and field events and apply them to the hardwood. One big area that shined was his playmaking ability, which he credits to his time as a quarterback.
“In high school, we watched football film and figured out where the defense would go. It’s very similar now, except there’s only five guys on the field,” Roddy says. “I can see the court really well and ‘throw guys open.’” My playmaking ability definitely directly correlates to my quarterback experience.”
A player who some college coaches pigeon-holed as an undersized center started unlocking some point guard skills. In his second college game against Duke, Roddy came off the bench and played all five positions. The Rams got hammered by 34 points against an elite Blue Devils team, but Roddy scored 12 points, grabbed six boards and dished out a pair of assists in a game that started to prove CSU had more than just a big man on its hands.
Roddy averaged nearly 12 points and six rebounds as a freshman to earn honorable mention all-conference honors, then exploded into a first-teamer in 2020–21, averaging nearly 16 points and 10 rebounds per game. But only by his junior season did he perfect the final facet of his game: three-point shooting. In his first two seasons at CSU, Roddy shot a combined 23.4% from beyond the arc. This year, he’s shooting a remarkable 50% from deep (on 64 attempts), the sixth-best mark in the nation, per KenPom. The most notable indicator of his improvement as a shooter came at the Paradise Jam in November, when Roddy went 7 for 10 from three as part of a 36-point outburst in a statement win over Creighton that remains one of CSU’s better résumé wins.
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“There was a moment with him in the game against Creighton where it’s just, you saw him get to another level and a lightbulb that went off,” Medved says. “There was no hesitation. There was just that zen-like moment.”
Now that teams have to guard Roddy attentively from distance, there’s little you can do to stop him. He can create with the ball in his hands in pick-and-rolls, drill threes with ease, score out of postups, attack in transition and distribute. His 255-pound frame makes him too strong for guards and wings to guard, and his athletic burst and skill level makes life difficult for big men who venture out onto the perimeter to match up with him. It’s why Roddy was named to the Wooden Award late-season top 20 recently. And even NBA evaluators are starting to take notice.
“He’s a pretty unique prospect,” one NBA scout says. “Once you drop your preconceived notion of positions and the more you watch him, the more you like him.”
Success for the Rams has followed. The year before Roddy arrived (Medved’s first season at CSU), the Rams went 12–20. They won 20 games in Roddy’s freshman year, won 20 more and came a game away from a Mountain West title with Roddy as a sophomore and now are 18–3 and on track for an at-large bid in 2021–22. CSU is well on its way to a third straight 20-win season, the first time the program will have accomplished such a feat since 1989–90. With Roddy and Stevens, who is on the Bob Cousy Award watch list for the best point guard in men’s college basketball, the Rams are a team that can not just make the NCAA tournament, but win a game or two while there.
Coincidence? Not according to those who know Roddy best.
“You might pull your measuring stick out and say, ‘Oh, he’s a football player.’ No, he’s not. He's a winner,” Thorson says. “Whatever he chooses to do, he’s going to do great at it.”
So Roddy will keep being the man in the arena. And more often than not, he’ll come out of it the winner.
