Inside The Huskies

End to Sav'ell Smalls' Football Career Was a Big Deal

The former Husky was forced to medically retire at Colorado.
Dan Raley|
Huskies Carson Bruener (42) and Sav'ell Smalls (17) pursue Oregon running back Travis Dye in 2021.
Huskies Carson Bruener (42) and Sav'ell Smalls (17) pursue Oregon running back Travis Dye in 2021. | Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images

The long-winding and unconventional football career for Sav'ell Smalls came to a close for good four months ago, with the former University of Washington edge rusher revealing how he was forced to medically retire at Colorado.

In a social media posting on Tuesday, the 6-foot-3, 265-pound disclosed how he was experiencing temporary paralysis in his arms and legs during the season and tried to play through it until experiencing repeated episodes and he stopped playing altogether after five games in 2025.

Smalls told how he was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal cord that caused his nerves to compress and shut down.

"A spinal fushion was the only viable option to continue my career," he wrote of possibly pursuing the NFL. "However, it was not guaranteed to stop my symptoms and the risk of paralysis would still be high, so in early October, I medically retired, ending my athletic career for good."

Thus, one of the highest-rated high school players to emerge from the Greater Seattle area -- ESPN ranked him as the No. 15 player in the country and No. 1 player in the state in 2020 -- walked away.

With that, the one-time 5-star recruit from Kennedy Catholic and Garfield high schools in the Seattle area ended his college career at 51 games spread over six seasons for the UW and Colorado. He started one game each for the Huskies and the Buffaloes.

Sav'ell Smalls was a Husky from 2020-22 before transferring.
Sav'ell Smalls was a Husky from 2020-22 before transferring. | UW

Smalls finished his career with 34 tackles, all but two coming with the Huskies. His last game for the UW was the 2022 Alamo Bowl, when he came up with a tackle and a quarterback hurry in his team's 27-20 victory over Texas. He transferred in the offseason to Deion Sanders' team in Boulder.

After a position change at Colorado in his second season, he finished with 9 catches for 68 yards and a touchdown, the latter a 2-yard scoring catch from Shedeur Sanders coming at the end of Colorado's 36-14 loss to BYU in the 2024 Alamo Bowl.

While his deteriorating medical condition had to be disconcerting, Smalls must have been more than a little frustrated that his career didn't turn out the way he or others probably envisioned it with unlimited greatness, culminating in a lengthy NFL career.

Yet the talented athlete should be grateful he came away with his health intact before anything tragic happened to him.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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