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Inside The Huskies

Ex-Husky Megwa Sues UW for Allegedly Causing Knee Re-Injury

The running back from Texas never played in Montlake after first getting hurt in high school.
Dan Raley|
Ex-Husky Megwa Sues UW for Allegedly Causing Knee Re-Injury
Ex-Husky Megwa Sues UW for Allegedly Causing Knee Re-Injury

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Washington Huskies

Emeka Megwa was going to be the next big thing for the University of Washington football team, a vaunted running back from Texas who coach Jimmy Lake would build the Husky program around.

Surrounded by family members, Megwa announced in the summer of 2021 on a CBS Sports live-stream broadcast that he had chosen the Huskies over Alabama, Auburn and Arizona State amid 40-plus scholarship offers. Through his junior year, this 4-star prospect already had rushed for more than 3,000 yards and 45 touchdowns for Fort Worth's Nolan Catholic High School.

Lake was so giddy over this development he had to call people and let them know he had just hit a home run in landing this coveted player.

Three years later, however, Megwa filed suit in King County Superior Court this week basically alleging the UW football program was negligent in causing him to suffer a second knee injury over seven months time and he was seeking damages, all of which was first reported by the Seattle Times.

What the lawsuit didn't say was the 6-foot, 213-pound back, now a non-scholarship player at Oklahoma, probably has next to no earnings power in a college football landscape enriching players everywhere. Think of the hard-luck Boobie Clark who was in the film "Friday Night Lights."

Megwa never practiced with Lake's Huskies. Only after Kalen DeBoer took over as coach for his fired predecessor did he participate in offseason training exercises. He might have spent six or seven months tops in Seattle.

To his great misfortune, he appears to be damaged goods as he pushes forward, hardly the all-everything rusher he was destined to become. He blames the UW football medical team and DeBoer's staff for causing that to happen, naming nine different individuals in his complaint.

Everything began to come unraveled for this promising football player not long after he committed to the Huskies three years ago when he tore an anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee after changing Texas high schools to Timber Creek for his senior year.

Lake encouraged Megwa, who had surgery in Texas, to graduate early and come to Seattle, enroll at the UW and receive the best medical treatment he would find for his long rehabilitation.

In his lawsuit, Megwa alleges the DeBoer coaching staff rushed, if not shamed, him into participating in winter workouts before he was fully recovered, beginning in January 2022, and he re-injured his knee and suffered great mental duress.

Interestingly, Megwa posed for a fairly muscular looking image of himself in mid-March that was posted on social media — a week after he supposedly learned he had another ACL tear.

The running back never appeared even as a spectator at a spring football practice conducted by DeBoer, who was decidedly vague about the running back's situation all along.

It wasn't publicly known that Megwa had re-injured himself and returned to Texas for a second surgery until another Husky running back disclosed the information in an offhand conversation during spring ball.

In June, Megwa left the UW program and two months later announced he was entering the transfer portal. He expressed his gratitude to Lake, but not DeBoer, for his time with the Huskies. The running back later didn't respond to a message asking him if he had been forced out of the program, which he now alleges in his complaint.

Asked in fall camp about the reason behind the running back's departure, DeBoer again didn't offer a lot of detail about Megwa, saying only in a disjointed manner, "When you look at our offense and just the numbers we have, and how it all comes together ... I think he's a great kid, does a great job and is going to have great career. He's still working through getting healthy."

Megwa sat out the 2022 college football season, but joined Oklahoma last year as a walk-on player. He appeared in two games and ran the ball once for 6 yards against Texas Christian. 

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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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