Whenever he is selected by one of the 32 NFL franchises in the 2025 NFL Draft, Utah State wide receiver Jalen Royals will become the first Aggie since Jordan Love in 2020 to hear his name called.
While that has felt like an eventuality for a couple of years now, Royals wasn’t always a guaranteed future pro, nor even was a collegiate career at Utah State anything close to a foregone conclusion for the Powder Springs, Georgia native.
So how did Royals get here? How did the Aggie standout go from being an under-recruited high school prospect to a junior college transfer who hardly played at that level to a star at Utah State who will now likely be taken in either the second, third or fourth rounds of the NFL draft?