• Wayne Knight is among the breakout stars on the 6-0 UCLA football team, but his journey to success with the No. 9 Bruins was far from easy.
• Knight dominated Delaware football but had no FBS offers until he was recruited by then-James Madison coach Curt Cignetti.
• Knight nearly left JMU, but he was sold on new coach Bob Chesney’s plans and took over the rushing the attack before following Chesney to UCLA.

As the kids of Smyrna, Del., bickered about who got to play the role of 5-foot-7 high school star tailback Wayne Knight during their pickup football games, Knight was blazing a trail under Friday night lights.

During Knight’s senior season, he ran for 1,406 yards and 30 touchdowns. He dominated state competition with the ardent support of the Smyrna community — a rural town centered around fishing, crabbing and waterfowl, with no more than 15,000 people.

All of Smyrna shut down when it was game day — supporting William Knight, Wayne’s older brother, who won three consecutive state titles and finished his career as the state’s all-time leading rusher.

The future breakout UCLA football star who will help lead the No. 9 Bruins (6-0, 3-0 Big Ten) against Michigan State (2-5, 0-4) at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Rose Bowl took a long and challenging path to reach Westwood.

Following in his brother’s footsteps, Wayne led Smyrna High School to a state 3A title game and earned his third consecutive All-State selection in his senior season. But despite the stats, accolades and highlights, three days before signing day, Wayne was a zero-star recruit, held zero Football Bowl Subdivision offers and was committed to Stony Brook.

“I committed to Stony Brook during the summer of my senior year and then Curt Cignetti came around,” Wayne said. “I went down on an official visit [to James Madison] a few days before signing day, and then three days before signing day, he called me, asked me if I wanted to be a Duke. It was a no-brainer. It was my only shot at playing FBS football.”

Like most true freshmen, Wayne saw sparse playing time at James Madison, appearing in eight games as a running back and seeing snaps on special teams.

But everything changed during his sophomore year.

After the first few games of the 2023 season, Wayne solely saw time on kickoffs, and after the fourth game, he asked if he could be used on more special teams action or in a different role.

The answer was no.

So, Wayne made one of the hardest decisions of his young career, stepping away from the team to redshirt his sophomore season, preserve an extra year of eligibility and enter the transfer portal.

“I never really ultimately wanted to step away from the team that year, but that’s ultimately what it got to,” Wayne said. “Doubt creeps in moments of vulnerability. Having to go through that kind of time, it was tough, and I wasn’t highly recruited out of high school, so I didn’t know what the next steps for me were leaving James Madison University. I probably would have had to go down to a lower level.”

But a door opened when Cignetti left for Indiana following the 2023 campaign. Wayne wanted to stay at James Madison and saw an opportunity under the new leadership of head coach Bob Chesney.

So, he sent in a representative to talk with Chesney to see if he would welcome him back to the Dukes.

That representative was his brother, Yamir — a slot receiver who spent his first two seasons at JMU and is now in his senior year at Southern Methodist.

“He came and approached me first and said my brother’s in the portal. He got in there, and he explained to me why he was,” Chesney said. “Yamir said, ‘Hey, this is my brother, Wayne,’ and I remember walking in that day, and Wayne was sitting on the couch and he came into the office and talked a little bit, and he said, ‘I wanted to be part of this team, I wanted to do more, I just was told there wasn’t going to be more for me to do and I didn’t want to burn a whole year.’”

After their meeting, the head coach was open with the Knight brothers, giving them all the details of how it would look if Wayne returned to the program.

And Wayne did not hesitate.

After returning to the new-look Dukes, he was mentored by former JMU running backs coach David Sims Jr. — the current passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach at the University of Rochester — who recruited him to the University of Pennsylvania out of high school.

“When I found him, I thought he was extremely quick,” Sims said. “If you get a shorter back, you always want them to have either really good quickness, really good speed or you want them to kind of have the type of build that would allow them to take a little bit more of a punch. And he had all three of those things wrapped into one.”

After Wayne’s first spring back at JMU, Sims rated him as the second- or third-best guy coming out of the group.

However, every time he went into the game, Sims and former JMU and current UCLA offensive line coach Chris Smith noticed that nobody blocked, never really giving him a chance to showcase his ability and making him hard to evaluate.

But after an injury to the room, Wayne rose up the depth chart and got his shot.

“As you started seeing him more and more, you started seeing his ability show up more and more,” Sims said. “To the point, by the time we got to the [Old Dominion game], I remember talking with [offensive coordinator Dean] Kennedy as we were driving back [and him asking,] ‘Do you think Wayne is one of our best players?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’”

Although Sims said five running backs who could be Division I FBS or FCS starters returned to the program in 2025, Wayne took the reins as starter, running for 1,373 yards and nine touchdowns.

Even when Wayne made the move to UCLA and faced Big Ten competition, there was no guarantee of a starting role. He joined two veteran returners in Westwood.

But Wayne had been there before.

“Everybody in the world could be telling him he’s not going to make it, but he doesn’t give a damn about that because all he knows is fight, and all he needs is his teammates to respect him and show up for him, and he’s going to show up for them,” Smyrna High football coach Michael Judy said. “I can’t think of a more storybook tale that’s being told right now.”

While Wayne is on track for more hardware this season after a dominant start to the season, he has already won the hearts of the Bruin faithful, something Judy noticed when he saw kids waiting in the rain to get his autograph after facing Maryland. It reminded the coach of how kids responded to Wayne during his high school days in Smyrna.

“If all those little kids knew what a great person to look up to this young man is. It was really heartwarming. It made me feel good about football,” Judy said. “I’m going to speak on behalf of our whole community out here and the whole state. From the people that hated going against him on a Friday night, from our rivals. I’m 100% certain I can speak for everybody and say we’re extremely proud of him and so happy to see him having success and getting recognized for, you know, the type of person and player he is.”