SUSPENSION REPORT: IU Football Suspended Defensive lineman Mikail Kamara for 12- games for-..

‘I’m a zero star.’ How JMU transfer Mikail Kamara evolved into pass rusher IU craves.

BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football defensive end Mikail Kamara likes to tease Curt Cignetti about the coach’s reluctance to offer him a scholarship.

Back in 2020, Cignetti expressed reservations about Kamara’s size. They were the same kind of doubts Kamara had grown used to hearing on the recruiting trail as an edge rusher who was 6-feet tall and weighed less than 240 pounds.

“We talk about it all the time,” Kamara said in an interview during fall camp. “We talked about it a month ago. He was like, ‘Man, I was sitting in the office and going to take your offer away, look at us now?’”

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That meeting Cignetti mentioned included Kamara’s parents as well. His father, Hassan Kamara, left the sit down thinking there was no way his son would verbally commit to James Madison.

“You want to play for this guy?” Hassan said with a laugh. “(Cignetti) didn’t seem like he wanted him. He didn’t think Mikail was up to it. He seemed a little snobbish.”

Mikail had a different reaction.

“I was drawn to him, it was like an ‘it’ factor,” Mikail said, echoing what many Indiana players have said about the coach in recent months. “I knew I was good, he knew I was good. He was still like, we’ll take you. We don’t need you, but we’ll take you. I was like bro, I could come here and dominate.”

Kamara became the impact player he envisioned while transforming his body — his playing weight in fall camp was 265 pounds and he had the lowest body fat (15%) of his career — and helping JMU reach the program’s first bowl game last fall.

It might have happened even earlier if not for a recurring shoulder injury, but the delayed success only made Cignetti’s unprompted praise of Kamara last week sound that much sweeter.

“I think the one guy that’s really upped his game is Kamara,” Cignetti said. “We saw that in the spring. We saw that in fall. He’s just playing at another level.”

IU football’s Mikail Kamara has never backed down from a challenge

Mikail Kamara didn’t have much time for action figures growing up. At 5 years old, he started carrying around a football everywhere he went.

Some of his earliest memories are of his parents scolding him for knocking items off the shelves on their trips to the grocery store with that same football.