{"id":4916,"date":"2023-10-26T18:25:48","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T15:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/4916\/how-bucs-rb-white-went\/"},"modified":"2023-10-26T18:25:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T15:25:49","slug":"how-bucs-rb-white-went","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/?p=4916","title":{"rendered":"How Bucs RB White went from sleeping on floors to the NFL"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How Bucs RB White went from sleeping on floors to the NFL\u060c<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"article-meta\">\n<ul class=\"authors\">\n<li class=\"mugshot-shown\">\n<div class=\"author-img\"><\/div>\n<p>Jenna Laine, ESPN Staff Writer<span class=\"timestamp \">Oct 26, 2023, 11:00 AM<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"author-overlay\">Close<\/p>\n<ul>Jenna Laine covers the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for ESPN.  She started covering the Bucs for ESPN in 2016, but she has covered the team since 2009. Follow Jenna on Twitter: @JennaLaineESPN.<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>TAMPA BAY, Fla.  &#8212; Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Rachaad White and his mother, Rochelle, still remember that tearful car ride home following the Thomas A. Simone Memorial <a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/tag\/football\/\"   title=\"Football\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\">Football<\/a> Award banquet.<\/p>\n<p>It was White&#8217;s senior year of high school in 2016 and he didn&#8217;t <a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/tag\/win\/\"   title=\"win\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\">win<\/a> the award, presented each year to the best high school player in Kansas City.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDo you see how you feel now?\u201d  his mom told him.  \u201cNever let anyone make you feel this way again.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That car ride is the moment White, now 24 and in his second year in the NFL, leans on for when things don&#8217;t go according to plan.  It serves as a reminder to where he came from when he finally earned the Bucs&#8217; starting role, and how much he leaned on Rochelle, who he calls his Superwoman, as he navigated the path to becoming a professional football player.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"inline float-r inline-track\">\n<h2 class=\"img-title\">Best of NFL Nation<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" data-lazyload=\"true\" src=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/How-Bucs-RB-White-went-from-sleeping-on-floors-to.jpg\" class=\"round lazyload\"\/><\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Young vs.  Stroud: Top picks set to face off<br \/>\u2022 How Bucs RB went from evictions to NFL<br \/>\u2022 McDermott&#8217;s DC duties complicated for Bills<br \/>\u2022 Etienne has been key to Jags&#8217; offense<br \/>\u2022 Eagles hope Byard brings stability to safety<br \/>\u2022 How has Jets coach looked over 40 games?<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>&#8220;I was hurt. I was hurt for sure,&#8221; White said.  &#8220;I didn&#8217;t even get voted as a finalist, I was a semifinalist. &#8230; I was already upset because I wasn&#8217;t getting no [scholarship] offers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI felt like I let myself down, let my family down, let people down.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>His mother told him, &#8220;There are going to be certain instances &#8212; key moments in your life, defining moments. This is going to be one of them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Seven years later, the second-year <a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/tag\/pro\/\"   title=\"pro\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\">pro<\/a> has ascended to starting running back for Tampa Bay, galvanized by a journey that included stops in Division II and junior college.  He&#8217;ll help lead the Bucs&#8217; rushing attack against the Buffalo Bills on Thursday night (8:15 pm ET, Amazon Prime).<\/p>\n<p>But on that car ride, it wasn&#8217;t enough in White&#8217;s mind to merely be an also-ran for the award.  Not with all the dreams he had and what they&#8217;d been through as a family.  He wanted to look out for his mom and his three brothers &#8212; Antoine, Darrioine and De&#8217;Andre.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBreaking generational curses,\u201d White said, \u201cI\u2019m going to be the one that breaks it and changes things.\u201d<\/p>\n<aside class=\"inline inline-photo full\">\n<figure><picture><source data- media=\"(min-width: 376px)\"><source data- media=\"(max-width: 375px)\"><img class=\" lazyload lazyload\" data-image-container=\".inline-photo\" height=\"414\" width=\"570\"\/><\/source><\/source><\/picture><figcaption class=\"photoCaption\">Rachaad White, left, and his mother, Rochelle, pose with his brothers (left to right) Darrioine, Antoine and DeAndre&#8217;. <cite>Courtesy of Rochelle White<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/aside>\n<hr\/>\n<p><strong>ROCHELLE WORKED TWO<\/strong> jobs &#8212; at a gas station at night and as a school bus driver during the day &#8212; while raising four boys and going to school.  First, she earned her bachelor&#8217;s degree at Central Missouri, and, later, her master&#8217;s degree at Missouri.<\/p>\n<p>White&#8217;s father wasn&#8217;t around for much of his childhood and struggled with addiction.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe was incarcerated from when I was maybe 8 or so,\u201d White said.  &#8220;He came back around when I was a freshman in high school.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Rochelle often worried about the family becoming a &#8220;victim&#8221; to their environment, but nothing could prepare them for the phone call they received in the early hours of June 30, 2016.<\/p>\n<p>His brother, Darrioine, then 22, had been shot while taking a friend home.  He was caught in the crosshairs of an altercation at a nearby apartment complex.  Doctors gave him a 6% chance to live, according to Rochelle, odds he beat after a month in the hospital.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt broke my mom. It hurt my mom to death,\u201d White said.  &#8220;It had a huge impact on my life. &#8230; It just changed me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<aside class=\"inline float-r inline-track\">\n<h2 class=\"img-title\">Follow the NFL all season long<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" class=\"floatright\" src=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/How-Bucs-RB-White-went-from-sleeping-on-floors-to.png\" width=\"50\"\/><\/p>\n<p>\u2022 Full schedule \u00bb |  Standings \u00bb<br \/>\u2022 Depth charts for every team \u00bb<br \/>\u2022 Transactions \u00bb |  Injuries \u00bb<br \/>\u2022 Football Power Index \u00bb<br \/><b>More NFL coverage \u00bb<\/b><\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>The incident, and the feeling White needed to get out of Kansas City, made playing football at the next level mean more.<\/p>\n<p>He ended up attending Nebraska at Kearney, a Division II school in 2017. During White&#8217;s freshman season, he took a redshirt and didn&#8217;t appear in a game.  But in practice, he earned the nickname &#8220;Lil Le&#8217;Veon&#8221; after former NFL running back Le&#8217;Veon Bell.  They said if he did well in junior college that he could be recruited by a Power 5 school and stand a much greater chance of fulfilling his NFL dream.<\/p>\n<p>In 2018, White transferred to Mt. San Antonio College, a junior college in Walnut, California &#8211; a move his mother was against.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI called the entire family and everything, and I wanted them to talk him out of it, but he was head-strong and he decided to go,\u201d Rochelle said.  &#8220;I said, &#8216;Well, how are you going to get there?&#8217;  He said, &#8216;I&#8217;ll pay for it on my own.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>By then, White&#8217;s father had started communicating with him regularly as he tried to make fines for his absence.  He began sending money to his sons, which White saved and used to purchase a one-way plane ticket to California.<\/p>\n<p>Rochelle would also send money, but that didn&#8217;t cover the cost of living on the West Coast.  White feared if he told her just how bad things were, she&#8217;d try to convince him to come home.<\/p>\n<p>White and his teammates would put together their money and try to cram more than 10 people into one apartment, where some would have to share diapers or mattresses on the floor and &#8220;get creative&#8221; so they all could have a place to lay their heads.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When I first got there, I was sleeping in the living room. I just picked a corner in the living room,&#8221; said White, who lived in six different apartments in the two years he played at Mt. San Antonio.<\/p>\n<p>They would try to help each other out, but there&#8217;s a limit to how many people can squeeze into a two-bedroom apartment, which costs about $2,300 a month.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was just a crazy time,\u201d said Zach Rangel, who was a teammate of White\u2019s.  &#8220;It was very sporadic, unstable. You kind of just didn&#8217;t know what was going to happen one day from the next and evictions and lights turning off, water going off &#8212; there was always something new. You would come out there and you&#8217;d sign a lease, and then eventually somebody, one of your teammates, gets evicted. You look up and you&#8217;ve got 14 guys in a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>White&#8217;s relationship with Rangel would prove instrumental for White&#8217;s time in California.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe leaned on each other,\u201d Rangel said.  &#8220;We had a rule early on. It&#8217;s tough to go about it by yourself. &#8230; We made a pact that no matter what apartment we stayed in, it&#8217;d have to be able to fit two of us so we could both be there.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Anytime any of us had any food or anything like that, if say, he went out and he got a pizza somewhere, we were splitting it. If I had a sandwich, we were splitting it. If I ate, he ate. If he ate, I ate.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>White recalled a conversation while out in California, where a teammate told him &#8220;Juco is either gonna make you or it&#8217;s going to break you,&#8221; where White responded, &#8220;It ain&#8217;t gonna break me. I ain&#8217;t being broke.&#8221;<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><strong>WHILE WHITE WAS<\/strong> succeeding on the field, where he rushed for 1,264 yards and 10 touchdowns in his sophomore year, he balanced odd jobs to help pay the bills &#8211; even during the season.<\/p>\n<p>One job was security at the music festival, Coachella, where he saw Todd Gurley who was the star running back with the Los Angeles Rams at the time.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/tag\/man\/\"   title=\"Man\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\">Man<\/a>, go get a picture,\u201d White\u2019s coworkers told him.  But White refused.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The next time I go to Coachella, I&#8217;m going to be the guy backstage&#8230;not working it,&#8221; he told himself.<\/p>\n<p>As his former teammates back in Nebraska had predicted, White would go on to get an offer from a Power 5 school, Arizona State, in 2020.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"inline inline-photo float-l\">\n<figure><picture><source data- media=\"(min-width: 376px)\"><source data- media=\"(max-width: 375px)\"><img class=\" lazyload lazyload\" data-image-container=\".inline-photo\" height=\"400\" width=\"267\"\/><\/source><\/source><\/picture><figcaption class=\"photoCaption\">Rachaad White and her mother, Rochelle, embrace after a game at Arizona State. <cite>Courtesy of Rochelle White<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/aside>\n<p>He would rush for 1,006 yards and 15 touchdowns, along with 456 receiving yards and a receiving touchdown, during his final season in 2021. The Bucs then selected him in the third round of the 2022 NFL draft.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI remember being there at his draft day in Arizona,\u201d said Rangel, who kept in touch through the years.  &#8220;You&#8217;re just proud of him. &#8230; I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a more deserving person than Rachaad.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>During White&#8217;s rookie year, he was the No. 2 back behind Leonard Fournette.  White got his first <a class=\"wpil_keyword_link\" href=\"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/tag\/start\/\"   title=\"start\" data-wpil-keyword-link=\"linked\">start<\/a> over in Week 10 in the NFL&#8217;s first regular season game in Munich, Germany, against the Seattle Seahawks.<\/p>\n<p>White would have his best game to date, rushing for 105 yards on 22 carries and helping the Bucs close out the game down the stretch when Fournette had officially been ruled out in the fourth quarter with a hip injury.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m just proud of him,\u201d Rochelle said.  &#8220;He didn&#8217;t give up. He knew what he wanted.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>White did enough toward the end of the season to make the Bucs believe in him as their lead back, and after the team parted ways with Fournette in the offseason, White became the guy.<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p><strong>THE 2023 SEASON<\/strong> has been filled with ups and downs for White, including a pivotal play where he ran into a wall of defenders that resulted in a safety against the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 3.<\/p>\n<p>The Bucs&#8217; run-blocking woes were on display, but White doesn&#8217;t lay blame on the unit.  His resiliency is why he says he believes he can spark a fledgling rushing attack that&#8217;s averaging 77.8 yards per game &#8211; 29th in the league &#8211; as their unit continues to adjust to offensive coordinator Dave Canales&#8217; system after six games.<\/p>\n<p>The Bucs&#8217; run block win rate is currently 63%, which ranks last, according to ESPN Stats &#038; Information.  It&#8217;s an indicator of where some of their biggest struggles lay.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want greatness right now, but you got to work for that,\u201d White said.  &#8220;And that&#8217;s one big thing I just keep understanding &#8212; you got to keep working. That&#8217;s what it&#8217;s about. Only way is up, and that&#8217;s for all of us.&#8221;<\/p>\n<aside class=\"inline inline-photo full\">\n<figure><picture><source data- media=\"(min-width: 376px)\"><source data- media=\"(max-width: 375px)\"><img class=\" lazyload lazyload\" data-image-container=\".inline-photo\" height=\"320\" width=\"570\"\/><\/source><\/source><\/picture><figcaption class=\"photoCaption\">Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Rachaad White has gone through a lot off the field, but he says that he wouldn&#8217;t be where he is on the field without it. <cite>Dustin Satloff\/Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/aside>\n<p>As White is still working on his patience to this day, his mom, who now works for a crisis hotline, has given him needed perspective.  She told him to &#8220;get back to smiling more&#8221; after the Eagles loss, and you could see it the following week in a win at the New Orleans Saints.<\/p>\n<p>As the Bucs (3-3) are on a two-game slide since their Week 5 bye, smiles may be hard to come by, but White is coming off his best game of the season.<\/p>\n<p>Although White didn&#8217;t really get it going on the ground (33 rushing yards) against the Atlanta Falcons, he had six catches for a career-high 65 receiving yards.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSometimes it ain&#8217;t always about how you start,\u201d White said, \u201cit&#8217;s about how you finish.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Bucs RB White went from sleeping on floors to the NFL\u060c Jenna Laine, ESPN Staff WriterOct 26, 2023, 11:00 AM Close Jenna Laine covers the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for ESPN. She started covering the Bucs for ESPN in 2016, but she has covered the team since 2009. Follow Jenna on Twitter: @JennaLaineESPN. TAMPA BAY, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3744,3746,847,3745,1706],"class_list":["post-4916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-sports","tag-bucs","tag-floors","tag-nfl","tag-sleeping","tag-white"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4916"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4918,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4916\/revisions\/4918"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wikidollar.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}