Great story on Logan Muckey - StL PD

Posted on: August 27, 2025 at 10:04:10 CT

MIZZOU | FOOTBALL
He walked on at Mizzou, then beat cancer. Team captain Logan Muckey says 'it's worth it'

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Logan Muckey walked into Missouri’s defensive meeting room, placed his water bottle on the faux-wood lectern at the front and looked around. Cameras lined the upper-most row with reporters dotted throughout the rest of the seats.

“There’s a lot of you in here,” he said, breezily.
For the first time in his five seasons with the Tigers, Muckey was about to take questions from reporters, as every team captain did before the Tigers begin their 2025 season Thursday against Central Arkansas. Representing his team like this, in itself, was an improbability.

As a kid, he’d once been so nervous that he threw up on the walk to his first day of preschool, then again on the first day of kindergarten. Now, he seemed self-assured, even as questions turned increasingly personal.
How could they not? His story is one of a walk-on turned team captain, of someone who’s living out his dream by playing college football for the school he decided to attend in second grade.

“Every time I step out on the field wearing Mizzou across my chest, it’s worth it,” Muckey said.
By “it,” he means a lot.

A bet on himself despite the long odds walk-ons face.
A four-year wait for his first collegiate catch.
And cancer, which he survived earlier this year.
Muckey arrived for his first news conference in the standard player garb: a team-issued charcoal-gray polo shirt, “Missouri football” stitched in gold letters on the left side. Two silver necklaces showed underneath the collar. A few inches above, a scar.

His offseason looked different from the rest of his teammates. Muckey came back from spring break to find out, in what was ultimately a stroke of good luck, that he had papillary thyroid cancer.

In May, doctors removed the mass on his thyroid. He’s been cancer-free since. Save for 10 days of medically mandated rest, he hasn’t taken a break from football. He didn’t even want anyone to know about the cancer at first.

“He recognized that there are people out there that have it a lot worse than him,” Logan’s dad, Darren, said. “He just felt like they’re the ones that deserve the thoughts and prayers.”
Because here’s the thing about Logan Muckey: He’s happy. Couldn’t be happier, really. For a 23-year-old who went to the doctor with a sore throat only to find out there was a tumor on his thyroid — and maybe because that’s part of who he is now — he’s incredibly content with where he is.
“He’s exactly where he wants to be,” Darren said. “You couldn’t get Logan out of Columbia, Missouri, with the jaws of life.”

At no point, however, was there a guarantee he’d get there. Or that it would wind up like this, with Logan a survivor and a captain.
‘Dad, we did it’

Coming out of Lee’s Summit North High School in the Kansas City area after three all-conference seasons with the Broncos, Logan had a decision to make.

At that point, two things about him were true:
First, he was a good wide receiver. This dated back to when he started playing in second grade and was the first player to figure out how to catch the ball over his shoulder. If he could get behind the defense — and if an 8- or 9-year-old quarterback could get the ball there — he was gone.

“It was a weapon on second-grade football,” Darren said, half-joking, half-serious.

Logan started for Lee’s Summit North as a sophomore. He finished his career there with 88 catches for 1,049 yards and nine touchdowns.

Second, Logan wanted to play for Missouri.
He’d grown up loving the Tigers and shying away from Kansas, even though Lawrence was right there on the other side of the metro area. Once, when he was at a youth basketball camp, some KU players showed up to hand out posters and souvenir basketballs and signed autographs.
Logan left empty-handed because he wanted nothing to do with them.

The highlight of one of his birthday parties was Corbin Berkstresser, who was mostly a third-string quarterback at Mizzou from 2011 to 2015, making an appearance.

On the table, from relatively new MU coach Eli Drinkwitz, was a chance to be a preferred walk-on for the Tigers. A spot, but not a scholarship, which was good enough for Logan.

His mind sounded made up, but his parents wanted him to be sure he knew what walking on meant.
“We had a conversation,” Kristy said. “‘Is this the best choice? It’s hard. It’s the SEC. You’re going to have to work really hard.’ He said to us that if he didn’t, he would wonder for the rest of his life if he could do it.”
So off Logan went to Columbia, to find out if he could make a college football team.

He played 15 snaps across two games as a true freshman during the 2021 season, preserving his redshirt. His second year, however, went differently.

Logan played in every game of the 2022 season, racking up 205 snaps on special teams. And then came the news from Drinkwitz: Logan was a walk-on no more and had been awarded a scholarship.

He called Kristy to share the news. As a middle school teacher, she was in class with a room full of eighth graders.

“I answer it in the middle of class,” she said. “He’s crying. I can’t understand him.”
Then Logan called his dad.

“He says, ‘Dad, we did it,’” Darren said. “And I lost it at work.”

Logan was a special teams staple again in 2023 and 2024, racking up more than 100 snaps in each of those seasons but no catches for a by-then veteran receiver.

That changed in the Music City Bowl at the tail end of last season. In that game against Iowa — the school Darren grew up cheering for, coincidentally — the Tigers needed more than their usual cadre of wideouts. Mookie Cooper’s season had ended weeks earlier due to injury. Luther Burden III was done with college ball and getting ready for the NFL draft. Theo Wease Jr. broke his hand in the first half.

Logan was about to make himself useful and did so with a 6-yard catch that eventually set up an MU touchdown.
Inside Nashville’s Nissan Stadium, Darren was in awe of what he was seeing.

“I just about fainted,” he said. “It was an extremely proud moment. All my friends are chucking me on the shoulder: ‘That was your boy, that was your boy!’ I’m trying to compose myself — don’t want to be that dad — but inside, I’m just bursting.”

As the calendar turned to 2025 and parts of the Missouri roster turned over, Logan’s role in the wide receiver room changed. He became the longest-tenured wideout, one of just four players still around from the 2021 season.
Fellow wideout Marquis Johnson — two years Logan’s junior — affectionately called him an “old head.”

“Muck’s the oldest, and we just respect him on all terms,” Johnson said. “We respect everything he does; we respect the work he puts in. Logan has done something that I’ve never seen no one else do. His toughness and the way he goes about his business, we all respect him.”
Earlier this year, Logan woke up on a Monday morning with a sore throat. He’d been fine the week before, when he spent spring break back home in Lee’s Summit. He texted Kristy that he was going to see the Mizzou training staff to get checked out.

She assumed it was probably strep. Antibiotics, Popsicles, solved. Then she got a call from the trainers that they were taking Logan in for a CT scan.

The scan wasn’t even intended to look for cancer. Logan had an abscess — a gnarly infection — on one of his tonsils, which required a scan to image before it could be drained.

The trainer called back again. In addition to the abscess, there was something on Logan’s thyroid. A mass. It would need to be biopsied.

From the biopsy came a number: an 80% chance that the tumor on Logan’s thyroid was cancerous.
“Nothing that I could have ever expected,” Logan said. “It was something that shocked me, something that I had to come to terms with, like, OK, this is real. This is real life. What do we do now?”

He needed surgery to have it removed. His parents and Zach Parker, MU’s director of football sports medicine, tried to keep him calm because there was a plan and a good prognosis following surgeries like this.

Still, Logan “was in the mental meat-grinder of concern,” Darren said. “... Any time you say the word cancer, it carries a certain level of concern.”

Surgeons removed the mass late in May. Logan wasn’t allowed to exercise for 10 days, which was the part he hated the most. Post-op tests confirmed it was papillary thyroid cancer, which is most common in middle-aged adults. There usually aren’t symptoms. Spotting the tumor on a CT scan meant for his tonsil was pure coincidence, pure miracle.

“We thank the abscess a lot,” Kristy said.
Missouri wide receiver Logan Muckey points downfield during a 2024 game against Oklahoma.


Walking on to a football team and surviving cancer are not the same thing, yet both have a way of working themselves into identities. Logan is a walk-on and a survivor. He worked his way into a scholarship spot on the Missouri roster and lucked, perhaps, his way into having his cancer caught before it was worse.

“Everything that Logan does in his life, he sees it as a part of him,” Darren said. “It’s who he is. He’s proud of who he is, what he does.”

The walk-on part of him is grounded by the grind of scout-team reps, of waiting four years for his first catch, of betting on his ability to win over coaches to earn a roster spot.

“Being a walk-on, the odds are stacked against you,” Logan said. “It’s an uphill battle. But the guys here fight that battle with you. I’m not walking alone.”
He could, and does, say the same about having cancer. He thanked his parents, Parker and the Mizzou training staff, Tigers coaches, and MU’s Ellis Fischel Cancer Center.

“I realized a lot about myself,” Logan said. “I learned a lot of lessons in life. I’m not taking anything for granted ever again because anything you have can be taken away from you just like that.”
He snapped his fingers for effect.
“It’s crazy to say, but it’s a blessing in disguise,” he said.

Now, Logan is a team captain, voted to represent Mizzou’s special teams units by his teammates. The honor means a little more to a player whose path to this point was paved with unknowns and disrupted by a scare.

“When I walked on back in 2021, I knew that it was going to be gritty,” Logan said. “I knew that it was going to take a lot of hard work. So being in this situation now, I mean, words will never be able to describe it. It’s awesome.”