BOULDER - Chauncey Gooden has always looked like a lineman. He just never wanted to move like one.
As a kid in Nashville, Tenn., Gooden was the biggest player on the YMCA floor, but he spent his time launching shots from deep instead of camping out near the rim. His answer this week on Colorado’s weekly radio show with Mark Johnson was blunt: “Nothing but three-pointers,” Gooden said.
“I wasn’t trying to go in the paint and do nothing. I was trying to shoot threes.”
That same kind of versatility is now showing up on the football field. Gooden, a second-year Buffalo, has started all eight games at guard this season after logging only 18 offensive snaps in four games a year ago.
He was named the Outland Trophy National Player of the Week after Colorado’s opener at Georgia Tech, where he also played eight snaps at nose tackle and made a goal-line stop. He added a quarterback hurry against Weber State.
Offensive line coach Gunnar White made it clear he sees the value in that kind of package.
“If you’re athletic and you can move and you’re pretty fast, that helps, too,” White said on the same show. “Like Chauncey, for example.
He’s a special cat. He’s only in his second year, but you’re seeing what he’s doing on both sides of the ball.
It’s a special deal.”
Gooden’s path to Boulder started with Darius Darden Box, now Colorado’s director of player personnel. Box, a Nashville native, offered Gooden when he was a freshman at Lipscomb Academy while Box was at Vanderbilt.
That was only the second offer of Gooden’s career. Around that same time, Gooden attended a camp at Jackson State, where Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders was head coach.
“I balled out,” Gooden said. “So I always wanted to come play for Coach Prime.”
When Sanders got the Colorado job and Box followed him, the connection finally came together.
“We was building that connection all the way from there,” Gooden said. “It was just like a family connection. It was just meant to be.”
Gooden said his size was never something that came and went. It’s always been there.
“I’ve always been a big guy,” he said. “I always stood out in every class I was in.”
He traced that to his father’s side of the family. His dad is 6-foot-3, the same height as Gooden, and his paternal grandmother was around 5-11 or 6 feet.
His mother, at 5-4, didn’t add much to the height equation. His 13-year-old sister, though, gets a much softer version of him.
“I love my little sister to death,” Gooden said. “I’d do anything I can for her.”
On Saturdays, though, things are different. Colorado’s 27-24 overtime win over Kansas State last week gave Gooden the kind of game offensive linemen live for. The Buffs ran for a season-high 222 yards, with Richard Young piling up 120 yards and two touchdowns for the first 100-yard rushing game by a Buff this season.
“It’s so beautiful, just being able to see the running back run through the holes that we create up front as the offensive line,” Gooden said. “It just keeps us going. We just want to keep going and keep bullying people all game.”
Even with all that, Gooden still points to defense when asked where he first fell in love with football.
“When I first started loving the game of football, I was playing defensive line,” Gooden said. “Being able to run through somebody’s face and make a play on the ball carrier, and then the crowd loves it.
It’s just a full electric thing. I just love playing defense.
But offensive line is where I came to, and where God has blessed me.”
So when asked whether the coaching staff has a tug-of-war over him, he didn’t really deny it.
“Nah, for real, it definitely goes on like that,” he said, before adding, “But our defensive line’s playing well.”
His high school coaches used to tell him Colorado might give him a shot on defense. He didn’t buy it then.
“You really haven’t seen linemen playing both ways in Power Four football,” Gooden said. “So I definitely didn’t believe it at first. It’s definitely a dream come true to say that.”
He knows the job is different from what Travis Hunter does, even if Colorado has had its share of two-way players.
“It’s definitely tough,” Gooden said, “because it’s just hitting somebody in the mouth every play. It’s constant physicality, on both sides of the ball, doing different techniques. But when you really love both sides, it’s just fun at the end of the day.”
He’s still learning on offense, too. Against Kansas State, Leon Bell spent the day pulling and flattening people, and Gooden was honest when asked if he can move like the 6-8, 330-pound veteran.
“That’s an athlete,” he said. “That’s a lineman right there.
I just try to learn from him early on in my career. I don’t think I can do what Leon Bell do yet.”
Bell also has the room’s biggest personality, at least in Gooden’s eyes.
“Sometimes he talk a lot, sometimes he may not,” Gooden said. “He definitely just got a lot to say, and then a lot not to say. So he’s definitely a tricky one.”
Colorado, which is 3-5 overall and 1-4 in the Big 12, plays at Arizona State on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. MT. Gooden’s attention is where it should be.
“We’re trying to stack these wins,” he said.
But there’s still one more thing he’d like to see. When Johnson asked about the chances of Colorado lining him up at fullback and handing him the ball, Gooden lit up.
“That would be beautiful,” Gooden said. “If you look at my high school tape, I played fullback, tight end, running back. I got like two touchdowns in my high school career.”
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