Trey’Dez Green’s rise at LSU has come with a jolt of fear, a month of waiting and, finally, a return that looked a lot like the player the Tigers have leaned on all season.
The 6-foot-7, 242-pound tight end was knocked out at Ole Miss after taking an Ole Miss tackler’s helmet to the knee, and for a moment the outlook looked grim. Green was on crutches in a stadium tunnel when he met his mother, Casondra, and the emotion hit hard.
“That next play,” Green said, crying, “was mine.”
He had been a central part of LSU’s comeback from 17 points down, including a 19-yard catch and run that helped push the Tigers toward a score in a 24-24 game in the fourth quarter. Quarterback Sam Leavitt would have been looking for him in the end zone, undoubtedly, if Green had stayed in the game. Instead, LSU’s drive stalled and Ole Miss went on to win 32-24.
Casondra said her son didn’t dwell on the pain in that moment.
“He didn't say, ‘Mama, I'm in so much pain,’ this or that,” Casondra Green said. “He said, ‘That next play was mine, mama.’ I said, this child, he is so dedicated to the game.”
The fear around the injury was real. On Sept. 19 in Oxford, Mississippi, doctors found that Green’s MCL was intact, but they couldn’t rule out an ACL tear. Green said, “There was fear, but I had to double down on my faith,” Green said, “and know that God has a better and bigger plan for me.”
The next day, an orthopedist reviewed his MRI and the surprise was enough that one LSU medical staffer asked, “What kind of body do you have, Trey’Dez?” Green pointed the credit elsewhere, saying “That’s God.”
His longtime AAU basketball coach, Chad Hardy, was in the tunnels when Green came off the field and heard the early concern.
“The doctor said, ‘Man, I think this is gonna be something bad. Plan for the worst,’ ” said Chad Hardy, a longtime AAU basketball coach who was in the tunnels of the Ole Miss stadium when Green came off the field.
“Got there the next day, man, nothing was torn, just a sprain. I said, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’
“God’s gonna take care of ones that treat people (right) and do good things, right?”
Hardy has known Green since he was 6, and he’s seen plenty of reasons to believe in the kid’s toughness. Green’s mother worked two jobs, and on his 7th birthday she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Trey’Dez learned to iron his own clothes early. He also comforted his mother during treatment, rubbing Casondra’s feet.
There’s a softer side to him, too. He calls his mother “Sweet Lady,” smiles at strangers and will carry a random grandmother’s groceries.
But the competitive edge has always been there. He had a short little league football run, retiring after future TCU safety Kylin Jackson decked him at 10 years old.
On the basketball court, though, he kept growing into himself. He was about Hardy’s height in middle school, and he dunked for the first time in sixth grade.
“When he’s playing, ain't no one person going to stop him, nobody was going to box him out,” Hardy said. “If he wanted to do it, he was going to do it.”
That same force has shown up in football. Green does not want one defender to be the end of the play. He sees tacklers as obstacles between him and “feeding” his family, which includes his mother, who lives with him in Baton Rouge, and his daughter, Rain, who was born in spring 2025.
His path to football was not straightforward. Green actually played football at Zachary High School as a senior, not basketball, because he was ruled ineligible by the Louisiana High School Athletic Association after his transfer from East Feliciana.
Hardy was an assistant basketball coach at Zachary, and many of Green’s AAU teammates were on the team. Casondra said tears were shed when Trey’Dez was “robbed” of a chance to win a championship with those teammates.
Still, she believes that setback pointed him toward the right road.
“God has a reason for everything. We may not understand that reason, right then and there,” Casondra said.
“He maybe closed that basketball door for you to open another door. Which, to me, that door was on the college football side.”
That was not the path she first wanted for him. Casondra didn’t want her son playing football at first, and she warned the coach at East Feliciana that she would pull him off the team after his first injury.
When the Ole Miss injury happened, Casondra wasn’t in the stadium. She had gone outside to care for Rain, who was crying more than usual that night, and LSU staffers came to get them.
Green’s response to the scare was to get right back to work. He returned to LSU’s football facility almost immediately, with classmates Weston Davis and Caden Durham helping him in and out of his car and up stairs. He told his mother, “Mama, I'm a leader,’” and explained, “My teammates, they look up to me.”
He was also asked to address the team, where he reminded LSU that it takes more than one or two injured players to define a roster. He told them to “block out” the negativity of the media and fans because “we’re all we got.”
Doctors gave him a four- to six-week recovery window, but Green wasn’t interested in that timeline. He told Hardy that “ain't gonna be it.”
“Give me two to three weeks,” he said. “I went and looked at the schedule, I said, ‘Auburn game, huh?’"
Casondra would have preferred he wait through the bye and come back against Alabama instead. Before Auburn, Green checked on her in her bedroom and asked, “Momma, you alright?”
She wasn’t.
“I know you’re worried about me, but I'm gonna be careful,” he said. “God got me covered.”
When he returned, he looked like a player who had never stopped being a problem for defenses. Against Auburn, he raced down the middle on a hitch route, split three defenders and scored a touchdown. Casondra watched with her hands pressed together as if she were praying the whole game, and it felt like Auburn was trying to tackle her son even when he didn’t have the ball.
“I'm like, ‘Take him out, take him out!’ Which I know they couldn’t hear me,” Casondra said, laughing.
He kept making the next play, then the one after that. Lane Kiffin pulled him just short of 50 plays.
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