Finding his home as an Aggie

There were moments during the day when Carson Su’esu’e simply stopped to take it in. Around him, kids ran through drills on the football field at Deer Valley High School in Antioch, California. Coaches worked with linemen and skill players. Families watched from the stands. Some of the kids wore the New Mexico State tight end’s name and number on their backs. For the first time in a couple of years, all of his siblings were together.

“There’s a couple times throughout the day I just had to take a step back and just observe and just be in the moment,” Su’esu’e said. “It was truly amazing.”

For a football player who has spent much of the past several years moving — from one school to another, one position to another, one state to another — the camp brought Su’esu’e back to where everything started. Home.

It is a word that has taken on different meanings during Su’esu’e’s football journey. He grew up in the East Bay, with his mother living in Oakley and his father in Antioch. His father has coached for as long as Su’esu’e can remember, putting his son on sidelines where he watched players such as Najee Harris and Joe Mixon before they became NFL stars.

But sports were also something that connected Su’esu’e to his own family. He has three brothers and a sister, and he and his two older brothers grew up playing together. Football was part of it, but so was volleyball, still one of Su’esu’e’s favorite sports, along with baseball and just about anything else that kept them moving.

Football eventually became the constant. Even then, Su’esu’e took an unusual route to his current position.

As a young player, he was an offensive and defensive lineman. He spent a season at tight end, then moved to quarterback when his team needed someone to play the position. Eventually, Su’esu’e became the starting quarterback at De La Salle High School, one of the country’s most storied high school football programs. He learned there that being good at football involved considerably more than what happened on Friday nights.

Nutrition, the weight room, conditioning, and preparation all mattered.

“The workouts were rough,” he said. “It was hard. The conditioning was hard. It was hot. Summer days were long days.”

Years later, he can see how much those days prepared him for college football.

“I feel like the culture that I learned from De La Salle really helped me into becoming the person that I am today, the player that I am today,” he said.

But Su’esu’e didn’t finish his high school career there. His mother was dealing with Lyme disease and looking for medical help in Utah. Su’esu’e had an uncle coaching at Granger High School outside Salt Lake City, and he decided to go with his mother and spend his senior year there.

At De La Salle, Su’esu’e had played in the school's famously structured program and its run-oriented offense. At Granger, his uncle helped him learn a spread passing attack.

The move was a “culture shock,” Su’esu’e said, but it also gave him another football education. He and his uncle studied formations, routes and schemes between classes and after practices. And being in Utah put him close to BYU.

Su’esu’e graduated early, then left football behind for a year to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Orlando, Florida. The experience taught him about persistence in a way football couldn't.

“It was hard,” he said. “The day-to-day knocking on doors, getting shut out and whatnot.”

His faith, he said, taught him to keep moving through disappointment and learn from it. That lesson would become useful when he returned to football.

Su’esu’e enrolled at BYU and went through spring football, but the former quarterback found himself on the other side of the ball. The Cougars moved him to outside linebacker, but that didn’t feel like home.

“My heart is on the offensive side of the ball,” he said. “I just felt like offense comes very easy to me. And it's just something I love.”

So Su’esu’e moved again. An old relationship who had recruited him earlier was now coaching tight ends at Oklahoma State. Su’esu’e reached out and asked whether there might still be an opportunity for him to play tight end. The answer was simple.

“Man, come home.” Su’esu’e did.

At Oklahoma State, the former lineman, tight end, quarterback and linebacker became a tight end again. And all those previous stops suddenly had value. Playing quarterback had taught him to see the entire field. Playing linebacker had allowed him to see an offense from a defender's perspective. Now he could use both.

“I think playing defense helped me,” Su’esu’e said. “Just trying to learn from a defensive point of view and have a defensive mindset. I feel like that, along with my quarterback skills and knowledge, it helps me see the entire field, see what they're seeing.”

For a while, Oklahoma State was the next home, but then the Cowboys fired head coach Mike Gundy during the 2025 season. A new coaching staff arrived, and Su’esu’e decided to look for another place to play. That search led him to Las Cruces.

Su’esu’e connected with New Mexico State assistant coach Taylor Mazzone, came for a visit and quickly felt something familiar.

“I was like, this is the place,” he said.

It wasn't because NMSU looked like Oklahoma State or De La Salle. In some ways, the opposite appealed to him.

“I came here and I just felt like this is a place where you can just grind,” Su’esu’e said. “You come here, it's a smaller school, and I feel like a lot of people overlook it. But I feel like the coaching staff was great. I love the scheme.”

He also found something that can't be measured in a depth chart — connection. College football's era of constant movement can make that difficult. Su’esu’e knows better than most. He watched players come and go at Oklahoma State, then experienced the uncertainty created by a coaching change.

At NMSU, he has watched relationships form gradually through winter workouts, spring football, summer conditioning, and now fall camp. Day after day, he said, the Aggies have learned one another's strengths and weaknesses.

The evidence, for Su’esu’e, can be found somewhere as ordinary as the dining hall.

“I feel like I could go into any position group or sit at any table and just start a conversation,” he said. “We're friends on and off the field.”

That matters to Su’esu’e because his journey has taught him that football can look very different from place to place without really changing at all. He has played at De La Salle and Granger, practiced at BYU, competed at Oklahoma State and now wears the crimson and white of New Mexico State. There are differences in size, strength and speed, he said. But ultimately, the game remains the game.

“It's the little things,” Su’esu’e said. “It's the first step. It's the level of your pads. It's the contact when you strike.”

And underneath all of it is something even simpler. Football is supposed to be fun. That was the message Su’esu’e wanted to take back to Antioch this summer.

His camp included coaches for different positions and plenty of instruction. Kids worked on their technique and learned more about the game but Su’esu’e knew there was only so much football he could teach them in one day. What he really wanted them to remember was how football felt.

“I wanted them to feel the most is the love of the game,” he said. “I wanted to let them know that it's fun. Because I feel like when you lose that feeling that the game is fun is when you just stop playing. You stop playing for yourself.”

When he steps onto a football field, he said, he can still find the kid who played on the line with his brothers, who tried tight end and then decided he might as well give quarterback a shot.

“I feel like when I step out on that field, I'm like that little kid again,” he said.

At the camp, the roles had changed. Now other kids were watching him. They wore his name and number. His brothers helped with the camp and the player who had spent years moving from place to place found himself standing off to the side for a moment, looking at all of it.

He had gone back home to give something to the community that raised him. Then he returned to Las Cruces, where, after all those stops, Su’esu’e believes he may have found another one.