Zonovan Knight is better for the experience. Not the nine games he’s played over his first two NFL seasons so much as everything he’s dealt with around them.
Knight signed with the New York Jets as an undrafted rookie out of North Carolina State in 2022 and was a shooting star in the fantasy football world late that season when he totaled 103 yards from scrimmage in his NFL debut.
He ran for 90 yards the next game and 71 yards the week after, then saw his playing time dwindle as the Jets lost their final six games to fall out of the playoff race.
Last year, Knight appeared ticketed for a backup role on offense even after the Jets drafted Breece Hall in the second round in 2022. Then New York signed Dalvin Cook as a free agent in training camp, and Knight found himself consumed by the writing on the wall.
“Once they signed Dalvin, in the back of my mind I knew that I was kind of on my way out so it kind of started messing with me a little mentally cause that was my first time going through that,” he said.
Knight played sparingly in an exhibition loss to the Carolina Panthers, immediately after the Jets signed Cook, had nine carries the rest of the preseason and found himself the odd man out when New York set its 53-man roster at the end of training camp.
The Detroit Lions signed Knight to their practice squad days later, and the running back found himself rejuvenated by a fresh start.
He spent a month quietly working his way up the depth chart and was square in the middle of the Lions’ running back rotation for a Week 5 game against the Carolina Panthers after a slew of early-season injuries to David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs, only to suffer a crushing season-ending shoulder injury on his second offensive snap of the game.
“It was humbling and frustrating,” Knight told the Free Press after the Lions’ sixth organized team activity of the spring Thursday. “A lot of questioning my purpose, if it was meant for me to be at this level cause obviously coming off a good rookie year and then getting released by the Jets and then signing here, getting hurt, what four weeks here into being here, it made me question a lot, man.
“But I think once I was able to start doing stuff and then the Lions ended up re-signing me to come back that kind of brought value like, ‘Yeah, they still value me even though they weren’t able to use me or utilize me last year,’ so I think that spoke highly to me of them. Like, they still want to kind of work with me, still want me to grow with the team and stuff so I think that’s the best thing right there.”
Knight has been a limited participant in OTAs this spring as he rehabs from the torn shoulder labrum he suffered last October.
He was cleared for seven-on-seven and light team work last week and will ramp up his participation in mandatory minicamp next week and the offseason’s final set of OTAs the week after before returning to compete for a roster spot this summer.
Knight reached for his left shoulder when asked about his rehab Thursday.
“Once I got to this end portion of where I am now, it was kind of like, took a little longer to work on striking and stuff,” he said. “It would still kind of irritate in that area, but it was just something that has to occur cause I haven’t done it in what, seven, eight months? So just kind of reintroducing those motions and stuff to that, but for the most part it’s been phenomenal.”
Knight had surgery in California in the fall and returned to Detroit to be around the Lions’ playoff run. He spent the early part of the offseason rehabbing in Miami, and while his first two NFL seasons have left a massive chip on his shoulder, he also is more at ease with the business side of the game.
Gibbs and Montgomery return as the Lions’ top two rushers this fall, the team drafted Sione Vaki in the fourth round and re-signed Craig Reynolds as a free agent.
The backfield is crowded, and Knight knows he’ll have to fight and claw for a spot. He’s trying to drop weight to get back around the 212 pounds he played at as a rookie, after bulking up to 220 pounds in 2023.
But entering his third NFL season, he said he’s matured as a player and stopped worrying about what’s going on around him.
“I would say coming here, it definitely changed my perspective, made me get back into that mode like, ‘OK, you still got the undrafted story now it’s time to restart what you did your rookie year,’” Knight said. “Once I got here, man, I was eager to learn, I was eager to go and then just unfortunately I got hurt and that was the game … I was supposed to get a lot of the reps and a lot of the plays that game. It just happened bad. But I don’t look at it as a negative thing cause I’m still here.”
