The improbable path of Michael Buckley, UNM's Cabo San Lucas-born wide receiver

Michael Buckley knew what his first collegiate catch would look like. He saw it tossing the ball to himself in the backyard of his childhood home in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, darting and juking barefoot across the grass. Night after night in his apartment in Albuquerque, lined up with nameless and faceless cornerbacks, releasing against air. Thousands of imaginary passes, years of solitary routes.

“Just visualize, visualize, visualize,” the redshirt junior wide receiver said Tuesday.

He did not, however, know when it would happen. Entering this season, Buckley had played just seven offensive snaps in three up-and-down, sometimes injury-afflicted seasons with New Mexico. His parents back in Mexico would always call — sometimes “more frustrated than me,” he chuckled — and ask why he wasn’t playing.

Buckley could only shrug. “I just told them I had to stay the course,” he said, “and my time will come.”

And then Saturday came.

With wide receivers Luke Wysong and Caleb Medford out for the majority of UNM’s 17-6 loss to Colorado State, Buckley hauled in his first career catch — a 15-yard gain on second and 8 — on his way to finishing with seven receptions for 90 yards.

When the Lobos needed him the most, there was Buckley — a 6-foot-0, 180-pound walk-on who treated every practice like a game — at the center of UNM’s most improbable breakout performance of the season.

It’s not fair to say nobody saw it coming. “I don’t want to say the word unbelievable,” wide receivers coach Micah Simon said, “because in this world, anything you want to do, you can do it. Anything you want to do, you can put your mind to it.

“And Buckley, he’s that guy, right?”

If most football stories are, in some way, about fathers and sons, Buckley’s is no different. John Buckley weathered a rough childhood in Seattle, one his son said left him homeless at 15. He decided to move to Mexico when he was “19, 20 — really young,” Buckley said.

John Buckley never left, marrying Blanca, and building a career in real estate; Buckley says he’s “Mexican by heart now.” But John always loved the Seahawks, and there might not have been a happier man in Cabo when Seattle crushed Denver 43-8 on Feb. 2, 2014 for its first and only Super Bowl title.

The seed was planted. “I saw how happy he was,” Buckley, then 12, said, “and I wanted to do that.”

If you’ve ever fallen down a wormhole of YouTube compilations with titles such as Nastiest Jukes in NFL History or NFL ‘FILTHY’ Route Running, Buckley is a kindred spirit. After falling in love with the game, he learned it from YouTube, studying mid-2010s luminaries such as Odell Beckham Jr. and Antonio Brown.

That’s when the visualization in the back yard started.

“I would try to imitate that exact same clip: ‘OK, he’s doing this – boom,’” Buckley said.

Maybe a year after those backyard sessions started, Buckley joined a club team in Cabo — and scored 36 touchdowns in six games. At least that’s what he remembers. He played wide receiver, safety, running back, long snapper, kicker. “I was everything,” Buckley said.

He wasn’t bad, either. With a few seasons at the club level in hand, Buckley started to hit the camp circuit in the United States and kept hearing the same thing: He needed to play high school, then college football if he wanted a realistic shot of making the NFL.

In Buckley’s “tiny” slice of Cabo, everybody knows each other. His middle school and high school were merged, roughly 130 kids together. He had known all his best friends since he was 1- or 2-years-old. It’s one big family expanding beyond John, Blanca and his three sisters. “Honestly, I just feel so much love,” Buckley said.

He left it all, alone, when he was 16 — a “sacrifice” that rivaled those bonds in scope and scale. Buckley moved in with family friends in Orange County, California, and enrolled at nearby Santa Margarita Catholic High School, sitting out his sophomore year because he was ineligible.

Despite playing in the Trinity League — perhaps the most competitive prep football league in the country — Buckley didn’t know how college recruiting worked, and he bounced from host family to host family. “I had no idea,” he said. “I just decided, ‘you know what, I’m just gonna go hard and play.’”

As a senior in 2021, Buckley caught 17 passes for 349 yards and four touchdowns, earning first-team All-Trinity League honors as did Arizona quarterback Noah Fifita and Michigan defensive tackle Mason Graham that year. The list is an embarrassment of riches: Just about every name ended up as a highly-touted Power 5 recruit, the next crop of players fortifying the league’s vaunted reputation.

Every name but Buckley. By July, he had a “couple of looks” and a handful of preferred walk-on offers when UNM came into the fold. The promise, from former wide receivers coach Brandon Blackmon, was that he’d have a chance to play. Nothing more, nothing less.

As a freshman, Buckley notched one game appearance and returned a kickoff 32 yards. Then, a long, frustrating stretch of nothing. Injuries thwarted his sophomore year, derailed his junior season. When head coach Bronco Mendenhall was hired in December, he was looking for a fresh start with a new staff.

On Monday morning, Mendenhall put him on scholarship.

“That’s something that we will never forget,” Medford said. “Like, I’ve been a part of many receivers rooms and this is just one that really, I’m gonna remember for the rest of my life. Just because of his story and his like, (the) inspiration that he brings to everybody here.”

When wide receiver Ryan Davis transferred to UNM in January 2023, he first knew Buckley as the “King of Cabo.” If someone was going to go get some work in on the JUGs machine, it was a safe bet Buckley was going, too. He also asked (seemingly) a million questions on “the littlest things,” Davis said.

How do you hold the ball? How do you swing with it and still run full speed? How do you dip your shoulder like that? Are you running on your toes when you’re running?

“Just all the questions you can ask — anything to gain an advantage, he wants (it),” Davis said. “And I love him for that.”

To Medford, he’s “Baja Buckley,” a glider that runs free-flowing routes like he’s playing soccer.

Not much is known about “The Interview,” a thinly veiled secret from Mendenhall’s near-mythic offseason program.

The only certainties are that it’s a timed workout, and it’s hard: “Honestly, it’s just a lot to explain,” Medford laughed. “I can just tell you, man, there’s some prowlers (an exercise), dog. It was the prowlers for all of us.”

Whatever it was, Medford remembered that Buckley asked to do it again — Buckley wasn’t impressed with his time. “To do it twice, that’s just – you gotta have a lot of courage, you really do,” Medford said.

Buckley admits he tries to keep it out of his mind. He doesn’t want it to be an excuse. “Say, ‘oh, just because I’m from Mexico, this is all right to do,’” he said. And Buckley’s big moment will forever be intertwined with a conference loss to CSU that left him and a locker room full of teammates far more frustrated than not.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to know that we could have won a game — and we didn’t.”

But for all that went into it, perhaps not even Buckley could have visualized the pure joy and excitement he felt moving from catch to catch, target to target. Or the phone call with his parents after the game, John and Blanca brought to tears by their son’s performance.

And perhaps that doesn’t matter now. You don’t have to see what you can feel.

“And that part,” Buckley said, “felt good.”

Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect that Buckley was unimpressed with his workout time.