His is a natural smile, those who know J.K. Dobbins say. The same since everybody knew the name Dobbins across the grass of La Grange, Texas. It’s not a meek grin, or even a polite one. Rather, it comes from the soul, flowing out through the creases in his eyes, the corners of his lips curving his cheeks into tiny dimples. The product of repetition.
Technically, though, his is not a natural smile.
In 2020, the NFL announced Align Technology, Inc. as a sponsor, the makers of the braces alternative Invisalign. They needed a player, as Florida dentist Dr. Rick Mars recalled, to rep the partnership and get treatment. Dobbins, then a young running back with the Baltimore Ravens, had a small gap between his front teeth he wanted to close.
Invisalign and the NFL picked Dobbins, Mars said, out of hundreds of candidates. The reasoning was simple.
“He likes to smile,” Mars said.
The beam has followed Dobbins from Texas to Ohio State, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, still glued to the running back’s face after signing with Denver earlier this month. It has followed him from child prodigy to an afterthought on crutches, through the days of rehab in Baltimore when ex-running backs coach Craig Ver Steeg could see through the shine of Dobbins’ teeth to the frustration in his face.
For years, the future he once seemed destined for was derailed by severe tears in his legs. He played nine games of football from 2021 to 2023.
“You’re just heartbroken,” Ver Steeg said.
Still, teammates and coaches describe Dobbins’ presence in the locker room as if he were a lit torch in a dark hallway. And the smile persisted as he turned away the reaper knocking at his career’s door, over and over again.
How, exactly, is the 26-year-old still here, now the potential leading man in Denver’s backfield? Still healthy? Still standing? Still smiling?
The answer lies in his DNA, intertwined with that soil in La Grange, where families in Lubbock County still lounge in backyards across Fayette County and swap tales of one Lawrence Dobbins. This was his dream, first, a man who himself could bring a shot of joy to anyone. But Lawrence, despite the legacy he left at La Grange, never made it.
When Dobbins was 15 years old, his father, Lawrence, died of a stroke inside Texas’s Bartlett State Prison. In one of their last conversations, as Dobbins’ longtime friend Daven McKenzie recalled, Lawrence told his son he wanted to see him make it to college and the NFL. And he told his son to keep going.
A decade later, after arriving in Denver, Dobbins struck a deal with cornerback Damarri Mathis to assume No. 27. It was Lawrence’s number back at La Grange High. And in Dobbins’ Instagram bio, a message sits, typed in Spanish: Sigo rodando.
Roughly, in English: I keep rolling.
“I’m just wired the way where I just, I can’t give up,” Dobbins told reporters in Denver last week.
“I mean, I don’t know how to give up. I don’t know how to lay down.”
•••
In that town in central Texas, the name Lawrence Dobbins has become legend. One in a million, his former La Grange coach Merville Johnson said. He came out of his breaks with choppy steps and his arms pumping at a 90-degree angle, a star running back who flew so effortlessly in the late 1990s it seemed almost as if he wasn’t breathing.
“People still talk about that name to this day,” Johnson said. “And after I’m gone from here, they’re still gon’ be talking about that name.”
Lawrence’s son was born into this and wanted nothing else. Growing up, Dobbins would watch his father’s highlights on TV. And slowly, he became his own celebrity in La Grange, a boy who ran in the Junior Olympics and who jump-cut across the grass in Pop Warner football.
By the time Dobbins hit seventh grade, his former La Grange coach Matt Kates said, he couldn’t go to a local grocery store or Walmart without being stopped. In the spring of his freshman year, before he played a snap of high school ball, Dobbins played in a seven-on-seven game at La Grange in front of coaches from Oregon State and Houston.
They offered him on the spot.
In Dobbins’ freshman year, on the night of a state-quarterfinal matchup, a 30-mile-an-hour dry wind whipped through Bastrop, Texas. A sort of polar vortex descended, as Kates and his staff scrambled to hand out sleeves to players, a freezing chill kissing their skin. Everyone was bundled up for pregame warm-ups.
Except for the 5-foot-7, 160-pound Dobbins. Bare-sleeved. Running routes.
Kates’ brother Will, the program’s offensive coordinator, went over to Dobbins, as he remembered.
“J.K., what are you…?” Will asked, baffled.
A freshman Dobbins stared back at him with a straight face.
“If I’m going to play in New York on a Monday night,” Dobbins responded, “I better get used to it now.”
Will Kates has still never seen a more goal-driven kid. Dobbins quickly rounded into a game-breaker, running for 2,291 yards and 29 touchdowns as a junior at La Grange. He read holes two steps ahead of defenses. He hit gaps others couldn’t see.
And as Merville Johnson watched Dobbins grow up on football fields, he was struck with the past. Dobbins, Johnson noticed, ran in choppy steps coming out of his breaks. He kept his arms pumping at a 90-degree angle when he slashed through the air.
The exact same form as his father before him.
“When you see J.K.,” Johnson said, “you see Lawrence Dobbins.”
•••
On the first play of Dobbins’ final year at La Grange, he took a counter, stuck his foot in the ground and, as Will Kates described it, a grenade went off in his ankle.
He tore all three ligaments. His coaches fell into a muted disbelief upon later hearing the diagnosis. Dobbins hadn’t missed any time to that point in his high school career.
A year later, Dobbins’ former La Grange coaches assembled to turn on his first game at Ohio State. They watched the kid run for 181 yards on 29 carries — in his first time touching a ball in a real game since his ankle popped.
“I remember one of the doctors saying, ‘I’ve never seen a kid heal like this,’” Kates recounted. “‘It’s like Superman.’”
Dobbins rarely missed so much as a practice through a banner three-year Ohio State career that saw him finish as the Buckeyes’ second all-time rushing leader. But fate tested Superman in the years to come. After bursting on the scene with a nine-touchdown rookie year for the Ravens in 2020, Baltimore’s building felt the “sky was the limit,” for Dobbins, Ver Steeg said.
Then, in 2021’s preseason, he crumpled to the turf and clutched his knee after a backfield dump-off. And then, after missing all of ’21 with a torn ACL, Dobbins opted for arthroscopic surgery to clean up scar tissue in the middle of 2022. And then, after he played eight games in ’22, he tore his Achilles in 2023’s season opener.
“It’s just like, ‘My gosh,’” Ver Steeg said. “‘Lord, what are you putting him through?’”
McKenzie heard folks back home in La Grange, who once claimed Dobbins as their golden boy, whispering the kid was done. His rookie deal with Baltimore ran out. He signed a one-year, last-gasp deal for $1.6 million with the Chargers in 2024. And surely, Dobbins’ friends say, he had his bad days behind the scenes.
They never saw them.
In his arrival in Denver, Dobbins called himself a big personality. Self-aware, certainly. Mickey Marotti, Ohio State’s strength coach, called him an “energy-giver.” Willie Snead, Dobbins’ teammate with the Ravens in 2020, called him a “big kid.” At longtime friend Bralon Hutchinson’s wedding in 2021, Dobbins didn’t get off the dance floor, Hutchinson recalled, the life of the party at his buddy’s own ceremony.
“I don’t think anything could get J.K. down,” Johnson said. “Nothing. I mean, not nothing on this Earth, man.”
Rehab stints took nearly three years of Dobbins’ NFL life. But they were calculated. The cartilage-cleaning surgery in 2022 wasn’t a last resort, but a look to the future to reclaim the drive in his knee. The tear in 2023 was a setback, not a death knell. Dobbins even made a high-profile NFL friend who was simultaneously building back his own Achilles: Aaron Rodgers.
“He made every day’s rehab just a little bit brighter,” Rodgers said in 2024 on The Pat McAfee Show.
Dobbins has always been singular-minded. Because he long dedicated his work ethic, as friend McKenzie said, to his father’s dream.
“He never dropped the torch,” Johnson said, “because he knew his dad was watching him.”
•••
For a year, starting in the summer of 2021, Dobbins showed up to Mars’ Dental Care Group office in Florida once every month or two. They tossed a football around. They cracked jokes. Mars developed a healthy respect for the young running back because he showed up, wore his Invisalign and seemed to care.
And as Dobbins limped in after that second-year ACL tear, he told Mars he was determined to make it back in football.
“He’s a money guy,” Mars said. “He’s a guy you can count on.”
Dobbins has still never played a full NFL season. He enters Year 6 in Denver after a year in Los Angeles in which he missed a few games with a sprained MCL. But Ver Steeg still sees a workhorse in his 215-pound frame, a three-down back who’s averaged 5.2 yards per carry in the NFL and is a plus in pass protection. He motored for a career-best 905 yards in 13 games for the Chargers in 2024, and Dobbins had a conversation after the season’s end with McKenzie, the friend recalled, where the back expressed interest in the Broncos if he didn’t re-sign in LA.
Half a year later, he landed in Denver on a one-year contract with a base salary of $2.75 million. A prove-it deal, of sorts, for the second year in a row. A backfield teeming with names, from rookie RJ Harvey to second-year power back Audric Estime, behind him.
But at this point, there’s little Dobbins could face, as McKenzie said, that would get to him.
“He’s come back so many times from stuff — here he is in Denver,” Ver Steeg said. “I mean, don’t count the dude out, man. At all.”
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