🎉Meet Michigan football’s most enthusiastic player, also one of its best

Michigan defensive lineman Kris Jenkins (94) celebrates after the Big Ten championship NCAA college football game against Iowa, Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, in Indianapolis. Michigan won 26-0. (AP Photo/AJ Mast)AP

ANN ARBOR — Kris Jenkins leads his mom down a hallway inside Schembecher Hall and opens a door into a stairwell to show her something that, until a minute ago, she didn’t know existed. She is talking about where they might eat dinner, watching her first step up the stairs, when she looks up. Her eyes widen.

“Oh my gosh! Look at my baby!”

Her baby appears on an approximately 15-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling mural, crouching and flexing his arms, mouth open as if mid-yell, wearing his Michigan football uniform, jersey No. 94. “Attack the day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind” is written near the bottom. Jenkins is the literal poster child for Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh’s favorite saying.

They ascend half a flight of stairs to get a closer look, craning their necks to take it in.

“Yeah, it’s insane,” Jenkins admits.

You might have a perception of a big-time college football player — especially one who’s 6-foot-3, 305 pounds and plays defensive tackle — that doesn’t exactly jibe with who Jenkins is. He’s goofy. A Michigan football photographer posted a photo on social media before the Big Ten championship of Jenkins sticking his tongue out sideways under the caption, “Take a normal photo of Kris Jenkins challenge (impossible).”

He’ll make “random noises,” his uncle Cullen Jenkins said, and Jenkins illustrated this at an interview session last month, acknowledging a passing teammate with a sort of screech. He seeks out comedy on YouTube, and is a big fan of British groups like The Sidemen. “He will make you watch it and keep looking back at you until you laugh,” Cullen said. Jenkins also enjoys anime, like Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer.

His sense of humor can border on annoying. When visiting his uncle, Jenkins would sometimes knock on a wall for no reason other than to trick the four dogs in the house into thinking someone new had arrived. “He’s his silly self and he thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world,” Cullen said, laughing at a memory that ticked him off at the time.

Knowing when to be silly and when to be serious was a challenge for Jenkins until about last year, his junior season.

“Sometimes at practice I’m trying to crack jokes with some of my teammates on the sidelines and I didn’t hear that this formation was called and I need to go in,” he said.

“Nowadays, during breaks I can be more goofy, talk some trash, but I know when it’s time to work and pay attention to the details.”

There’s no denying Jenkins’ performance this year. He was a second- or third-team All-American, depending on the outlet. Interior defensive linemen don’t usually rack up many box-score stats, especially those double-teamed as often as Jenkins; still, he’s got 33 tackles (fourth on team), plus an interception and a fumble recovery.

It’s all impressive for a player who wanted to be a wide receiver when he started playing football and didn’t embrace contact until his junior year at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney, Maryland.

“Kris Jenkins, the whole d-line, they make is so easy for us as linebackers to go out and make plays,” said linebacker Junior Colson. “They don’t get as much as credit as they should. Those guys are phenomenal at taking on double blocks.”

ESPN draft expert Mel Kiper Jr. has Jenkins as the fourth-best defensive tackle prospect in the 2024 draft. Jenkins’ dad, also Kris Jenkins, was a second-round pick in 2001 out of Maryland and played 10 years in the league with the Carolina Panthers and New York Jets. Cullen played at Central Michigan and for 14 years in the NFL, eight of them with the Green Bay Packers. Both were defensive linemen.

The youngest Jenkins was just voted Michigan’s co-defensive player of the year on the best defense in college football. He’s a major reason Michigan is 13-0 and will appear in a playoff semifinal at the Rose Bowl against Alabama on Jan. 1.

Michigan football player Kris Jenkins and his mom, Shay Delotch, inside Schembecher Hall. (Andrew Kahn | MLive.com)Andrew Kahn | MLive.com

“You are gonna gas me up too much,” Jenkins tells his mom, Shay Delotch, at the end of a back-and-forth earlier this month.

She’d been alternately praising him and mildly embarrassing him, as mothers tend to do.

“This one right here, as a child, he was always on the stage,” she says. Jenkins regularly appeared in talent shows in elementary school. At 5, he sang “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” wearing pajamas and performing a dance routine he created.

“You gonna put that on YouTube too?” Jenkins asks, referencing the teasing he gets from friends who search for his interviews or highlights and come across the talent shows or random clips of his karate lessons.

Delotch believes he developed his football practice habits back then. If he was going to sing on stage — James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” or Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” — he better know the lyrics.

He’d carefully choose his outfit the night before. “He had to have these red and white Jordans,” Delotch says. “He didn’t even know they were Jordans; he just liked the patent leather, and the guy.”

(“The guy,” of course, is the Jumpman logo, affixed to much of Jenkins’ gear since Michigan football is sponsored by the Jordan Brand.)

“You were a lot,” she tells her son. “And I loved every second of it.”

This reporter says she must be proud. She directs her answer at her son.

“I really am. I call you a kid but you’re a man — a great man, a good man. You are something to look up to.” (She doesn’t realize that in a minute, that will be even more true.)

“Aw, I appreciate that,” Jenkins says.

“And if you weren’t I would tell you.”

“Oh, I know you would.”

When Jenkins arrived in Ann Arbor, he wasn’t sure how he’d be received by the campus community. He’s felt embraced, and flourished as a result. Some coaches might preach uniformity among their players. Not Harbaugh and his staff.

“When it’s time to get serious and ball out and execute, they know we’re going to,” Jenkins said. “He likes that energetic side of us.”

Entering the season, Jenkins displayed that energy in a way that earned him the aforementioned mural. He and a few other Wolverines have an EUTM (enthusiasm unknown to mankind) sticker on their helmets.

Linebacker Jaylen Harrell said Jenkins always has a smile and uplifts the locker room. “He’s got a spirit inside of him that can’t be kept in,” said quarterback J.J. McCarthy. “Whether we’re passing each other in the halls, he’s always got this energy to him that you just want to rub up next to him and get a little some of that.”

And for those who don’t happen to see the actual Kris Jenkins in the Michigan football facility, they can still get a piece of his positive energy. Just go in stairwell, right near the indoor practice field, and look up.