BYU’s Sione Moa had a few choice words for the East Carolina defensive back who dove at his legs in the fourth quarter of the Cougars’ 34-13 win over the Pirates last September, then sauntered back to the huddle thinking the hit was just going to leave a minor bruise.
A few hours later, he was wondering if he would ever walk normally again, let alone carry the football in a college football game.
On the four-hour flight back from Greenville, North Carolina, the running back’s right thigh had swollen up to the size of a football, and the pain “was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said.
While his teammates and coaches slept in their seats and enjoyed BYU’s third victory of the 2025 season, he laid down in the cabin’s aisle writhing in pain and tried to elevate his leg as much as possible.
“Absolute worst experience of my life,” Moa said. “Lucky to still have my leg.”
When he finally got home at 4 a.m., Moa woke up his wife of a couple months, Kate, who is a nurse at a surgery clinic in Riverton, and asked her what to do. She gave him some ibuprofen, but that did little to halt the pain or the swelling, so at 10 a.m., he called a BYU athletic trainer and said, “I haven’t slept all night and basically can’t feel my leg, which is fat, shiny and hard as a watermelon.”
After meeting with Moa at BYU’s training facilities on campus, the trainer called a team physician around noon that Sunday, and within minutes, they were headed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
“The doctor took one look at it and said, ‘We gotta get you to the hospital ASAP,’” Moa said.
Doctors determined that Moa was suffering from acute compartment syndrome. A surgical procedure called a fasciotomy was performed in the nick of time to improve blood flow and save the sophomore’s right leg.
Showing off a gnarly 12-inch scar after a BYU football spring practice last Monday, the 5-foot-10, 220-pound Moa said he will be “eternally grateful” for the fast-acting medical personnel who essentially saved his leg, and his football career.
“I am so blessed that I was able to get in and get that surgery,” he said. “I had never heard of (compartment syndrome), but after doing some research, I learned how serious it can be, and how people have lost (limbs) when it wasn’t treated within hours of happening. I am so grateful for our medical staff.”
Moa was in the hospital for three days and originally told he would be out of action for two to four weeks. However, there were some complications, and that recovery process turned into 12 weeks. During that time, he wondered if he would ever play football again. Some medical professionals had advised him to not get his hopes up.
“I am just thankful that God gave me another opportunity to be out here.”
— BYU running back Sione Moa
“It was just a crazy situation,” he said. “Honestly, it is all kind of a blur now. The recovery process sucked and it hurt every single day. … Looking back at it, I am grateful for everything that I went through, but at that time I thought, ‘I don’t know if I am ever going to be back out here with the boys.’ I am just thankful that God gave me another opportunity to be out here.”
Moa returned for the Big 12 championship game against Texas Tech, but took an elbow to his thigh on his first and only carry and was shelved for the remainder of the game.
“Yeah, that probably wasn’t a smart move (to play),” he said. “It just did more harm than good. That made me take a step back a bit. My wife was telling me maybe I shouldn’t play. I didn’t listen to her. It was the Big 12 championship. I just felt like I had to play. So I learned a lot of humility and patience throughout the process.”
Almost back to full strength
Moa missed BYU’s 25-21 win over Georgia Tech in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, but has been practicing all spring and says he is almost back to full strength.
“Yeah, I feel good,” he said Monday. “I feel like right now I’m maybe in 80 to 90% range of being my old self. Just little things, like my mobility and flexibility and activating the muscle again are still getting there. But everything is honestly on track.”
Also Monday, coach Kalani Sitake said Moa is back to his old self, and looking good. Fellow running back LJ Martin is not participating in the contact portions of spring ball as he recovers from offseason shoulder surgery.
“It is going to be nice to have (Moa) and LJ be ready to roll by the time we get to fall, but it has been great for us to see him here in the spring, and get the bulk of the reps because LJ is still recovering,” Sitake said. “… Sione is one of the older guys now. He’s married and all that stuff, so it is good that he went from being one of the youngest guys to one of the oldest. That’s kind of how it works.”
Offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick said when Moa and Martin are both healthy, they combine to give BYU one of the best running back tandems in the Big 12.
“We missed him last year,” Roderick said of Moa. “We had a great year. He was going to be a huge part of our offense going into the season, and played really well in the first two games. It’s nice to have him back. He’s a very good football player, and you will see him on the field a lot this year with LJ.”
A promising debut season, then an injury
Last September’s injury wasn’t Moa’s first major injury. As a freshman who had walked on after a church mission to San Bernardino, California, he broke onto the scene in a big way in BYU’s 38-9 win over No. 13 Kansas State at LaVell Edwards Stadium in September of 2024.
However, after rushing for 76 yards on 15 carries, including a 21-yard, tackle-busting touchdown run, he sustained a sprained ankle that limited what he could do the remainder of the season. He finished the year with 29 carries for 144 yards and three touchdowns.
Last season, he had 17 carries for 90 yards and a touchdown before the injury at ECU.
“Coming back was as big of a mental battle as it was a physical battle,” he said. “So many people were there to support me and get me through — the people at BYU, my parents, my wife, my nieces, everyone … I’m lucky that I married a nurse. She’s awesome. She has taken care of me throughout our whole marriage, basically. She’s been a huge blessing for me.”
Moa said another huge blessing was BYU’s “True Blue Hero” program, a weekly happening during the season, usually held on Wednesdays or Thursdays, in which the team honors fans who are fighting cancer or other life-altering hurdles after practices.
Moa said that he was a “coach potato” during the recovery process, rarely leaving his home, but found joy and perspective by making a point of attending those specific practices.
“That got me out of the house. It inspired me so much, just seeing everything they were going through. What I was going through was so small, compared to them,” he told former BYU RB Hinckley Ropati on a podcast. “I thought, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ It made me see everything good in my life, gave me a more positive outlook on my life.”
Because he played in four regular-season games, or fewer, in 2025, Moa can call that his redshirt season. That mean’s he’s a redshirt sophomore, with three seasons of eligibility remaining.
Off the field, he has applied to the business management program at BYU’s Marriott School of Business and has about two years left to get his degree.
“Growing up, my parents always made sure that me and my siblings had a Plan B,” he said. “My parents always emphasized that football is only a little bit of our time here on Earth, and to make sure that we are ready just in case anything happened. Unexpected things happen in football, like what happened to me last September. Thankfully, my parents have led me in the right direction.”
