[IMPORTANT: Make this 4 times longer with much more detail]
Don Landry CFL.ca You might think it a bit of a stretch for me to call the last man selected in the 2025 CFL Draft a slam dunk pick but hear me out. DeEmetrius Masuka was lying in bed on Tuesday night — draft night — about to head off to dreamland. He had an early morning workout planned for the next day and after suffering not one but two serious knee injuries in the last two years, the 22-year-old defensive back has work to do in the gym. Besides, he figured there was a good chance he wouldn’t be drafted at all. And so as he lay in that bed, watching the selections play out on a YouTube stream, Masuka’s thoughts were turning from the hopes that he’d hear his name called to what might be next for him. 2025 CFL Draft » Stamps take receiver Damien Alford first overall in CFL Draft » A team-by-team look at the 2025 CFL Draft » View: 2025 CFL Draft results » Subscribe to the CFL’s official YouTube channel » Subscribe to the CFL’s newsletter for exclusive offers and league updates The day before the draft, he’d taken a shot at climbing back into the consciousness of some of the CFL’s personnel decision-makers, by showing a few teams how far along he’d come in his latest rehab. Masuka sent out a video that showed him charging at a basketball rim, ball in hand, elevating, and throwing one down. One of those teams Masuka sent the clip to, the Toronto Argonauts, made him the final pick of the draft, 72nd overall. That jolted him out of bed. Masuka was back at his parent’s place for the week and so he went downstairs to inform his folks that he’d just been picked in the eighth round, adding, “I think.” “It was kind of a surreal moment,” he laughs. Sleep? That could wait. Or rather, it would have to as Masuka’s own excited thoughts would take him over, along with his phone, which was continually glowing and buzzing. “It was just FaceTimes, text and everything,” Masuka says of the flurry of communications he experienced in the wee small hours that followed his name hitting the board. “It was people close to me that have been around me and kind of know everything I’ve been through.” Yeah. What he’s been through. It’s a lot. In the summer of 2023, Masuka tore the ACL in his right knee. That major misfortune came after a fabulous previous season in which he’d had three interceptions (two more called back on penalties, he says) and 27 tackles in eight games at boundary corner for the McMaster Marauders. So, the six-foot-two, 220-pounder missed the entire 2023 season due to the injury and extensive rehab that followed, but when the 2024 campaign arrived, he was ready again. Ready, too, for his shift from corner to free safety. In his third game of the season, however, that ACL in his right knee was torn again. Masuka’s year was over. Again. He was devastated, as I’m sure you can imagine. “That was probably the hardest month of my life,” says the native of Hamilton. “You have things in order, and your life is going the way you want it to,” he says of his work to get back on a football field, “and then having to do it for a second time? It kind of felt like all the work doesn’t matter anymore. “In that month, I didn’t really know what to think of my life, and I didn’t know if I was gonna play football again, or if I should focus on something else.” We know the answer now. We know because Masuka is back to dunking basketballs and he just got drafted by a pro football team. During his month of soul-searching, Masuka marshalled his determination — some of which he says he probably gets from his father Paul, a commercial roofer who puts his back into his work — and decided to get back to the task of pursuing a football dream following his second surgery in just over a year. “I don’t really know how to….” He pauses for a couple of seconds. “Quit,” he then adds. “It might be a weird personality (trait). “I kind of just attacked rehab the same way I did the first time, and maybe a little more.” Masuka’s immediate future with the Argos is quite clear in that he will not be ready when rookie camp opens next week, being that he is just six months out from his last surgery. Getting back to full football health will take until sometime in the summer. One option that remains open, should the Argos and Masuka decide to go that way, is having him head back for more OUA football. Masuka, who has two more years of university football eligibility remaining, has completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Kinesiology at McMaster. Not knowing what his draft stock was going to look like, he transferred to the University of Guelph, with any eye on completing a Masters in Human Health. He’d set those plans in motion prior to the draft, wanting to be certain he could still have football in his life should he go unselected. Which was something that was entirely possible and why Masuka designed as low-key a draft night as he could, back at his parents’ house for the week, under the covers, pretty sure he was not going to hear his name called. “I kinda had low expectations going into it just based off everything,” he says. “I didn’t really want to put myself in a place where I was going to get disappointed.” Then lo and behold, there was his name, on the board, on the last rung. The day before it got there, Masuka had sent out that video. He wasn’t planning to do that, really. He just wanted to prove to himself that he could still dunk a basketball. But since teams had already been asking him for rehab and workout progression videos he thought “why not just send it out to maybe encourage a team to draft me?” “I guess it did me good,” he says. Like I said. A slam dunk pick. Get all the top stories from across the league delivered to your inbox.
