#12 Caleb Medford — Offseason portal moves: Exit walk-on wide receiver Erwin Nash (88); enter scholarship receiver Caleb Medford (12), who will wear the same No. 88 jersey. Considering Medford has five years of experience under his belt at TCU and New Mexico, I have to say that’s a clear upgrade. | Photo by Michael Chang/Getty Images

In which BracketCat counts down the 88th day until the 2025 kickoff with a profile of Kansas State wide receiver Caleb Medford.

#88 Caleb Medford

Redshirt Super Senior | 6-0 | 201 lbs. | Henderson, Texas

Position: Wide Receiver
Previous Colleges: Texas Christian University; University of New Mexico
Projection: Second-String
Status: On Scholarship

Caleb Medford (b. August 22, 2001) is a transfer wide receiver from New Mexico who has one COVID year left to play one season. He will look to make an immediate impact at KSU.

Medford actually began his career at conference rival TCU, but he did not see any game action during his first collegiate season, which was the infamous pandemic year of 2020.

In 2021, he did see action in five games, but recorded no statistics for the Horned Frogs.

After playing against Tarleton State, but again still not recording any statistics, Medford presumably became frustrated with his lack of playing time and entered the transfer portal.

He landed in Albuquerque, where he immediately broke through and made a big impact.

Medford played in 12 games in 2023, with eight starts, coming away with 551 receiving yards and two touchdowns on 30 catches to earn All-Mountain West honorable mention accolades. In all, he tallied at least one catch in each of the final 11 games of the season.

Medford tallied 122 yards on six catches — both career highs — at Fresno State.

He also had 70 or more receiving yards at UMass (82 yards), against UNLV (70 yards) and at Boise State (77 yards), this last game in which he had a career-long reception of 59 yards.

Medford posted eight straight games of multiple catches as, aside from his career-high six at Fresno State, he also had four against UNLV and three apiece at UMass, Wyoming, Nevada, and Boise State.

He finally tallied his first career touchdown at UMass, then had another at Fresno State.

In 2024, Medford saw action in 11 games with six starts, totaling 336 receiving yards and three touchdowns on 18 catches, posting a season-high 91 receiving yards — including a season-long catch of 47 yards — at in-state rival New Mexico State.

He also was named to the Wuerffel Trophy and Earl Campbell Tyler Rose Award watch lists.

Despite diminished production, Medford had four catches at Wyoming to record a season high and had receiving touchdowns at Arizona, at Auburn, and against Washington State.

He prepped under head coach Phil Castles at Henderson (Texas) High School, where he was rated the 100th-best wide receiver nationally in the Class of 2020 by ESPN, while he was ranked No. 104 by 247Sports.

Medford earned first-team all-district honors as both a junior and senior after helping the Lions to reach the state quarterfinals as junior. He also played baseball, golf and track.

As a high schooler, Medford picked TCU over an impressive list of scholarship offers from Arkansas, Arkansas State, Baylor (where he was recruited by Joey McGuire!), Boston College, Hawai’i, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, Memphis, Missouri, Ole Miss, Purdue, Southern Miss, Stephen F. Austin, Texas Tech, Tulane, Tulsa and Virginia, as well as preliminary recruiting interest from Oklahoma State.

Head coach Chris Klieman had a lot of praise for Medford and his fellow transfer wide receivers during spring practices, regarding their ability to pick things up very quickly:

I know it helped getting (Jaron) Tibbs and (Jerand Bradley) and Medford in here. Those guys are really efficient wide receivers who’ve had a lot of playing time at other places that it didn’t take long to learn a system sometimes like a young player does. These are older guys that have played a lot of football. You can tell them something once and tell them about a concept, just with different terminology, and it clicked a lot faster for those guys.

Get to know Medford better by watching this K-State Athletics video.