By Camille Cox | Staff Writer
Baylor football alumnus Colin Allred now serves as US representative for Texas’s 32nd District.
The Dallas native played football at Baylor from 2001 to 2005 before playing for four seasons with the Tennessee Titans.
During his time at Baylor, Allred studied history, earned All-Academic Big 12 in 2004 and 2005, served as team captain of the 2005 team and was named the 2020 Baylor Football Legend by the “B” Association.
“I learned so much about being a leader at Baylor,” Allred said in an interview with The Waco Tribune-Herald. “I had never really been outside of Dallas, even though Waco wasn’t that far away. It was a new experience going from Hillcrest to Baylor. We weren’t the most talented team in the Big 12, but we wanted to be the hardest working.”
Following his football career, Allred attended the UC Berkeley School of Law before entering a career in politics. Allred’s website said he decided to run for his own district’s office.
“I’m trying to run to represent the community that I came from and to make sure that the values that I grew up with here are being represented in Washington,” Allred told the Baylor Lariat in 2017. “I think I have a story to tell of someone who the community gave me a chance.”
Baylor alumnus Nick Dean, class of 2012, worked directly with Allred on his first congressional campaign in 2018. Dean said Allred’s story mirrors his and he found it easy to support him while working with him.
“I largely focused on digital communications efforts for the campaign,” Dean said. “Colin Allred is the real deal: what you see and what you hear about him is the same in person. I personally connected with him because he’s got a story really similar to mine, being raised by a single mother in Texas.”
Dean said Allred stands as a strong Baylor alumnus and represents Texas well in his role as a congressman.
“I think that one really interesting thing about college in general and especially at Baylor is that it attracts people who are bound by the same desire to help the people around them,” Dean said. “For Colin, he was a civil rights attorney, which is where he was actively helping people, then he turned then did all this hard work to become a congressman, where he can also do this hard work on a larger scale.”
Dean said Allred was one of the first congressmen to take paternity leave, which resonated with him as a new father.
“It was such a great example there, and it’s such an important thing for our country to see,” Dean said.
Spring sophomore Payton Perez shares her fields of interest with Allred, who originally entered the university on the pre-med track before switching his major to history.
“I think it’s super cool to see somebody be so successful that studied the same things I’m studying as a political science major and history minor,” Perez said. “It’s cool to see that it’s possible to go here and … then do that.”
