LSU redshirt freshman defensive end Barkevious “KeKe” Mingo was not supposed to play football.
 
At least that’s what his mother said when he was growing up.
She said football was too dangerous for Mingo and his brothers, Hugh and Hughtavious, so he focused on basketball and track until his junior year at West Monroe High School. At that point, the football coaching staff recruited Mingo after he finished competing at the state track meet in the 4×200- and 4×400-meter relays.
 
Mingo took the bait, and his football career began at the Rebels’ 2007 spring scrimmage. Those two football seasons drew the attention of LSU, where he played in all eight games this season. He notched his first career start at right defensive end against Auburn.
 
He is eighth on the team in tackles (22), tied for fourth in sacks (2.5), leads the team in quarterback hurries (four) and is tied for second in forced fumbles (two).
 
“I was a backup in the [West Monroe High School] spring game, and the guy in front of me broke his arm, so that’s why I got thrown in right away,” Mingo said. “Then I had a ridiculous amount of tackles, and the coach was like, ‘Please,’ I guess you could say. And then the rest was good.”
 
But Mingo’s mother, Barbara Johnson, was still too nervous to watch her son on the field because she was afraid to see him get injured.
 
“A guy I worked with kept saying, ‘Barbara, you have to go see him play. He’s awesome,'” she said. “And I’m like, ‘I’m not going, I don’t want to see people knocking my baby around.’ I went to a game one night, and the whole game I was blocking my eyes. … But he wasn’t getting knocked over by people — he was knocking over people.”
 
Mingo moved between safety, defensive end and linebacker in his senior year at West Monroe. He arrived at LSU two years later as a linebacker before making the switch to defensive end last spring.
 
Though Mingo did not see the field as a true freshman, his fame sparked around the LSU campus when he was nominated for “Name of the Year” in March.
 
Mingo began as the No. 4 seed in the 64-team tournament started by the Name of the Year blog, which was founded in 1983 with the mission “to discover, verify, nominate, elect and disseminate great names.”
 
Mingo was named the winner in April, beating Michigan graduate student Iris Macadangdang by a 54-46 percent margin, as 1,147 of more than 10,400 votes were cast in Louisiana in the final round.
 
“I voted a couple of times for him last year,” Hughtavious Mingo said. “It was a big thing at our high school. Everybody would vote for him. [Our names] are unique.”
 
Barkevious Mingo said his teachers were the people who showed the most enthusiasm during the competition, to his surprise.
 
“The teachers would get on and vote every day,” he said. “They would say, ‘I voted for you, and I sent e-mails to all my friends telling them to vote for you.’ It was funny.”
 
Mingo’s mother said she derived the name Barkevious by adding the first three letters of her name, Barbara, to the name she liked, Kevious. His brothers’ names, Hugh and Hughtavious, were inspired by their father’s name, Hugh Jr., and they have two half-siblings named Hughmetrious and Hughlisha.
 
Hugh Mingo III, a junior basketball player at Louisiana-Monroe, said Barkevious has made the family proud with his dedication to football. He said Barkevious “has a heart for the game.”
 
Hughtavious Mingo said the Mingo family has always been a tight-knit group, and one of their favorite things to do together is play video games.
 
“He’s a laid-back person, probably one of the best people you’ll ever meet,” Hughtavious Mingo said. “He’s never judging anything. We are a very close family. … We all stick together.”
 
 
 
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Contact Rachel Whittaker at [email protected]