1. Las Vegas Raiders - Fernando Mendoza - QB - Indiana

2. New York Jets - Arvell Reese - Edge/LB - Ohio State

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A lot of anxiety.

He checks his cell for what might be the thousandth time. Or maybe it’s the tenth. He can’t remember. It only seems like minutes ago he was eating and laughing and chatting. Now he’s just worrying and wondering.

Wondering if his life is going to change today.

Wondering if the life of the man sat next to him is going to change today.

Wondering what he’ll say if it doesn’t.

The room is quiet save for the hum of the television, the sound of every movement magnified. As the clock ticks towards midnight, Chell knows it’s now or never.

Suddenly the phone begins to ring. He glances down and sees a Missouri number.

This is it.

This is it.

The man next to him leans forward and answers. He sounds tired. Chell can hear the voice on the other end. The voice of a three time Super Bowl winner and former NFL Executive of the Year. Although he can’t make out exactly what’s being said, he knows exactly what’s being said.

The voice is telling the man that his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, are making him the 32nd pick in the 2025 NFL Draft and that his job from this day forwards will be to protect the blind side of the best quarterback of a generation, Patrick Mahomes.

As Josh Simmons says goodbye to Brett Veach and hangs up, the room explodes in noise. Chell, the only British agent in the NFL closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, secure in the knowledge he has his first ever first round draft pick.

For the 27-year old from Stoke, it’s been a hell of a journey to get here.

It’s early February 2026 and Chell is already on the Zoom when I join, sat at a table in his apartment in Chicago that he shares with his wife. This is our second attempt at meeting up, our first curtailed because a Champions League game came between us. As a Stoke City fan, Chell bemoans the fact he’s never been lucky enough to be distracted by European football, and we laugh at why fandom is so often determined by geography, family heritage, or a formative, inescapable connection rather than a conscious choice.

His light brown hair is parted down the middle and he’s wearing a grey hoodie. He’s immediately likeable, if frighteningly young and at times during our ninety minute conversation I get the sense someone else is in the room, just behind the camera. But I never ask. He’s very easy to talk to and I sense we’d be friends in another world. Yet when the conversation moves to the NFL I’m struck by how quickly his persona changes and how seriously he discusses his craft, comfortably belying his age. I can see immediately why athletes would buy into what he’s selling.

We dance around the fringes for a few minutes, getting comfortable with each other, laughing about how we came to be sat on this call. I’d emailed Ohio State wide receiver Carnell Tate asking for an interview and Chell had replied saying that Tate was busy training for the draft but that perhaps I’d like to tell his story instead. Even now sat on this call, there’s a small percentage of me wondering whether I’m part of some elaborate hoax. Why would a guy born forty-seven miles away from where I’m sat message me back? I mean let’s be serious for a moment: blokes from Stoke don’t normally reply to emails you send to the best wide receiver in the NFL Draft.

But then blokes from Stoke don’t usually work for football's most revered super agent, Drew Rosenhaus.

Yet here we are.

Last year, Stoke - or the Potteries as it’s more popularly known - celebrated its century of city status, a history defined by its rise as the world’s pottery capital, driven by innovators like Josiah Wedgwood. But despite the success of its core industry, it has not been a particularly popular place. In the 1930s, the English novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley opined that the human race “had yet to arrive there”. Thirty years later, Labour minister Richard Crossman recorded a deeply pessimistic view of the city in his diaries, saying it “ought to be abandoned,” and that any attempts at renewal would be “a waste of time and money.” Since then it’s variously been referred to as ‘an urban tragedy,’ a ‘run-down, deprived armpit’ and ‘the only town in Britain where a vase costs more than a house.’ Over the last two decades it’s been home to a strong far-right presence: the British National Party once held nine seats on the city council and Nigel Farage’s right wing party, Reform UK secured a 24.4% vote share in Stoke-on-Trent North in the 2024 general election.

Today it’s become a symbol of a Britain left behind. Like someone’s faded memory of a city.

It’s here where Chell was born. His mother was a nurse and his father worked in hospitality, first running pubs before becoming head of franchise operations for Pizza Hut UK. Although he moved to affluent Ascot, just a short drive from the grounds of Windsor Castle when he was a small boy, Chell has retained a link to his birthplace through its football team.

Stoke City, founded in 1863, are one of the oldest clubs in the world and one of the twelve original members of the Football League. Although their greatest triumph came more than half a century ago when they beat Chelsea 2-1 to win the League Cup in 1972, they’ve been home to two of the best players to ever play the game: Sir Stanley Matthews, twice European Footballer of the Year; and World Cup winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks whose save from Pele’s header in Guadalajara in 1970 is widely considered the greatest of all time.

Chell smiles as he talks about his team, thanking his dad for instilling a devotion for ‘The Potters’ from an early age. He tells me about games he’s been to, of mad cap dashes to and from the stadium on Saturdays in the family car, and moments of unbridled joy witnessed from the stands. There’s an instantly recognisable passion in his voice, almost as if he’s back in the Boothen End amongst a twisted mass of humanity celebrating a winning goal by Crouch, Walters or Shawcross.

I ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he suddenly gets serious, even steely. But the passion remains.

“That’s a good question and it sounds cliche,” he says. “It wasn’t directly as an agent, but I knew I wanted to work for a Premier League team or a football team in the business side of it, you know. I wanted to run the front office. I felt like that was my destiny.” He pauses for a second to let that wash over both of us, almost as if he were speaking it into existence for the very first time.

“I really feel like that’s what I was destined to do because I love business and I love sport,” he says quietly.

“At Stoke?” I ask, and a smile breaks back out on his face.

“Sure,” he says.

“Sure.”

Chell’s childhood was a happy one, spent on football pitches and tennis courts, cricket outfields and golf courses. But one sport definitely not on his radar when he was growing up was American football.

“I had no idea about it,” he says flatly. “I really wasn’t aware of it at all.” He stops to think, then says: “I remember I did have one Patriots shirt, but not in fandom way or in any show of support. It was just the team most kids had heard of back then because of Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski. The reason I was introduced to it at all was because I was in America at that time.”

Chell was in the US because of his older brother, Joe, who, upon finishing his exams had no interest staying in England to continue his education or even to find a job. He’d become fascinated with the idea of playing football and studying abroad and had managed to secure a scholarship to The College of St. Scholastica, a private Benedictine college in Duluth, Minnesota.

“That was always his mindset,” says Chell. “To leave the UK. And he was a pretty good footballer. He was never going to be a professional but I think having the opportunity to keep playing whilst also getting an education was such a great experience for him. And that kind of put the idea in my head to follow a similar path.”

Arnold Palmer called Sunningdale, “One of the great golf courses in Europe.” Tucked away amongst undulating heather and pine a couple of miles from Ascot in the Royal County of Berkshire, its two courses are some of the most aesthetically pleasing anywhere on the continent and where, exactly a century ago the great Bobby Jones hit a perfect 66 in Open Qualifying on the Old Course, causing C.B. Macfarlane of the Evening News to write simply: “It is probably the finest golf ever seen in Great Britain. The boy’s game was as perfect and chaste as Grecian statuary.”

When Chell was a teenager he began working as a caddy on weekends at the course, walking the same fairways Jones had a hundred years before. But he cared little about what had happened on June 16th, 1926 and the feats of the 24-year old from Atlanta, focusing more on the people whose bags he was carrying in the here and now. “That job introduced me to a lot of CEO’s and executives,” he says. “Not necessarily of sports teams, but just high level people across different industries. And through them I really got introduced to the idea of running a business. That was all I became focused on.”

His most regular client was a man called Jeremy Marsh, the vice president of Warner Brothers Records and one of British music’s most important names. Every Saturday the pair would meet on the first tee at 8am sharp, greenkeepers buzzing around behind them as the sun burned away the remains of the early morning mist. Chell would arrive early with Marsh’s clubs and a 20p hot chocolate he’d bought from the machine near the caddy room door, ready to offer advice and soak up wisdom.

“Jeremy was great,” says Chell, the boyish grin returning to his face. “I mean really great. And he helped me so much.”

“Helped you how?” I ask.

“I didn’t work for him or do an internship or anything like that, but he was so open to giving me hints and tips about life. At school I was known for my entrepreneurship. I was the wheeler dealer, the kid selling sweets and clothes, and I loved it. But I wanted to know more. So Jeremy and I built a relationship that was professional but relaxed. To the point where I was comfortable enough to have those conversations as a 15, 16 year old kid who wanted to be an executive of some sort. And it could sometimes be hard to bring stuff up because I didn’t know if I was asking questions the right way. But one thing I really appreciated about Jeremy was that he’d fill my head with information about how to go about getting where I wanted to go. And that just fuelled my desire.”

When Marsh holed out at 18, Chell would return his clubs to the members locker room and rush out to the car park where his dad would be waiting to drive the three hours to Stoke for the match. When the conversation wore out he’d stare out of the window at the fields racing past and think about what he’d heard that morning, piecing together his business masterplan, his thoughts shimmering somewhere between dream and daylight.

Sure, high school entrepreneurship had given him ideas.

But Jeremy Marsh had given him something far more valuable.

Hope.

Duluth is a major inland port on the western tip of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake by surface area in the world. The easiest way to get to the Zenith City from London is to fly to Chicago and then drive the seven hours up I-90. It’s a journey the Chell family would make often on their way to St Scholastica. The long hours on the road would give them chance to talk, often about Oliver’s next steps in life. Back in England he was about to finish school and had unanswered questions about where his future lay. He knew what he wanted to do. He just didn’t know how to go about it. But being in America gave the family options, including the possibility of him following in his brother’s footsteps and continuing his education in the United States.

As a footballer in his own right, Chell had significant talent. Watching his brother doing well for the Saints in Duluth only fired his imagination about what his own future might look like if he took the plunge. He signed up to an agency that linked European athletes with US colleges and hoped for the best.

It wasn’t long till interested schools started reaching out.

“I went to a couple of tryouts and played in front of a few scouts that travelled over,” he says. “They filmed it and it got sent out to coaches in the states, and one of those was North Park.”

Twenty minutes north of Chicago, North Park is a private Christian university founded by the Evangelical Covenant Church. Originally populated by Swedish immigrants, the neighbourhood surrounding the school is a blend of cultures and generations, and the riverfront campus is full of historic, brick-facade buildings.

“The cool thing about North Park was that European connection,” says Oliver. “The head coach and a couple of the assistant coaches were Scandinavian so that made me feel more comfortable because I was pretty nervous about the idea of going to live in America, even with Joe out there. But they saw my film and I met with them over there and it all felt really comfortable. Everyone was so welcoming, the facilities were great and it was so close to downtown Chicago, which is such a cool place to have access to. That’s really what I fell in love with when I was looking around.”

Although North Park had a well established athletics programme, including a strong football team, it didn’t offer sports scholarships. But Chell, with the help of his parents and grandparents was able to fund an academic scholarship to study business.

However, there were still some lingering doubts.

“It was just a long way from everything I knew and I wondered whether I was ready for big city America. But the more I thought about the sacrifices my family had made to put me in this position and the things that Jeremy had said to me on the golf course about taking chances when they presented themselves, it just felt right for me to go.”

It was a decision that would change his life forever.

It’s spring 2018 and Oliver Chell is lacing his Nike boots with their bright orange stripe around the heel. He’s sat on the edge of the football pitches at North Park which make up part of the Holmgren Complex, named after Super Bowl winning head coach Mike Holmgren and his family, who’ve been longstanding supporters of the school. The sophomore is a few days into pre-season training, hoping to build on a promising freshman campaign. He feels at home here now, settled. He’s also the fittest he’s ever been, and that’s reflected in his numbers. Today however, there are no bleep tests, no small sided games to work on closing down, and no recovery runs. On this day it’s time for actual football; 11 v 11 so the coaches can begin to work out what the starting line-up might look like come the new season.

Chell is in his usual position marshalling things at the back. As the opposition moves forwards he spots one of his closest friends on the team, Gustav Ericsson, a small, technical midfielder from Stockholm move into the space in front of him. As the ball’s played into his feet, Chell moves touch-tight to him. Ericsson, anticipating contact shifts the ball, turns past the Englishman and accelerates away, leaving him twisting behind him. At the same time Chell hears his knee crunch and then pop. Suddenly he’s on the floor and in incredible pain. “It was horrible. Really horrible. My foot was planted and my knee just……”

He goes silent for a few seconds, his mind racing back almost a decade.

“With grass it gives a bit under your studs but with the turf it doesn’t at all. My body turned but my foot and my leg stayed where it was. I can still remember the noise. I knew straight away it was really bad.”

Chell had torn his ACL, his MCL, and suffered something called osteochondritis dissecans, a joint condition in which the bone underneath the cartilage of a joint - for Chell it was the bottom of his femur - dies due to lack of blood flow. He went through months of surgeries and rehab, only to feel significant pain in the knee when he was finally able to practice again, forcing him into yet another surgery. “I couldn’t even walk around a shopping centre without feeling pain,” he tells me. “So they took a pretty drastic measure and removed a piece of cartilage from a cadaver, taking out the exact piece and put it in my knee.”

The operation was a success and after almost two years Chell was finally able to play again, making it back for the final five games of the 2019 season and winning the North Park Moment of the Year Award for his goal in the NCAA tournament against Pacific Lutheran. “After everything I went through, scoring that day meant the world to me,” he says. “It was a nice way to finish up my time in Chicago. But it was also the end of me playing the game.”

Chell’s knee simply didn’t feel like it used to. The reality was that despite the miracle goal, any career he might have had in football was ended on that day back in 2017. I ask him whether he still plays now and he shakes his head resignedly. “I don’t,” he says. “I’ll kick a ball around if I see one because I just can’t help myself, but I’m going to have pretty significant arthritis in my knee when I get older so I’ve got to manage it properly.”

I pause for a moment, hoping he’ll fill the dead air, which he duly does.

“That whole time was a rough, tough experience,” he says. “Especially when you’re so far away from home.”

What got him through the darkest days was a burgeoning relationship with a fellow athlete on her own recovery plan.

The fantasy story Chell likes to tell people is that he met his future wife as they rehabbed serious knee injuries on adjacent training tables. He laughs when I ask if that’s serious, setting the record straight immediately and telling me the reality is a little different: “North Park’s a pretty small school so you’d get to know everyone who was on the other sports teams,” he says through a smile. “And I’d seen her around but never really said anything to her.” Chell stops and the smile becomes a laugh. “She’s not going to love this story……but I remember her adding me one day on Snapchat. And I didn’t really care about girls that much because I was playing and just having fun with the boys so I didn’t add her back. I also didn’t know that not adding her back was a really big thing. Anyway, I remember seeing her the next day and she was like, “Why don’t you want to be friends?” That sort of broke the ice and it just went from there.”

Zakiya Newsome, a second team All CCIW point guard from nearby Glendale Heights was rehabbing her own torn ACL, which subsequently gave her more time to make the 20 minute drive from North Park to the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston to see her brother, All American cornerback and highly regarded draft prospect, Greg Newsome II.

“It never registered,” says Chell laughing and shaking his head as he tells me about discovering his new girlfriend had a brother playing big time college football on his way to the NFL. “I mean she’d tell me he was going to be a pro and that he was the best cornerback in the nation, but honestly I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. I thought it was great he was playing sport and that he was good at it but I didn’t understand college football or how massive it was. I just thought it was like someone playing for their university in England, which is to say I just didn’t care that much”.

I ask Chell when it clicked that what Newsome was doing was a bit different to what happens back home.

“We were at Buffalo Wild Wings,” he tells me. “Northwestern are playing on the TV and she points him out to me. I remember thinking ‘why on earth is my girlfriend’s brother on television in this restaurant’? Then a few weeks later we went up to Evanston for one of his games, against UNLV. My parents were in town as well and we all go to Ryan Field and there are thousands and thousands of people there going crazy for a college sport. That’s when I got it. That’s when I really started paying attention, really started watching the game and beginning to understand it as Greg went into his final year. Watching the momentum build towards the draft and to witness that first hand, to see what he went through, the process and the Combine and running at the pro day. I was living it vicariously through Greg and it all just clicked into place for me. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with my life. It put me back on that golf course with Jeremy and all the chats about knowing when the time was right. Well, the time was right.”

“I’d found my lightbulb moment.”

After Chell leaves the call I search around on YouTube for the video of Newsome being drafted 26th overall in the 2021 draft by the Browns. After the announcement of the pick, NFL Network cuts to its edited highlights package and Daniel Jeremiah tells America he was his 4th rated corner, that he loves his competitiveness, how fluid he is as a mover, and his physicality. Then they cut to a shot of Newsome’s draft party watching the announcement on TV. Surrounded by twenty or so family and friends, the Northwestern corner is the last to rise from his sofa as the room goes wild around him. At the back of the frame are two men leaning against what look like large cupboard doors. The man on the left is wearing a grey gilet and has a mask over his mouth. Stood next to him is a smaller figure in a white long sleeve t-shirt, baseball cap hiding a now familiar face. He punches the air with one hand, then raises a second, before clapping, hands above his head.

Oliver Chell has just had his introduction to the first round of the NFL Draft.

It won’t be his last.

It’s the autumn of 2021 and Oliver and Zakiya are in Cleveland where they’re living with her brother Greg, helping him assimilate to life in the NFL. The pair are taking care of the things he doesn’t have time to do, allowing him to focus completely on football. Over the last few months Chell has become aware of another presence in Newsome’s life: his agent, Drew Rosenhaus. Occasionally he spies him at games or hears his voice on phone calls in the car or at the apartment the three share. But on this day, Rosenhaus, a man who’s negotiated north of ten billion dollars in contracts and remains the only agent ever to feature on the cover of Sports Illustrated, has an offer for Zakiya.

“He tells her he wants her to come and do an internship at his company, Rosenhaus Sports,” says Oliver. “And she’s brutally honest sometimes and so she just told him she had absolutely no interest in doing that! And obviously I hear all this happening and I’m saying that she should do it anyway! But she was adamant. And then suddenly she just said, ‘My boyfriend Ollie would love to do it. He loves business, he loves sport and he’s really close to Greg’. And Drew just says yes. And there I am, a guy from Stoke who’d always wanted to work in sport and sports business, getting an offer from the biggest agent in America.”

“It was an absolute game changer.”

In the beginning, Chell’s focus is what he refers to as “bottom of the barrel intern stuff,” consisting of anything to do with off the field business - marketing, endorsements, public relations, helping out with community staff, and working on the concierge service that Rosenhaus Sports offers its clientele. “You help make dinner reservations for a guy that’s forgotten about Valentine’s Day, ” he says. “All unpaid, but just a foot in the door to an industry that’s hard to get a foot in the door of.” However, it was made clear to him that his chances of sticking were somewhere between thin and none. But there was a problem: Chell had the bug. “I was obsessed,” he says. “Obsessed. I loved being around the players and being in that world. Those four months made me want to become an agent so badly.”

Chell relied on an old Jeremy Marsh mantra he’d woven into the fabric of their conversations on Sunningdale’s undulating Old Course about making it impossible for businesses not to hire him once he’d found what he wanted to do.

Landing marketing contracts didn’t hurt his chances either.

“I brought in some cash deals for our clients which is a big win even to this day. And from there they offered me an independent contractor type role. Wasn’t paid a bunch of money but I was paid, and suddenly I was there on the ladder. From that point the only way was up and up and up.”

Over the new few months, Oliver hoovered up every piece of information he could find about becoming a sports agent. He read books, attended meetings, and spoke to as many people as possible about the role, the recruiting process and the art of relationship building. But nothing beat actually being in the room with the athletes themselves, especially away from the glare of cameras or the brand caravan that follows the games’ best players. But that’s easier said than done when you’re still a fresh faced, bottom-rung marketeer.

Unless you have a brother-in-law to be who just happens to be a starting NFL cornerback.

“Greg had probably been in Cleveland for a couple of days,” says Chell. “Zakiya and I flew down just to make sure he was okay and settling in. Anyway, he says he’s going out for dinner at this cool restaurant in the city called Town Hall and it was boys night and I was going with him. So we get to this place and we walk in and there’s Baker Mayfield just casually waiting for us. At the time I was going through this whole ‘learning the game and the players’ thing. I knew Odell (Beckham Jr) was there, and Myles Garrett, and obviously I knew Baker was the quarterback. And here I am just sat with one of those three guys having dinner and a few drinks. He was the coolest person in the world, just a totally normal guy you’d want to have a beer with. And that was my moment. Even though I’d been through the draft process with Greg and I’d seen him get drafted, that was when I was like: ‘Okay, now he’s in that upper echelon of players which means there’s going to be superstars around him all the time.’”

“But also around me too”

“That night was a welcome to the NFL moment for Greg, but for me it was the last confirmation I needed that I could survive being around this calibre of athlete and not be a fish out of water.”

We continue talking and I tell Chell that over the years I’ve been in many NFL locker rooms and press conferences and that I like to ask questions because I never take for granted the access the NFL affords you. I explain that I’m always respectful to the beat writers, allowing them to do their work. But that there’s always a moment to speak. Yet it doesn’t matter where you are: Miami, New York, Green Bay, New Orleans, Pittsburgh……the second you open your mouth as a Brit to ask a question, or the second you sidle up to a player in the locker room and start talking, everyone in the room turns to look at you with a level of mild incredulity. And I’m just a journalist asking a ten second question. I’m not asking the player to invest their trust that I’ll be capable of handling their off-field needs and represent them to the best of my ability, especially when it comes to contract negotiations, all with a different accent.

So I’m keen to know what happens when he opens his mouth and starts recruiting potential clients.

“It’s a pretty similar experience to you,” he says. “I get that same reaction but it’s almost like an instant icebreaker. 99% of the time it works in my favour. Obviously there’s been one or two guys, especially when I’m recruiting that are like, ‘Why would I sign with this English guy? He’s from a country where the game’s not even that relevant.’ But from hanging out and being around Greg’s teammates, it just gave me the confidence to converse. And I think it goes back to those Saturday mornings with Jeremy on the golf course, being free to talk to people and to express myself. We end up talking about everything apart from the NFL which I think players love because they can switch off. That’s what helped me build my relationship with Greg, then his teammates and then with players I was trying to recruit. When you know you’re comfortable in an environment full of NFL superstars it’s far easier to recruit college players. I wouldn’t say I’m relatable because I’m from a different country but I’m personable and from a different country and I think the combination of the two….. players and their families just really connect with it.”

But to be able to recruit players, Chell needed to graduate from marketeer to agent. In short, he needed his own draft moment.

He got the call late in 2024, on the night of his 25th birthday.

“I was at a sort of date night whiskey making class where they teach you how to make three whiskey cocktails. And suddenly my phone rings and it’s Drew. And Drew doesn’t call the marketing guys too often unless it’s pertaining to some off the field stuff. So I apologise to Zakiya and say I have to take the call, that it’s the big, big boss. So I answer and Drew just goes, ‘Ollie, I want you to take the NFLPA agent exam. I’ll connect you with a guy called Neil Stratton who runs a educational course, see when it is and get it done.’ And that was it. I remember getting off the phone and immediately texting my mum and dad and obviously breaking the news to Z, and it was just like……HOLY SHIT……the best to ever do it is saying he sees something in me that makes him want me to become an agent”.

“That was my equivalent of getting the call from the Cleveland Browns at the 26th pick.”

As the trust in Chell grew he was regularly sent two hours from his home in Cleveland to Columbus to check in on burgeoning superstar and Rosenhaus client, Ohio State wide receiver Carnell Tate. It was there, whilst watching the All American that he spots Josh Simmons, an off-radar left tackle who’d transferred from San Diego State and was beginning to dominate. “I thought he was a really good player so I shot him a DM on Instagram asking if he had representation and if he’d be interested in having a conversation. The good thing was that it was really early on in the season before anyone knew who he was. He literally had about a thousand followers on Instagram, so it couldn’t have been more perfect timing for me from an outreach standpoint.”

The pair exchanged messages and then phone calls only for Simmons to tear his ACL in the sixth game of the season against Oregon. Whilst the young left tackle worried about his future, he had an ally in his new agent and the stark similarities between the two became clear. It also helped that by then Chell and his bosses at Rosenhaus Sports knew he’d done enough to become a high draft pick in 2025.

It was just a case of how high.

Oliver tells me he slept well the night before the 2025 NFL Draft, that when he put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes his abiding memory was that he’d done everything he could to get his client to that point. He thought about the 30 visits Simmons had been on, the interest late in the first round from the Packers, and more importantly from the Chiefs. About the zoom call earlier that day his client had had with head coach Andy Reid.

At lunch time on draft day, he and Jason Rosenhaus went for lunch in Columbus, leaving Simmons to his own thoughts before the trio reconvened early in the evening and then watched on helpless as team after team picked and Simmons sat stoically, his phone silent. When the call came and went, when the cheering stopped, and after that deep breath, Chell took some time to gather his thoughts. “You know, it’s strange but it was probably a similar feeling for me as it was for Josh. Not as heightened probably, but our journeys were pretty alike. I think for both of us it was confirmation that although there’s going to be challenges, we could both be really successful in this world.”

I ask if his life changed when that Missouri number flashed up on Simmons’ phone and he pauses and looks beyond the camera before repeating my question back to me. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think it changed per se, but I think my mindset changed. What happened that night gave me a vessel to expand and to grow. I’m the same person I was before the call. I just have a first round pick to my name.” He pauses again and then says, “If that’s life changing then so be it.”

This Thursday night Chell has three more vessels who could find themselves in the first round of the NFL Draft, and one of whom will almost certainly become his first top ten overall pick. But wherever Carnell Tate, Kayden McDonald and D’Angelo Ponds end up, Oliver Chell, the boy from Stoke, knows nothing will ever be the same again.

At the start of the interview I’d asked Chell what his school year book would have said about him upon graduation almost a decade earlier. It’s when he told me about his wheeler dealing and entrepreneurship. As our time together draws to a close, I ask him what the yearbook would say about him now, on this day. He pauses to think, once more looking beyond the camera.

“I think it would say I’m the kid that will find a way.”

He’s not wrong.

Read more

The NFL Draft has been fairly life-consuming for me. Back when I first got into American Football in the early 1980’s, I found the annual selection meeting such an alien construct: we’ve nothing like it in the UK. I was fascinated by how it worked: the jeopardy, the pressure, the process, scouting. I became obsessed. I would dig endlessly into the weeds to find out what I could - which, frankly, in 1984 wasn’t a lot. This was all pre-internet of course. So come draft night I’d sit in my bedroom listening to the Armed Forces Radio and the staff sergeant tasked with reading the names of those men picked in the first round. Of course, as a Miami fan you could absolutely guarantee that the signal would drift out of range just as it came to their pick. This happened in back to back years in 1987 and 1988 and on neither occasion did I hear the names of John Bosa and Eric Kumerow read out.

In hindsight perhaps it was for the best.

Soon I was writing mock drafts and making endless notes of college players I’d seen on the highlights we’d get on television, or hear talked up on AFRTS each weekend.

Then I discovered Mel Kiper and he changed my life.

His Pre-and Mid-Season Prospectuses were everything I’d been searching for. As a 13-year old with no real access to games other than the radio and an hour of TV highlights in the middle of the night each week, I’d found it difficult to grasp why players who were so dominant in college weren’t first rounders.

Mel gave me focus. Although he will almost certainly never know!

Take the outstanding Holy Cross two-way star Gordie Lockbaum: as a junior he rushed for 827 yards on 144 carries, caught 57 passes for 860 yards, and scored 22 touchdowns. On defense he had 46 tackles, two fumble recoveries, and one interception; he also returned 21 kickoffs for 452 yards. He finished top 5 in the Heisman two years running, yet was picked 236th overall in round 9. I couldn’t understand it, but Mel could.

And he made me understand.

The Low Redzone DraftBook has and always will be a nod to the fire he started in me and so many others like me.

This year’s DraftBook has, as always, been a labour of love. There are more words than ever before: 230,000+, an increase of 100,000. There are 346 full player profiles with far more information than ever before. And a total of 3,421 draft eligible players covered.

I’ll repeat. 3,421 draft eligible players in total covered, across 283 pages.

It goes position by position and ranks the players in the order I have them for that position. So for running backs, Jeremiyah Love is the best, and Jam Miller ends the beginning. After all the write-ups there is then a list of players at that position who are also in the draft and who I believe will end up as UDFA’s, or head to the CFL, the UFL, the spring leagues or any one of the Gridiron Developmental Football League (GDFL), the Rivals Professional Football League (RPFL), the Liga de Fútbol Americano Profesional (LFA): (based in Mexico), the Indoor Football League, The Arena League, the United Indoor Football Association or into flag football and its leagues and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028. These players aren’t in order. But if your team brings one into camp, you’ll at least see their measureables.

If you’re a subscriber you will have seen some of the in-depth profiles already.

There are many amazing people out there doing similar stuff. But one thing I’ve always been interested in as it pertains to the draft are the stories and what these kids are like off the field as well as on it. That’s why I place so much significance in that side of things because it really matters for teams. I truncated the “OFF FIELD” section over the last couple of years and embedded them instead into the main report. Whether that’s injuries, arrests, or general points of note, I think they’re very important and to me it’s what sets the DraftBook apart. This year you’ll discover who’s the son of a blackjack dealer, who the LEGO obsessives are, who the four time national champion roller blader is, who met their wife in the parking lot of a Dominos Pizza, who owns 170+ bottles of aftershave, who’s never watched a movie, who Timothée Chalamet’s favourite college passer is, whose great uncle is Merlin Olsen, whose mum was a star football player, and which likely day two CB decided that lawn mowing and not football was his future.

Oh, and which player was so rowdy as a child that his parents were forced to take him out on a leash so they could control him!

If you would like a copy of the DraftBook, please email: thelowredzone@gmail.com and I’ll send you the details.

Between now and draft day for subscribers there will be my top 50, a Mock Draft, and other draft related ephemera. Then for all Low Redzone readers, a really great long form story that I had to put on the back burner because of the DraftBook. And then after the draft the long form writing will begin in earnest.

Thanks as always.

Si

5’11, 206

JUNIOR

It’s genuinely difficult to know where to start with Downs who could be a transcendent talent. To me he’s comfortably the best player in the draft, an elite performer with a skillset that drips with Sunday ability and a mind that can process information like a super computer. In all the research for each player in the DraftBook, I was struck with so many things that I discovered about him, the former #6 overall player in the 2023 class, the USA Today Defensive Football Player of the Year, and the 2025 Thorpe Award winner. But this really stood out: When he was a prep sophomore, he became obsessed with greatness.

Read more

SIZE: 6022, 263

CLASS: Junior

One of the most fascinating arguments of this draft cycle has been around the length of Reuben Bain’s arms versus his compelling tape. His Combine measurement of 30 and 7/8 inches mark him out as an absolute outlier: his arms are among the lowest recorded for his position since 1999. Only Ohio State’s Nate Williams (30 5/8 in 2013) and Northern Illinois’ Sutton Smith (30 3/4 in 2019) have had shorter arm-length measurements among edges during that span (Bain was joined in the 2025 class by Cashius Howell whose arms were even shorter at 30 and a quarter inches). But does it matter? The short answer is yes. But the longer answer is significantly more nuanced. If you have really short arms you need at least one elite trait to offset that and he has more than one, with power and explosion as his super strengths.

Read more

SIZE: 6046, 236

CLASS: Redshirt Junior

Mendoza is a great story. The Heisman Trophy winner was very high on my pre-2025 list of draft eligible players, with the caveat that he was stepping up a level and undertaking a new offense as he moved from Cal - where he’d had great success - to work with Curt Cignetti and a better group of weapons around him. And boy he didn’t disappoint, driving the Hoosiers to a fairytale National Championship and becoming the de factor #1 overall pick in the process. There’s so much to like about him and his game and he has a translatable skillset that new Las Vegas HC Klint Kubiak will love: great football intelligence, both pre- and post-snap; outstanding against the blitz; a killer in the redzone - since 2023, Mendoza has 53 total touchdowns (43 passing, 10 rushing) and only 1 pick; a terrific feel for playing on time; anticipatory in hitting the middle of the field, especially with in-breaking routes; and money on big downs and in big moments: on 3rd down and 8+ last season he was 23-32 for 435 yards, with 7 scores and only 1 pick, and a 71.8% completion percentage.

The grandson of Cuban immigrants who had their money and the three pharmacies they owned seized by the Castro dictatorship 65 years ago, he comes from a family of athletes: his mother played tennis at Cornell and his father played HS ball and rowed crew at Brown. Mendoza’s love of football started in elementary school when he joined the South Miami Grey Ghosts, although he initially didn’t like the idea of being a QB. But his mother wanted him to play there due to the fact that there were less collisions and less injuries. The confluence of his mother’s reluctance and watching Tom Brady lead New England to the 2011 Super Bowl title was a game changer for the young Mendoza: “He was very intelligent out there. I saw Tom Brady, and realised that’s the guy I want to be.” A two star prospect, he was such a bookworm in high school that some coaches actively stopped pursuing him because they questioned whether he really wanted to play the game at all. He initially committed to Yale - over Bryant, Lehigh, Penn, and FIU - to study economics, and figured he’d take a Ryan Fitzpatrick-style path to the NFL. But just before signing day, one of Cal’s QB commits flipped to UCLA. Bill Musgrave, then the Golden Bears’ OC had heard about Mendoza through the recruiting grapevine and paid him a visit. After spending some time with him and watching him throw, Musgrave offered him a scholarship on the spot.

He arrived at the very bottom of Cal’s depth chart, spent his redshirt freshman year running the scout team and applied for the prestigious - and very hard to get into - Haas School of Business, graduating in just three years, commuting to internships in commercial real estate between two-a-days. He started 19 of the 20 games in which he appeared for the Bears, leading them to consecutive bowl berths, and when he left Berkeley at the end of 2024 and transferred to Indiana, he did so as the programme’s all-time leader in completion percentage.

You can look at Curt Cignetti’s Hoosiers offense in two ways. The more simplistic one is to say that it generally makes things easier on passers because he generates space for receivers with their splits. However, the second is that it places enormous stress on the quarterback by prioritising execution over improvisation, especially as the Hoosiers have run 86% of their offense during Cignetti’s two years out of just two personnel groupings - 73% in 11 personnel, and 13% in 12 personnel. And that 11 personnel number jumped to 78% last season.

Regardless of the splits, Mendoza has shown no issues when condensed, putting the ball into cloudy areas of the field, layering throws to attack vulnerable spots, and he can work both schemed completions, or get through his progressions. To me, one of his biggest improvements at Indiana was how much better he was both in the pocket with the pure drop-back game, and his patience. He has great physical size and a strong arm: he made a deep out hole shot against Iowa from the opposite hash which to me was the throw of the year in college football, that perhaps only six or seven NFL starters could make.

https://x.com/DP_NFL/status/1972035964588744710/video/1

He also has a quick-whip of an arm with no elongation or wasted motion. Indiana run essentially a three-tier offensive system; part one is motion and shotgun with a heavy RPO attack in which Mendoza rarely keeps it off the zone read; part two is often 1, 2 or 3 routes - quick outs, slants or ten yard outs - and he does a nice job of throwing the ball on time and positioning it away from the defender. And part three is where he turns into a more natural drop-back passer to put the ball down the field, and he throws back shoulder fades like a ten-year veteran. He stands tall in the pocket, rarely drifts too much from the midline, and whilst there’s times where you’d like to see him hit that back foot and drive the ball out, when it does come off his hand it has some real velocity, and he’s able to whip it to all areas.

Down the field he was outstanding last season: Mendoza completed 29-of-55 passes of 20 or more air yards for 955 yards, 11 TDs, just one pick and a passer rating of 130.1. He uses his feet well both to navigate to find solutions and to step into his throws, and whilst you’d never mistake him for Lamar Jackson he’s by no means a statue back there, able to extend plays by manipulating the pocket and throw off platform, or pick up yards with his feet. However, it can be more of an adventure when he’s forced to move: on throws outside the pocket in 2025, Mendoza completed just 24-of-50 for 324 yards, three TDs, one pick and a passer rating of 80.8. I thought at Cal he took too many sacks, especially when blitzed up the middle, but it’s an area of his game that saw significant growth in 2025 and he handled blitzes and sim-pressures far more comprehensively, and although he can be affected by pressure in the pocket it was extremely rare that the opposition rattled him. I like how Mendoza understands his responsibility within the protection, thus rarely taking chances with the football when things do get messy. As one draft analyst I respect said early in the season: “He knows where the easy button is to get the ball out.” And that’s a really good trait to have. However, there are times under heat where he struggles to get that timing down and can be high on balls, or he’ll take the sack.

Mendoza processes what’s in front of him really well and shows a good understanding of the changes made defensively after the snap, consistently throwing with timing and anticipation, and I thought his throw-by-throw accuracy last season was outstanding. And he was massive when it mattered most: Oregon, Penn State - it was noticeable how he dealt with the rabid 105,231 fans on the final drive against the Nittany Lions when the Hoosiers needed a TD to win, changing the protections at the line despite the incredible noise - and of course the Championship game in Miami against the Hurricanes. He’s a hand-clap snapper which will probably need to change, but overall he’s a really intriguing blend of traits: accuracy, rifle arm, polish, and timing, paired with a big brain.

Off the field he has a great, albeit slightly wacky personality, but is hugely well respected by teammates and coaches alike, and don’t be confused by the comedic Mendoza. I’m told there’s a fire and a work ethic that burns deep.

Overall he reminds me of a Jared Goff or even a Carson Palmer type, and for a Las Vegas team looking for a QB who can operate an offense predicated on timing, rhythm and throwing from within the pocket, as well as running offensive concepts on schedule and in-structure, I think he has a chance to be very good. His analytical brain will also help him grow quickly at the next level because he understands the economics of playing for another down whilst being unafraid to rip the ball when necessary.

The Low Redzone DraftBook will be out in early to mid-April. It’s the biggest edition yet with more than 400 write-ups across every position, and grades from my very top player - Ohio State’s Caleb Downs - right on down. Packed full of on-field information as well as in depth off-field and background checks and analysis, I’ll be posting more information about how to purchase a copy here, and on my Twitter account, in the coming weeks.

As for the long-form writing, I’m in the process of finishing two new stories which have been slightly sidelined by the mammoth task of completing the DraftBook. Fear not, they will be coming soon, followed by a host of others as spring turns to summer.

Your support, as ever, is appreciated.

From this post onwards however, draft content will be for subscribers only.

The NFL Draft has been pretty life-consuming for me. Back when I first got into football in the early 1980’s I found it such an alien construct: we’ve nothing like it in the UK. I was fascinated by how it worked, the jeopardy, the pressure, the process, the idea of scouting. I became obsessed. I would dig endlessly into the weeds to find out what I could - which, frankly, in 1984 wasn’t a lot. This was all pre-internet of course. So come draft night I’d sit in my bedroom listening to Armed Forces Radio and the staff sergeant tasked with reading the names of those men picked in the first round. Of course, as a Miami Dolphins fan you could absolutely guarantee the signal would drift out of range just as it came to him reading our pick. In fact, this actually happened in 1987 and 1988 and on neither occasion did I hear the names of John Bosa and Eric Kumerow read out.

In hindsight perhaps it was for the best.

Soon I was writing mock drafts and making endless notes of college players I’d seen on the TV highlights, or hear talked up on AFRTS each weekend.

Then I discovered Mel Kiper and he changed my life.

His Pre and Mid-Season Prospectus’s were everything I’d been searching for. As a 13-year old with no real access to games other than the wireless and an hour of TV highlights in the middle of the night each week, I’d found it difficult to grasp why players who were so dominant in college weren’t first rounders.

Kiper gave me focus.

Take Holy Cross two-way star Gordie Lockbaum: as a junior he rushed for 827 yards on 144 carries, caught 57 passes for 860 yards, and scored 22 touchdowns. On defense he had 46 tackles, two fumble recoveries, and one interception; he also returned 21 kickoffs for 452 yards. He finished top 5 in the Heisman two years running yet was picked 236th overall in round nine. I couldn’t understand it, but Mel could.

And he made me understand.

For decades I’ve written scouting reports and pre-draft stuff for magazines and for the last five years I’ve written the DraftBook, a comprehensive 100,000+ word odyssey on 400+ prospects, their backgrounds, injuries, arrests, peccadilloes, as well as the meaty X’s and O’s stuff. This year will be its first as The Low Redzone DraftBook, and will be available in April.

So as a starter for twenty, a mere soupçon of what’s to come…..here are my top 20 players for the 2026 NFL Draft. Not the order they’ll be taken, just the best 20 players I’ve scouted.

And if the draft isn’t your thing, fear not. I’ll be back in a few days with another long read. But if you do like it then may I suggest you check out The Low Redzone Draft Show, a podcast I do each week with the most excellent Kyle Crabbs in which we talk all things draft. It’s available as part of the 3YPC network and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

The Low Redzone Draft Show

1. JEREMIYAH LOVE - RB - NOTRE DAME

The 6’0, 214lb junior is fast, physical and explosive, a true combo-platter of size and speed who understands how to set up his blockers, keeps his shoulders square to the line of scrimmage and then hits the accelerator pedal to take it the distance from anywhere on the field. He has the burst to get to the edge on outside zone runs, the toughness to work between the tackles, and the agility to make second and third level defenders miss in the hole. I love his vision to see paper thin cutback lanes, his patience, how he tempos his runs, and how he forces business decisions from every defender who stands in his way. He’s also got super soft hands, his long stride eats up the yards and he should quickly become one of the best backs in football. The comparisons to Reggie Bush are real.

2. CALEB DOWNS - FS - OHIO STATE

The first of four Buckeyes in the top ten, Downs is the archetype for the modern NFL defender, the complete package at safety and one who can dictate how a defense plays because of what he can offer a unit. Blessed with outstanding athletic ability and deep third range to play single high, if deployed there he can shut down the middle of the field or get to the sideline to make plays on the ball. In 2025 the majority of his production came down in the box and nearer to the line of scrimmage where his instincts and tackling ability take over. But he’s shown in that man or in the slot how he can carry receivers, tight ends and backs in coverage. A read-and-react weapon, he should have much the same impact on a defense that Jalen Pitre does in Houston or Quentin Lake does with the Rams.

3. SONNY STYLES - LB - OHIO STATE

Styles has quite the football lineage: his father was a 3rd round pick of the Falcons and spent six seasons in the NFL, winning a Super Bowl with the Rams. One of the youngest players in the draft, he reclassified in high school and started college as a 17-year-old five-star prospect and the #4 overall recruit in the 2022 class, meaning he’ll play almost all of 2026 as a 21-year old. Named after Sonny Corleone from The Godfather, he began his career in the secondary but transitioned to LB in 2024. He’s the prototypical modern second level defender possessing rare length, range, twitch, versatility, tackling ability, FBI and downhill explosion. A true force in the run game, he possesses significant pass-rush juice - often as a nickel blitzer - and a natural feel for coverages where he still moves like a safety. He needs to improve his eye discipline but he’s an elite athlete - many people thought he’d be a top basketball prospect - he’s super strong and twice featured on Bruce Feldman’s Freaks List.

4. ARVELL REESE - EDGE/LB - OHIO STATE

One of the most fascinating prospects in the draft, Reese burst onto the scene this season and turned in a series of high performances, vaulting himself first into the R1 conversation and then into the top 10, in large part because of his terrifying skillset. He has the ability to play as both a stack LB reminiscent of Green Bay’s Edgerrin Cooper or as a full time edge with a Micah Parsons-type ceiling. A physical specimen, he just moves differently, flashing elite diagnostic skills, range, quickness and the rare ability to accelerate, decelerate and then accelerate again without ceding ground. As an edge defender he’s a uniquely tough out because he’s so powerful and although he lacks a dedicated and consistent pass rush plan, he can bend and close or set a hard edge in the run game. Teams will need to have a plan for him, but the sky’s the limit.

5. REUBEN BAIN - EDGE - MIAMI

Known as ‘The Hurricane,’ a nickname passed down by his father because of his physicality and tenacity, inspired by the story of the wrongfully imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter, Bain has a Sunday frame: he’s super thick in the lower half to the point where he looks like a DT. He fires off the ball low, consistently winning the leverage battle and he’s super violent and heavy handed. Combine that with burst and overwhelming power, great hand strength and a 60-minute motor, and you’ve got a really good player, a 2026 Jared Verse if you will. Sure, he may lack the twitch of some in the class, but he can corner and change direction extremely well for a man his size. He’s also an outstanding run defender who can reset the line of scrimmage, is able to easily shed blocks to redirect and then pursue to the ball. Teams will love how he has a pass rush plan for each snap and how they’ll be able to move him around the front: he’s such a good stunt player that I’m sure he’ll get kicked inside on 3rd downs to score some easy wins as he collapses the pocket inside out. He has short arms but he’s long on talent.

6. FERNANDO MENDOZA - QB - INDIANA

A hugely likeable kid who was such a bookworm in high school that some schools actually stopped recruiting him because they questioned whether he really wanted to play football. He originally committed to Yale to study economics and figured he’d have a Ryan Fitzpatrick-style path to the NFL. But just before signing day one of Cal’s QB commits flipped to UCLA which left them short a passer. Bill Musgrave, then the Golden Bears’ offensive coordinator, paid him a visit and offered him on the spot. After working his way up from the bottom of Cal’s depth chart he became a high level starter, transferred to Indiana and won the Heisman. His game is really translatable: there’s a distinct pre-and-post snap understanding, he knows how and when to distribute the ball, he plays on time, can manipulate the pocket to buy time, and he knows where the get-out button is when needed. He’s also super comfortable working the middle of the field, able to hit receivers in stride on in-breaking routes and he has a really strong arm: check out his hole shot down the right sideline against Iowa this past season which only a small handful of NFL QBs could make. He’s also deadly in the redzone with 53 touchdowns since 2023 and only one pick.

7. DAVID BAILEY - EDGE - TEXAS TECH

Pass rusher remains one of the four cornerstone positions in the modern game, and the ability to consistently get home with four is often the difference between teams that win and teams that don’t. Bailey has an almost impossible get-off, a pure explosion of speed and balance that immediately puts a tackle in turmoil. This is a super traitsy dip-and-ripper whose footwork and stride when closing on his prey are as impressive as his snap quickness. In fact Bailey’s pressure rate over the past three seasons is an astounding 22.1% on 653 rushes. Compare that with 18% for All Pro Will Anderson, 18.3% for the 2024 NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year, Jared Verse, and 21.7% for last year’s 3rd overall pick Abdul Carter. He’s no one trick pony either: Bailey converts speed to power as well as anyone in the draft using heavy hands to stun opponents, and he became a much improved run defender in 2025. This is the best pure pass rusher in the draft, a tremendously sudden QB hunter.

8. FRANCIS MAUIGOA - RT - MIAMI

A starter on the right side since his freshman season, Mauigoa is as clean as they come and has put out some dominant tape during Miami’s run to the National Championship game. At 6’6, 315lbs he gets off the ball in a hurry, he can chase - and win - first contact, or sit in his stance and get an upper hand with powerful punches. He displays great strength, balance, and movement when getting out to the second level and can drive defenders off the ball, rolling his hips through contact and sealing defenders. He does good work elbow to elbow on combo blocks, he passes off extremely well, can torque players straight out of the club, and is comfortable using his athleticism to work rushers up the arc and past their landmarks. I’d be shocked if he isn’t a very early starter and a high level contributor. However, should it not work out at tackle, he has the physical chops to be a dominant guard.

9. CARNELL TATE - WR - OHIO STATE

The first of three wideouts in the top 20, Tate is the next cab off the Ohio State production line of great receivers. A big bodied Z who reminds me of Tee Higgins, he’s a fluid mover who plays fast, is a tremendous route runner and hands catcher who can weigh in as a perimeter run blocker. Not blessed with elite speed, Tate is nonetheless quick and he wins as a technician with good releases, great body control, terrific speed tempo and hip sink into his routes, and he exploits leverage through his stems brilliantly to consistently gain separation. What I really appreciate - and it’s a hallmark of a Brian Hartline-coached player - is his landmark identification and precision: if he’s supposed to be 18-yards on the left hash, he’ll be at exactly 18-yards on the left hash. There’s a week in, week out consistency to his game that teams will love as he routes corners up. He has excellent hands - no drops as a senior - is a hard out physically for any DB, and constantly wins above the rim - he converted 12/14 (85.7%) contested catch opportunities in his final season and was 22/32 (68/8%) in his career.

10. MAKAI LEMON - WR - USC

I won’t lie, I love this kid’s tape. And the modern game really values what he brings to the table: this is a player who understands leverage and how to get open consistently. A high IQ receiver who thrives in a position where reduced splits and routes that distribute from all over are King. He has the ability to read coverages pre-and-post snap, to pick up significant chunks of YAC, and to weigh in the perimeter run game as a blocker. The 2025 Biletnikoff Award winner is Amon-Ra St Brown 2.0, a juiced up hands catcher with just two career drops and a constant chain mover for the Trojans even though defences knew he was getting the ball. I love how he absorbs contact and turns into a running back with the ball in his hands, showing elements of Ja’Marr Chase in the open field and eating up yards. Lemon is intentional, a hugely coachable chain moving creator with some special traits and the mentality of a winner.

11. MANSOOR DELANE - CB - LSU

Not as big or as long as some corners in the class, Delane is a former high school wrestler who displayed some serious stickiness throughout 2025 and was absolutely dominant in the early weeks of the campaign, notably against Clemson and Florida. Scouts I’ve spoken to love the fact he’s so scheme diverse: he put himself into the NFL’s consciousness in the Hokies zone scheme, then thrived in Blake Baker’s man match system in the Bayou. He possesses terrific instincts, range and diagnostic skills - Delane was a safety for much off his prep career. He also has a strong football IQ which shows up in a rich grasp for reading concepts and route combinations. He’s an extremely fluid mover, he changes direction with no wasted movement in his hips, and he’s explosive in transition, able to click and close quickly and reach in to disrupt at the catch point. Delane has fast feet and a fast brain and they’re always in unison. He’s patient, rarely opening the gate to cede catches, and in run support he can come downhill fast and can crack-and-replace.

12. JERMOD MCCOY - CB - TENNESSEE

This is something of a projection because whilst McCoy is a supremely talented man cover corner, he tore his ACL last January and missed all of 2025. However, his tape from 2024 is truly tantalising stuff: he’s athletic, he stays in phase no matter what a receiver throws at him, he glides as a mover, he can mirror and match, and his ability to click and close is outstanding. He also possesses elite ball skills, great FBI - watch how he consistently narrows the throwing window by forcing his man to the boundary - and reactive athleticism. His Combine medicals will be important as will be his ‘football shape’. But remember, multiple players sat out of the 2020 season because of the pandemic including Ja’Marr Chase and it had little impact on where they landed and how they subsequently played.

13. JORDYN TYSON - WR - ARIZONA STATE

Speaking of Ja’Marr Chase, here’s a player who gives me Chase-like vibes. As with McCoy before him, Tyson would be higher were it not for a series of injuries which have affected his career. But make no mistake, this is a super talented receiver who can devastate from inside or out with his route running and big play ability. However, that chequered injury history will give some teams concern having missed significant time over the last four seasons with a torn ACL, MCL and PCL, a broken collarbone, and a significant hamstring problem. The brother of Cleveland Cavaliers star Jaylon Tyson, Jordan is a tall long strider and a good route runner, able to shift defenders with an excellent use of head, shoulder and body fakes, and he’s a sharp cutter. Tyson can consistently reach above or behind him to reel in the ball and then turn into a runner very quickly, and he’s nimble enough to evade tacklers to pick up yards after the grab. He catches a lot of balls from the slot or at the line of scrimmage, but he’s not a one trick pony and he can work down the field, notably on deep in-breakers to the middle of the field, or along the sideline. He’s had an issue with drops - a 10.5% drop rate through his three years - but this is an explosive playmaker.

14. AKHEEM MESIDOR - DE - MIAMI

Every time I watched Mesidor this season as he terrified offensive linemen I kept asking myself why he wasn’t in the R1 mix. Sure, he’s going to be 25 before the draft and there’s a history of shoulder issues, but he’s been as dominant as any edge player in college football over the last 12 months. Explosive with his get-off both inside and out, he has the ability to get his pads low and bull rush his man back into throwing lanes from either the end or DT spots, and when inside his rushes are clean, able to force the QB to shift platforms. For a man of his size he has some bend to get to the outside shoulder and there’s some flex in the ankles for him to corner when rushing off the edge . But the best part of his game is the bag of tricks he possesses: two-hand swipes, cross chops, push/pulls, swims and clubs which he uses to great effect. Mesidor is also a fine run defender, a full gas, no brakes type who reminds me a little of Saints stud Cam Jordan.

15. KELDRIC FAULK - DE - AUBURN

Faulk is a physical freak, a long, Sunday-framed true junior with a raw, hybrid skillset that’s everything you’re looking for in the modern game. This is a combo platter of size, speed, power, length and the ability to win in multiple ways from various spots and techniques - he lines up from shaded on the nose to a wide 9 pure edge rusher. Sure, he’s just 20 and so some of the nuance of his game needs honing. But the raw skillset is that of a player who looks like a top fifteen pick. I love how relentless he is, how disruptive he can be, and how smooth and athletic he is as a mover - his HS head coach believes he’d have been a Division 1 hoops prospect if he’d focused on basketball rather than football. Despite a drop in sack production in 2025 from 7 to 2, he should quickly become a contributor as an elite early down run player who can stun a tackle with his power, able to stop an opponent in their tracks to work inside or out, taking advantage of the space he creates with that initial punch. I love how he can win from every gap, and his understanding of the fundamentals along with his outstanding physical profile will mean he’s in high demand come draft day.

16. MONROE FREELING - LT - GEORGIA

In a class short on great left tackles, Freeling is a player who could really develop into a high level starter, an easy moving 6’7, 315lb behemoth with outstanding athletic ability who turned in some dominant showings for the Bulldogs in 2025. Sure, he’s a little raw but for someone of his limited experience he possesses the technique of an NFL LT on lockdown: he plays with great get-off, good bend, excellent pad level, he wins leverage battles time and again and he has the heavy hands and grip strength to move dudes around with ease. He has a strong outside hand to protect up the arc and he moves his feet really well, showing real comfort in space. He might also turn in a Combine performance that puts him significantly higher than sixteenth when all’s said and done.

17. SPENCER FANO - OT - UTAH

Although you could argue that Fano hasn’t perhaps made the giant strides we might have expected over the last 12 months, there’s certainly something to be said about his consistency and the fact he could probably man all five positions on the offensive line without a worry. In fact I spoke to one NFC West scout who said he could potentially make the same move as Graham Barton who was a LT at Duke and is now the C for the Buccaneers. A former LT himself, he’s played on the right for the past two seasons and has given up just one sack. Although his arms are shorter than ideal, he’s got quick feet, he’s well synched up from top to toe and his recovery speed and heavy hands keep his QB upright. He’s smart, athletic and another with a strong outside hand. He’s also explosive in the zone run game and looks great blocking and moving in space.

18. CASHIUS HOWELL - EDGE - TEXAS A&M

I thought Steelers edge rusher Nick Herbig began to turn into one of the game’s elite pass rush threats in 2025, despite his slightly strange usage, and Howell’s game has many similarities. He does have short arms which may well knock him when it comes to the Combine, but this is a tremendously bendy speed-to-power rusher with a smart football brain who was borderline dominant at points in 2025 and who began the season with back-to-back-to-back sacks against Utah State on first, second and third down. Despite the arm length, his hand work is extremely good and he’s so bursty off the edge, able to attack inside the breast plate or use his trademark spin move to get into the backfield. I like that he can win outside and in, how he mixes up his pass rush moves, and the elite quickness he has to close the gap to the QB for the takedown. He also demonstrates a real edge to his game, a trash talker of some repute who’s known to bark at his opponents when he’s really in his pass rush bag. Howell can be overwhelmed in the run game and he won’t be for everyone’s tastes. But this is a relentless player with three straight elite pass rushing production seasons.

19. DEVIN MOORE - CB - FLORIDA

When I first watched Moore’s tape early in the season I was blown away by what I saw. I kept going back to it week after week but was worried I was off the mark because there was nary a mention of him anywhere. However, it became impossible to keep him off this list because his tape is so good. He just looks the part of a lockdown corner and the ability he has is tantalising. But the problem is he’s not been able to stay healthy. When he is on the field Moore brings an an outstanding combination of size and speed - in eighth-grade, he ran one of the fastest 100m times in the state, 11.0 seconds flat, which would have won a district title in track that year. He’s long and physical with smooth hips, and he’s really scheme diverse. When he’s been on the field he’s been lockdown: In 2024 in 121 coverage snaps he allowed just six receptions on 13 targets while logging two interceptions and two PBUS. In 2023, he graded as Florida’s best defender in coverage allowing only five receptions for 30 yards with an interception and three PBU’s. A safety in HS, there were times last season where he rotated post snap to play single high - there’s a play against Texas where comes out of over the top coverage to the centre field and runs with the post. But as Arch Manning fires to the corner, he flips his hips like he’s doing a Combine drill, gets to the sideline and high points the ball for a superb pick.

20. EMMANUEL MCNEIL-WARREN - FS - TOLEDO

This may surprise some people but this is a position versatile safety who definitely falls into the category marked: “JUST DRAFT GOOD FOOTBALL PLAYERS”. He’s long, super physical and has played everywhere, an alley running missile who’s rangy, instinctive, agile and explosive with a nose for the big play - he’s got 11 forced fumbles in his career with the Rockets. Believe me, McNeil-Warren will come down into the box and at 6’3, 209 he will hurt you. His eyes are as good as anyones in the class and to watch him shade across gaps and make plays in space, to redirect tight ends and backs and make plays on the ball can be like watching a player who was just in the offensive huddle. I’ve seen some comparisons to Justin Simmons and they’re justified. A zone team is going to love him.

The message from Sue Hall is simple. Written in thick black ink on light blue paper, carefully folded at the bottom it reads simply:

“Simon, I am Coach Bowden’s assistant. He will be touring England for 1st time in May ’95 - do you have any brochures on what is very special to see - Only there for 3 days - If you do and can send to me would be greatly appreciated - Sue”

There is a smiley face drawn after her name and attached is her business card held to the thin paper with a single, now rusty staple. The accompanying letter is dated August 17th, 1994. I was 20-years old and had just graduated from university, two months away from starting my first job at the BBC and using up the last days of my final summer before full-time employment began, sending letters to my pen-friend in Tallahassee.

You see, the note from Sue Hall wasn’t a surprise. I’d been writing to her boss, one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, for a while now. And faithfully, Bobby Bowden, winner of 377 games, including two National Championships, and head football coach at Florida State for thirty-three years, would always write back.

When Bobby Bowden died in the early hours of August 8th, 2021 at the age of 91 surrounded by his wife and six children, in the home he’d moved into when he was hired by FSU from West Virginia 45-years earlier, he left behind one of the great coaching legacies of all time. His record ranked second all-time in major college football history behind only Joe Paterno, and fourth all-time across all divisions. He may not have won as many National Championships as Nick Saban or Woody Hayes, but few coaches have had such an impact on the game of football. He turned Florida State from a programme that had won only four games over the previous three seasons into a national powerhouse, out-recruiting everyone else by winning over parents with his folksy charm and easy nature, and developing their sons into All Americans, major award winners and NFL superstars.

“When I was playing at Alabama the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Auburn,’ he recalled in “The Bowden Way”, his book on leadership. “When I was at West Virginia they read ‘Beat Pitt.’ When I came to FSU the bumper stickers read ‘Beat Anybody.’”

That’s exactly what Bowden set about doing. His Seminoles were unbeaten in bowl games from 1982 to 1995, and between 1987 and 2000 he guided them to 14 consecutive 10-win seasons and top-five finishes in the AP poll. And he did so in an era where college football was significantly more competitive than it is now: Penn State, Miami, Nebraska, BYU, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia Tech, Tennessee, Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC and Texas all won National Championships during the golden years of his tenure.

It was that level of parity that attracted me to the game in the mid-1980’s. I’d become obsessed with the NFL Draft and how it worked, and sought to delve further into how and why players became prospects. I’d spend hundreds of hours listening with my ear pressed to a silver radio cassette deck as games were transmitted via the Armed Forces Radio Network, the lifeblood of my teenage years. For some people in Europe it was Emperor Rosko on Radio Luxembourg, or John Peel’s sessions with David Bowie or Joy Division. For me it was the relaxing tones of the staff sergeants linking between drives with news from around the globe, before handing back to the Westwood One commentary teams transporting me to South Bend, Madison, Ann Arbor, and Bowden’s Tallahassee.

I’d been drawn to the Seminoles by the same measures that those prospective parents had used to judge whether to hand their sons to an athletic programme for the best part of four years: Bowden’s personality. His dry sense of humour and down-home charm in post-game interviews dripped through the wireless. I was fascinated by his country-boy ways: his use of the word “dadgummit” to emphasise a point whether good or bad enchanted me. As a kid growing up in rural southern England I hadn’t heard that expression before. But I also loved the fact that his home phone number was listed in the local directory, and that fans would leave memorabilia in his carport for him to sign - which he faithfully did - and then they’d swing back round and pick it up.

So it gave me an idea.

For a couple of years I’d been writing to the Sports Information offices of major colleges requesting media guides. Most schools would send them through, and my little bedroom was full of these thick books of facts and history that I’d pore over at night, listening to radio plays, news of troop manoeuvres, or messages home from soldiers in far-flung lands on AFRTS. Some schools would include photographs of players which I’d blu-tac to my bedroom wall: Trevor Cobb of Rice, Gordie Lockbaum of Holy Cross, Tony Rice of Notre Dame, and Andy Kelly of Tennessee to name but a few. But when I discovered that fans could drop things off at Coach Bowden’s house I figured he might just be fascinated enough by a letter from a teenage English kid to respond. I’d been watching the Noles play each week for years thanks to a company in Germany called Pontel. For an annual subscription, they’d send you a VHS copy of the previous week’s game from any college team of your choosing. So, every Friday, six days after they’d played, my VHS would arrive in the mail and after my parents went to bed, I’d sit and watch FSU, making notes on potential draft picks and remembering plays I’d heard live on the radio.

By the late autumn of 1993, full of the knowledge of players like quarterback Charlie Ward, wide receivers Tamarick Vanover and Kez McCorvey, and freshman sensation running back Warrick Dunn, I penned a letter to Bobby Bowden thanking him for the season and wishing him good luck against Nebraska in the upcoming National Championship game. I thought it too informal to send it to his home so instead mailed it to the FSU athletic department, wondering if it would ever reach its destination on the other side of the world.

Of course, I can’t quite remember what I wrote in that first letter but it must have been outlining my fandom, how I watched and listened to the games each week, and my appreciation for his genius. And I knew he liked to send letters - I’d seen one he’d sent his Seminole players in 1977 - so what did I have to lose.

But days turned to weeks and there was no reply. 1993 became 1994, the Seminoles beat the Cornhuskers 18-16 to claim college football’s crown, and my 20th birthday came and went with no response from Tallahassee.

Then on the morning of February 1st, 1994, a large yellow envelope arrived at the house with a big ‘FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY’ address label and a sticky note to say that it had been sent from “Coach Bobby Bowden”. Underneath his printed name were the words “SCALP ‘EM SEMINOLES”. The envelope was sellotaped and had a little gold embossed fastener. I carefully unstuck the tape and pinched the fastener to open the envelope, my heart beating just a little faster. Inside was a single piece of white paper, dated January 25th, 1994, the day before my 20th birthday, with the following message:

“Dear Simon,

Sorry about the delay in answering, but the mail has just been overwhelming - first, because of Christmas and then the Orange Bowl. However, I enjoyed and do appreciate your kind note and want to thank you for it and your support; it means so much to us here at Florida State University. Especially when it comes from a fan as far away as England. That’s a long way from Tallahassee! Glad you get to enjoy the games and root for the Seminoles.

Again, thanks for your kind words. My best to you, and take care of yourself during what I’m sure will be a happy and prosperous new year.

Sincerely,

Bobby Bowden.”

Between the ‘Sincerely’ and his name he’d signed it ‘Coach Bowden’, his signature light and loopy on the paper. Alongside the letter was a copy of the 1994 Orange Bowl media guide.

I was beyond elated for multiple reasons, but the most important one was this: It’s hard to convey how far away America felt as a teenager growing up in England. My parents were working class and money wasn’t easy to come by. A trip to the United States seemed about as likely as a rocket ship to the moon. I had an old atlas of the world and I’d gently and carefully mapped out the route I’d take should I ever make it, starting in Florida and circumnavigating the entire country, so I knew my Manhattan, KN from my Manhattan, NY, and my Kansas from my Arkansas. But Bowden’s letter made an idea that felt absolutely unattainable, real. It turned the voices on the radio into something tangible, and it brought to life those pictures on my wall, of Lockbaum and Cobb, Kelly and Rice. Decades later I would stand on the sidelines in the fourth quarter of massive games in the SEC, or in NFL locker rooms talking alone with players like Julio Jones, Alvin Kamara and Jarvis Landry. Head coaches like Mike McDaniel and Sean Payton would praise my questions in press conferences, and Aaron Rodgers would come up to me in the Packers locker room and pat my chest, thanking me for my questions, or smile when he saw me at games. He even made a point of shaking my hand and asking how I was on a tree-lined walkway when it was just me and him and the writer Ollie Connolly and a Packers press officer.

That response from Florida State’s head coach made all of what came later possible.

So I decided to write back to him.

Over the course of the next five years, Bowden and I would exchange many letters. They started as complimentary congratulations from a fan but quickly became long-distance Q&A sessions with me asking one of the greatest coaches of all time a series of in-depth questions about his team, his life and his career. Each letter would be hand written by me and sent off, then faithfully returned a few weeks later from Tallahassee with every question answered fully, page after long page, often with interesting and informative detail, each envelope containing pictures or memorabilia, business cards or bumper stickers. In one there was a photo of Bowden coming onto the field, which I suspect was taken by Sue Hall herself. As I sit here now and read through them three decades later, there’s so much that’s fascinating and insightful:

On running back Warrick Dunn who would go on to star in the NFL: “His one drawback is he’s not very big - only 5’9, 175 pounds. We know that we cannot just give him the ball over and over and over. He is just not big enough to take that pounding.”

On Wide Right 1 where the #1 ranked Seminoles missed a 34-yard field goal with 29-seconds left when trailing 17-16 to #2 Miami: “In my view it should have been a “gimmie” kick. All losses hurt but I think the loss to Miami in 1991 hurt the most.”

On the shoe scandal where eight FSU players were accused of taking part in an after-hours shopping spree at a sporting goods store: “I believe we got off to a slow start because of it. We never could get the continuity up on the offensive line that we wanted and I think a lot of it is because we had so many of our offensive linemen suspended anywhere from two, to three, to four games.”

On a future superstar in 1995: “We signed four outstanding freshmen receivers we hope can help us next year. One of them, Peter Warrick, many think is the probably the second best receiver in the country.”

And then three years later on Warrick: “I think Peter might have as much or more talent than any receiver we’ve had here, but he is going to have to be more consistent and disciplined.”

And finally on Warrick in 1999: “Peter had a great year for us. I will say this about him, I think he’s the most dangerous receiver we’ve had at Florida State. The most dangerous kid I’ve ever coached.”

On his rival Steve Spurrier: “Coach Spurrier speaks whatever he feels, not being concerned how it will sound in the paper or what effect it will have on anybody else. He probably needs to be a little bit more guarded in what he says because sometimes if you want to say something, it’s best not to say it anyway.”

On his son Terry resigning from Auburn in 1998: “I was really hurt. I’m not mad at Auburn, I’m mad at the people who drove him out.”

On Randy Moss’s rookie season in the NFL. (Moss had signed with Florida State in 1995 but sat out the season after transferring from Notre Dame, only to fail a drugs test whilst on probation forcing Bowden to release him from his scholarship): “He continues to astonish me. When he came to FSU and I watched him practice, I felt like we really had a superstar, there was no way he could miss. All he had to do was behave himself.”

Bowden would sign off each letter by imploring me to “come see us if you’re ever over this way”. I clearly had invited him to do the same if he ever came to England because one letter finishes: “Thanks for the invitation to come visit with you. If I’m ever over that way I will. I would love to talk to you and I hope you keep selling American Football to the British.”

I stopped sending the letters in 1999, figuring that after five years he’d probably had enough of being interrogated. I often wonder if he ever missed the back and forth with this strange English pen-friend he’d had across multiple seasons. In the aftermath of his death, I wondered why I’d never made it to Tallahassee clutching a bunch of the letters and asking if he remembered me.

I also had no idea whether Bowden made it to England for those three days. I do remember that I sent Sue Hall an envelope with brochures on Bath and Stratford and London. But whether he made it or not, I just didn’t know.

So a few days ago, just after Christmas and before New Year I decided to try and find Sue Hall thirty-plus years on to see if she remembered if he ever got on a plane bound for my country.

I called FSU’s Alumni Association to which Hall was inducted into its prestigious Circle of Gold, but the answering machine told me they were closed until January 5th. I messaged Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Charlie Ward who I’d interviewed previously, but he too was unable to help. Then I struck gold: although I couldn’t find a directory listing for her, I discovered a newspaper article with a quote from a member of the football staff who’d been hired by Hall in the 1980’s: athletics administrator Carol Moore. So on December 30th I fired off an email to her. Early on New Years Eve I got a reply.

Hi Simon! Great to hear from you. Here is Sue’s email address. I know she will be excited to hear from you! Sue still volunteers in the athletic department as a greeter at the front desk in the lobby. You would never know she was 90 years old – hasn’t changed a bit and is still as active as ever.

Take care and Happy New Year!

Carol

Within minutes I’d fired off an email to Hall.

And then I waited.

It took less than half a day for her to reply. She thanked me for my email and apologised for her memory which she said wasn’t as good as she’d like it to be any more. Hall then informed me that she remembered Coach Bowden travelling to “many different countries while coaching and after retirement.” She mentioned a coaching session with a German team, along with a trip to Normandy - he’d been a World War II obsessive since his early teenage years when he listened to radio reports of the conflict from his bed after suffering a bout of rheumatic fever. In fact in later life he would recall that his most memorable lunch conversation came on a trip to Germany with the the mayor of Stuttgart, Manfred Rommel, son of one of Hitler’s generals, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel.

Hall attached some documents to pore over, and told me that if I had any other questions to be sure to send them over.

I had just one: did she remember typing up and posting the letters to me, and did she remember the holiday note?

Less than two hours later I got my answer.

Good morning Simon,

That note is definitely my hand writing and I am sure that I typed the letters. Coach Bowden received so much mail it was unbelievable. He did all his correspondence in a dictaphone. I would take the tape home at night to type up all his letters. No time to do it in the office as phone constantly rang. So I feel sure I typed the letters and mailed them to you.

Blessings to you Simon.

Sue

I read Sue Hall’s email through a few times and smiled. Strangely, I felt tears well up in my eyes. I’ll be 52 on January 26th, 2026, almost thirty-two years to the day since I received that first letter from Bobby Bowden. So much has happened in my life since then, most notably the death of my father in a car accident in 2004. The thought of Hall posting me those letters took me back to being a teenager in my bedroom in the house I grew up in when my dad was still alive and where life felt simpler.

In the end I have no idea if Coach Bowden made it to England or not. Frankly it doesn’t really matter. But if he did then I can absolutely imagine him wandering wide-eyed around the underground bunker complex in central London that is the Cabinet War Rooms where Britain’s government operated during World War Two. Or out at Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and his team of codebreakers managed to decipher the machinations of Enigma, the highly effective code encryption machine used by the Nazis, which turned the tide of the war.

What I do know with some certainty is that for five years he thrilled me with letters and packages that gave me a unique insight into what made Robert Cleckler Bowden such a special human being.

He also made football and the people who played it, real to me.

He changed everything.

At half time of the game that Bowden told me was the most disappointing of his career - the 17-16 loss to Miami - the #1 ranked Seminoles led #2 Miami 10-7. As his players got ready to go back out, he silenced them before giving them a final instruction. “You realise we’re just thirty minutes away,” he said. “We need somebody to make a great play. We need somebody who’ll suck it up and go get that passer, somebody to make that great catch”.

“We need a hero, men. We need a hero.”

Bobby Bowden was my hero.

When Navy’s offensive Swiss Army knife, Eli Heidenreich hears the first down call from his quarterback, Blake Horvath, he knows the play has a chance to go. As he lines up in the slot to the right of the formation at his own 40 and sees how Air Force are playing it, with nine in the box and two safeties just eight yards from the line of scrimmage, he’s sure of it.

Tie ball game, 24 apiece, early fourth quarter. Play clock running……13, 12, 11……tick tick tick.

“Just make a play, Eli”.

On the grassy knoll that is Memorial Plaza - the standing-room-only section behind the endzone at Navy Marine Corps Memorial Stadium - some seventy yards away from the action, Eli’s father David is making his way through the crowd to find a group of college buddies who’ve come to watch the game. A notoriously nervous viewer, he’s paced his way from the opposite side of the field where his wife is sat, barely able to look at the action. His son already has a career best five catches for 139 yards and two touchdowns, including an 80-yard score, but he knows if the Midshipmen are to go to 5-0, someone has to make another big play.

10, 9, 8……tick, tick, tick.

As David gets to the front of the stand and finds his friends, Horvath sets receiver Brandon Chatman in motion from left to right and takes the snap. He first fakes the jet sweep to Chatman, and then a fake toss to the up-back, Jackson Gutierrez, before rolling to his right and pulling up. Both safeties have taken the cheese and suddenly there’s a Navy player running wide open down the field.

In an instant, David Heidenreich realises it’s his son.

“Just make a play, Eli”

When the ball hits Heidenreich’s hands at the Air Force twenty-two, there’s six yards between him and the last defender. He gathers himself and runs in untouched as the stands explode. After slowing down on the bright blue and yellow checkerboard of the endzone he suddenly spots a face he recognises screaming at him from the knoll, and his body language changes completely. The 6’0, 206lb snipe regains his speed, runs through the back of the endzone and Lambeau-leaps into the arms of the man who told him unequivocally that he should stick to football when the doubts came and the offers didn’t.

Father and son, together again.

When Eli was growing up his parents used to joke that he was ‘always smiling and always sweaty’. A joyful, super-active child, he was sensible and even-keeled, often eschewing nights out with friends to stay home and watch movies, or hang out with his family. “He wasn’t much of a gallivanter,” David Heidenreich tells me on his drive to work on a cold Tuesday morning in December, as he heads for Pittsburgh’s north shore. “He was so focused on sports, always self-directed I might add. He really didn’t have time for going out. It was just practice, practice, practice. And he loved football so much. I’d often say to him during the baseball season that we should go out and work on his hitting, but he just wanted to head to the field with his high school quarterback and run routes.”

But football wasn’t his only love, and herein lay a problem for the Heidenreich’s: when your son is playing lacrosse, soccer, hockey, baseball, and football, as well as competing as a downhill ski-racer…….something’s got to give.

Except it wasn’t going to be football. And it wasn’t going to be hockey.

And it sure as hell wasn’t going to be ski-ing.

“If the NFL dream wasn’t on the horizon,” laughs David, “I think he’d be spending next spring in the Alps!”

Turns out there’s pretty good skiing about an hour from the family home in Pittsburgh. And the Heidenreich’s made the most of it. “All my siblings grew up ski racing,” says Eli from his dorm room in historic Bancroft Hall, home for the entire brigade of 4,000 midshipmen and containing more than 4.8 miles of corridors. “Every weekend in the winter dad would drive us up to our local mountain and I’d race slalom and giant slalom. And I was solid. Always kind of top end of the guys in the state.”

Although he’s rarely been on the slopes as a collegian for fear of injury, save for a trip to Wyoming with his Navy teammates last year, when Heidenreich’s playing days are over there’s little doubt about what awaits him.

“Oh when I’m done playing football, skiing’s going to be my number one hobby. No doubt.”

Trouble is, that may not be for a while.

There was always going to be a lot more to his sporting life than just skiing for Eli Heidenreich though, no matter how much he loved the rush of the slopes and the danger of the giant slalom. As he got older his focus turned more seriously to the hockey rink and the gridiron. But he was significantly undersized for football and the lure of the ice was strong, in part because of a fear that he simply wouldn’t be able to match-up physically playing the sport he adored.

“I’d say the time in my life where my size affected me the most was when I was trying to play football in middle school,” he says. “Kind of that period where kids are starting to hit their growth spurts, puberty and whatnot. Me? I was still kind of a little sprout! The way it worked that year was the seventh graders combined teams with the eighth graders. So we were playing against all eighth grade teams from surrounding communities, and I just remember going against what felt like grown men when I was still a child. I mean seriously, I was a little kid.”

As the frustrations grew, so did the doubts. “Screw the size,” thought Heidenreich. “Am I even good at football?”

“We’re notoriously late bloomers,” says his father as he sits in traffic waiting for a stop light to change. “And Eli’s not wrong, he was small compared to his peers. The problem was he was also really talented, but his size was holding him back. I mean, I could show you a photo of him and his teammates back then and he’s…….he’s small.”

To convince a high school sophomore to trust that his body will catch up with his skill-set when he’s being consistently overpowered by bigger, stronger players every time he steps on the field was a test for man and boy. While David wanted Eli to persevere with his first love of football, his son’s thoughts drifted back to the ice.

“I still loved football but that was my least favourite year of playing. My dad always set my expectations in the sense that he told me to stay patient and that down the line I’d catch up with everyone, that I just kind of had to push through it a little bit. But it didn’t make it any easier.”

The knock-on effect for Eli was confusion over where his life was going. Because all he’d ever really wanted to do was play ball.

“I think the size thing was a real factor in him not being heavily recruited,” says David. “He started his sophomore year at corner and also got some reps at receiver but there were just kids way bigger than him and he couldn’t make any sort of breakthrough. It’s hard to watch your son who loves this game so much, struggling to come to terms with the fact that his body might let him down.”

But there was something else drawing Eli’s attention away from football to hockey, beyond the frustration over his lack of size.

A family connection.

Mark Heidenreich was born in Pittsburgh in August of 1961. He grew up about 20 miles east in the small town of Monroeville and spent much of his youth playing endless hours of driveway hockey, hiking through the woods, or just sitting out back listening to ball games on an old wireless with his dog, Murky. He had three brothers, John, Chris and David and although the Heidenreich boys all loved sport, Mark was the athlete.

A standout left wing, he played hockey in Canada for a couple of years before getting injured and returning to the Steel City. Although he transitioned to the aeronautics industry where he became a mechanic, the joy of being on the ice and the idea of what might have been never quite left him.

“Yeah, my uncle was a really good hockey player,” says Eli. “He didn’t quite make it to the NHL but he was on the pipeline teams for the Penguins and things. He was pretty damn good.”

The pair were close, and following in Uncle Mark’s footsteps was a legitimate possibility for Heidenreich. So there came a fork in the road moment, where father and son were forced to discuss which direction they should go. One with nuance, but also an underlying sense of finality:

Try and make it as a hockey player, or stick to football.

“Eli always had the athletic talent that my brother had,” says David as he waits for a construction lorry to clear the road in front of him. “But hockey is such a commitment for a family. When I was a kid I was forever getting driven all over because Mark had practice or games. So Eli and I sat down and I said to him, ‘Look, if we do hockey and that’s what you want then that’s great. But we have to give up some other things.’

‘Other things’ meant football.

“It’s really funny because this year specifically I’ve been thinking a lot about how impactful that conversation and the subsequent decision were on my life at such a young age,” says Eli. “Because I remember him asking me, and it was after a hockey practice. He basically said, ‘Hey, there’s two ways you can do this. You can keep playing hockey, or you can start playing football’. And it was tough. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I couldn’t walk away from football. I mean, I grew up loving the Steelers and I always wanted to play in the NFL, so I made a decision to go with ball. Of course, at that time I had no idea where it would take me and sometimes I wonder where I’d be now if I’d have chosen to keep playing hockey.”

But in the end, father and son stuck to football.

Mt. Lebanon High School is located on 26 acres in the western Pennsylvania hills. Home to the Blue Devils, it was a filming location for the Tim Robbins political satire movie, Bob Roberts, and its alumni include the former professional wrestler Kurt Angle, and the Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

It was here on Lebanon’s turf field with its striking blue and yellow endzone’s where Eli Heidenreich finally began to see the benefits of the patience his father had pleaded he show. Suddenly, his body started changing drastically as he grew four inches and added 30lbs in just a few months. A physique to finally match his skill-set. And with it dawned a new possibility: that of big time college football. “I think at the end of my sophomore year in high school, that’s when I really started to consider it,” he says. “That was my first year starting on varsity, and towards the end of that season I began to hold my own. And when I began holding my own I realised maybe I had a chance. So I really started to put a lot of time in individually, just doing extra things away from the field, and it began to pay off.”

What else was paying off for the Blue Devils was a core of players who’d been together since the first grade and kept playing throughout middle school and then into high school. As Heidenreich entered his senior season, the sense of brotherhood and community that pervaded the team was almost hypnotic. And although Mt. Lebanon had never won a state championship, hopes were high going into the 2021 campaign that they could challenge for a title.

“A lot of the teams we played were these big private schools that picked players from all around Pittsburgh and had only been together for a year or two” says Heidenreich. “We were a bunch of guys that had been playing alongside one another our whole lives, and who’d been there for each other away from the field as well as on it. I think the team we had was good, but our performances weren’t necessarily down to talent. It was something bigger than just football.”

The two most highly regarded players were Heidenreich, now fully entrenched at receiver, and running back Alex Tecza. In fact, the pair had been so dominant during the 2021 regular season that they were often referred to as the “Magic and Bird” of Mt. Lebanon’s youth football league. Heidenreich though is quick to deflect his role in the success of the team, pointing instead to that camaraderie he says was unmatched. “We had some talented kids but we didn’t any have guys with Power Five offers. But we had an unity that nobody else could touch.”

That togetherness - and talent - took the Blue Devils to the WPIAL and PIAA Championships in Class 6A, finishing the season with a 15-0 record. In the state semi-final Heidenreich caught five touchdowns, and then added a 12-yard scoring run in the championship game as they beat Philadelphia powerhouse St. Joseph’s Prep - a programme that had lost only one other state title game since 2016 - 35-17.

Six months before Mt.Lebanon played for that championship, Heidenreich faced another fork in the road. His recruiting picture was slowly coming into shape with two schools showing significant interest. The first was Davidson of the FCS, a private liberal arts college in North Carolina some 430 miles south of his home, and the second was the Naval Academy, who’d begun recruiting him after his junior season and were now inviting him to a camp in Annapolis. But having been to a number of camps and not getting a single offer, Heidenreich agonised about whether he should even go.

Once again, his father’s wisdom changed his son’s journey.

“I was pretty hesitant beforehand,” says Eli. “It was a five hour drive from home and frankly, at that point it was just another camp. But my dad was like, ‘You know, we’re gonna go down and give it our best shot and see what happens.’ It’s funny to think about that moment because if he hadn’t said that and if we hadn’t decided there and then to go, I don’t think I would have been at Navy. I don’t. His words and being at that camp had such a huge impact on my life.”

In front of Navy wide receivers coach Mick Yokitis, a former Midshipmen wideout himself, Heidenreich showed out. “Coach Yo told me that the reason I got an offer was my performance that day,” Eli says. “If dad hadn’t convinced me to go……..the story changes again.”

For Heidenreich, the long drive home offered the chance for some perspective, and for him to consider what a commitment to the Naval Academy would mean for his life.

And for that of his family.

“You know, military service for me growing up was something I didn’t really pay much attention to because I always thought I was gonna go play football. But my grandfather was a Lt. Commander in a Navy reconnaissance attack squadron called the Sea Dragons, and my uncle served in the First Battalion 8th Marines, and so I heard a lot of stories about what they’d done. After that camp is when I really started looking into the idea of going into service and all that comes with it. I think that’s when the realisation of being part of something bigger than myself and giving up something for my country hit me. Being able to be that next generation…..the idea of that grew pretty important to me and my family.”

On June 30th, 2021, a few days after arriving back from that camp, Heidenreich and his family took a trip to the beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina when he received a text message from Coach Yokitis asking him to make sure he and his parents were available for a FaceTime around noon that day. After all the questions about his size and whether he was really good enough to compete in the sport he loved, Eli believed he knew what was coming: a scholarship offer to play college football at the Naval Academy.

The culmination of a dream fifteen years in the making.

“It was a pivotal moment for us as a family,” says Eli’s father David. “I mean this was it. This was really it. And I remember he had his phone on the counter in the kitchen so we could all be around it. Then around noon, just before Coach Yokitis was expected to call, my nephew rang my phone and I immediately hit cancel. But he called straight back, and so I did exactly the same thing and cancelled the call. But then he called a third time and so I texted him quickly to say I couldn’t talk, and asked if everything was OK. And he simply replied: “No” and urged me to ring him immediately.”

As David stepped out of the kitchen to call his brother’s son, Eli’s phone began to ring.

“All of a sudden it’s just me and my mom and so I answer and it’s Coach Yokitis,” says Eli. “He’s smiling and happy and he says that he wants to extend me an offer to go play football for Navy. I’m aware that my dad’s not there, but we keep chatting and he tells me about his expectations and we talk about my senior season at Mt. Lebanon which is upcoming. And then we hang up and it’s super exciting. But then dad comes back in the room and he just has this kind of look on his face……..he looks at us and tells us that my uncle Mark, his brother, had passed away an hour before from a sudden heart attack. It was just one of those astonishing moments in your life, the timing of it all.”

As David recounts his memories of that day, the tenor of his voice changes a little.

“It was surreal. A sort of collision of emotions for me. Shock and awe I suppose. I was so happy for Eli but so sad for my brother who was such a good human being. I think that moment……..”. Heidenreich’s voice changes again and he pauses for a beat. ”I don’t know what you call it. Maybe divine intervention. I mean, the Lord giveth and he taketh away, right? But whatever spiritual word or term you want to attach to it……this was almost like God was saying Eli should accept this offer and go to Navy. It felt right.”

The issue of military personnel in professional sports is a complex one. Until recently it was deemed that a “cadet may not obtain employment, including as a professional athlete, until after completing the cadet’s commissioned service obligation.”

But if Heidenreich is drafted or if he’s brought in as a UDFA and signs a contract with an NFL franchise, he would be able to play right away and serve his time on the back end. If he doesn’t make a team, he would then begin his service. Whatever happens, he’s fully of aware of what lies ahead, and the responsibilities he has to those who’ve brought him to the brink of professional football.

“I’m hoping I’m able to serve after my time in the NFL is done. I mean, I’ll still be locked into serving after I play, unless I have a pro career that lasts more than ten seasons. But I do think that the Navy, the United States and the taxpayers have invested money into developing me. So I feel I owe them some sort of service back. And I don’t think that playing in the NFL by itself is repaying them fully.”

Heidenreich knows that at some point there’s a possibility that, given the current state of the world, he’ll have to go war. So I ask him whether he’s taken the time to consider his own mortality, that whilst he’s a football player at heart, he may find himself in a position where he has to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of feelings associated with that,” he replies candidly. “And it’s something I absolutely think about a lot. It’s just kind of the expectation, right? It’s what you’re expected to do. I think a player choosing a service academy needs a different mentality, a different mindset than you need at most other schools because you’re not just picking a university, you’re picking a lifestyle, and your mortality is linked to that lifestyle.”

Heidenreich majored in cyber operations, covering the entire scope of cyberspace, from computer architecture and data structures, to cryptography, and forensics. And for him, much like football, a life in the military is about the detail, the minutiae.

“I’ve invested so much time into both these aspects of my life,” he says. “With football it goes back to when I was young and running around with a ball in my hand, and with the military it starts with the culture shock of the very first day here where you get your uniform and they shave your head. It’s all about my preparation to be able to do things to the very best of my ability so I’m able to go lead others in an effective manner, and that they in turn are able to do their jobs so we all come back healthy and safe.”

For those playing sport at a military academy there are none of the financial benefits that have forever changed the landscape of college football. There’s no NIL money on offer and nor is there the extra cash - up to $1,200 - that most players make for seeing themselves in 64-bit in EA Sports’ NCAA Football game. So did he ever consider transferring to reap some of the available rewards?

“No, I never thought about it,” Eli says firmly. “After I committed to Navy I had a couple of big Power 4 schools, Penn State and West Virginia, offer me preferred walk-on opportunities but I’d made a commitment to Navy and I was going to stick to it. After your sophomore year here at the academy you sign a contract saying you’ll stay for the rest of your time. You have the freedom to leave with no repercussions before then and you won’t owe them any money. And there were some people back home, you know, my family or friends that kind of nudged me or asked me about transferring, but it was never anything I gave a lot of thought to. I think the biggest thing was that my future was set for me in the military. That was the biggest piece of the puzzle.”

Heidenreich’s freshman year at Navy was a mixed bag; he played exclusively on the scout team and although he made an immediate impression, it wasn’t enough to see the field. Away from football he found himself exhausted by the responsibilities that come with being at a military academy: the long days and the commitment to living a different life to most big time college football players hit differently. But at the start of the 2023 campaign he travelled with the team to Dublin’s Aviva Stadium to take on Notre Dame in the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, and got in the game early in the second quarter.

When his number was called on a first down option pitch, the young snipe was ready.

Unfortunately, so was Irish senior linebacker, Marist Liufau.

“So this is my first ever college carry,” says Heidenreich, a smile breaking on his face. “And I get the little pitch run left from Tai (Lavatai), and avoid the first tackle but it knocks me slightly off-balance and the ball starts to come free. Then Liufau, who now plays for the Dallas Cowboys, he hits me so hard from behind. And I was still trying to tuck the ball away and get a good hold on it when he smokes me and it popped right out.”

Heidenreich can laugh about it now, and he does. But it taught him a good lesson about levels. And the importance of keeping hold of the ball.

“That was my only fumble,” he says, just hours before the Midshipmen play Army. “Knock on wood I’ve not fumbled since. But that was a wake up call about just how fast and physical college football was. To be honest, I don’t think it really started to slow down for me until my junior year. Up to that point it was a hundred miles an hour all the time. You’re stressed out constantly and it really takes a full season under your belt to get that confidence and feel like you belong.”

But, much like so many stops along his football journey, Heidenreich had a familiar shoulder to lean on.

“I would speak to my dad about it and he’d just keep me on an even keel. It seems obvious, but when you’re worried about your performance, I’ve always gone to him and he’s always reminded me that there was going to come a time where mentally I’d feel the same way that I did in high school. That it would get easier. He’d remind me that the game would slow down for me and when it did, that was the time to shine.”

For a moment he pauses, as if considering the magnitude of those words and the role of his father in his football life.

“He’s had a huge impact on me,” he says. “The way he pushed me. He saw this level of potential in me and he knew that I had a chance to be really good. He was just always really encouraging and motivating and kind of nudging me in the right way to push me to be the best version of myself. A lot of my motivation came from him and that recognised potential he saw in me.”

It’s Saturday October 26th, 2024 and I’m on holiday in New York with my teenage children. Unfortunately for them, they have to take half a day away from Manhattan’s streets to head to MetLife Stadium to watch #24 Navy take on #12 Notre Dame in a game that many are calling a potential upset special. The temperature is frigid and the low winter sun offers little respite from the biting cold wind that blows into the upper deck behind the endzone where we’re sat. I feel sorry for my kids who’d rather be anywhere but here.

However, for me it’s a chance to see a handful of 2025 and 2026 draft prospects in the flesh, including Irish quarterback Riley Leonard, tight end Mitchell Evans, free safety Xavier Watts, and sophomore running back Jeremiyah Love.

And a hybrid running back/slot receiver wearing #22 for the Midshipmen, Eli Heidenreich who on this day has 11 carries for 51 yards, and scores on the final play we watch before my kids tell me they’re going to freeze to death and that we have to leave. As we thaw out on the train back to Penn Station, I text a scout friend from an AFC West team about Heidenreich, mentioning how well he ran the ball, and how physically he blocked. Within minutes I get a one word reply:

“Legit”

The next chance to study him in isolation comes against Florida Atlantic in 2025 as I begin to look at slot receivers for the 2026 edition of the DraftBook. Heidenreich touches the ball only eight times, relegated instead to a support role for teammates Blake Horvath and Brandon Chapman, who run for 174 and 121 yards respectively. But the more I watch, the more I see him kicking ass in the perimeter run game as a blocker; sealing a DT on the Middies’ opening drive to allow Horvath to score; picking off a safety fifteen yards downfield for the second touchdown so that Braxton Woodson can get in; driving a CB into the benches for a big Chapman run; leading the way as a fullback for Alex Tecza on a 4th quarter score; then racing downfield to pave the way for Horvath’s game sealing touchdown run by eliminating the corner and allowing the quarterback in behind.

When I stop watching I message that same AFC West scout to tell him what I’ve just seen.

“I told you he was legit,” came the reply, with a smiling emoji.

He finished the 2025 regular season with 877 yards receiving at 19.1 yards per reception, adding another 437 on the ground at 6.5 yards a carry. At one point in late October he’s listed in the top five of Pro Football Network’s Heisman poll. But what sticks in my mind more than anything is his blocking, and what he might offer a progressive offensive thinker like Sean McVay.

“First off, I think on the physical side of things, I’m a guy that can kind of do everything,” he says. “I’ve shown this year I can play running back, I can play wing, I can play almost like a tight end position. I can play out in the slot or as a traditional split end, or even as a fullback. So I can do pretty much anything you need on the skill side of things when it comes to offense. And I play special teams. But to me the blocking is something that I pride myself on and that I want to be good at. I work hard at it, and that’s an extra thing an NFL team will get from me.”

“I’m an emotional guy,” says David Heidenreich, cheerfully. He’s reached his office up river from Acrisure Stadium and is patiently waiting for me to finish up. Before I do I want to take him back to where our conversation began twenty minutes previously: the game in October against Air Force.

I figure he knows what’s coming.

“I’ll cry two or three times a game,” he says. “Usually when Eli takes the field at the start, and then when the anthem happens. But I don’t think I cried that day. I think I was too shocked.”

That shock was understandable. His son was on his way to breaking a pair of long-standing Navy football records: the first was for most receiving yards in a game (243). The second for touchdowns in a career, the record broken on the 60-yarder that put him in the stands.

“When he first came onto the field, me and my buddies were in the endzone shouting at him but I’m not sure he heard us. Then the game starts and I leave them to go and sit with my wife over on the other side of the stadium and everything unfolds from there.”

But it turns out Eli had heard the group and was aware of a Heidenreich cheer section in the front of the stands. He just didn’t know exactly who was there or quite where they were.

He would soon find out.

“They were yelling at me and chirping across from me a little bit when I came out,” says Eli. “I could sort of hear them, so I knew they were in that general area. But my back was facing away from them and I was really in the zone, so I sort of forgot about it.”

Two hours later, just as David Heidenreich finds his buddies behind the endzone, his son scores his third touchdown of the game. As Eli crosses the goal line he can just see the jumbled mass of humanity celebrating in front of him, before he spots some familiar faces going wild.

And one in particular.

“I saw my dad and I just jumped right up and then they all started whacking me” laughs Eli. “Whacking my helmet and screaming. It was crazy.”

Whacker-in-chief was his father, lost in one of life’s unforgettable moments.

“I remember taking one step forward,” he says. “And suddenly he was there. I don’t remember what I was yelling but I remember slapping him on the helmet over and over and over. He knocked my sunglasses off and my hat’s down the side of my face and my friends are absolutely ecstatic, one of them’s crying. And my son’s right there. I suppose it was serendipity. But I was so proud……it just felt so surreal.”

Neither father or son cried that day, although both tell me they came close. David in the heat of the moment, and Eli afterwards watching the video on repeat.

“It’s something I’ll cherish for the rest of my life,” says the younger Heidenreich. “To break the record and then jump up into the arms of my dad in the stands and hang out with him a little bit on the exact same play……..” His voice falters for just a second before he continues. “Just everything we’ve talked about in terms of the role he’s played in my journey. That was pretty cool.”

It was the defining moment of a prophecy laid out from father to son when Eli was still in high school.

When David Heidenreich was 17-months old his father was killed in a car accident. Unfortunately he has no memories of the man, unlike his three older brothers, including hockey-loving Mark who was nine when the tragedy happened.

“I think it really affected him,” says David. “I really do. Mark was a wonderfully smart and warm human being, but he struggled with alcohol abuse his whole life and I think it was all because of the accident. I remember being at Mark’s funeral in 2021, just after Eli had accepted his offer from Navy, and his hockey friends were talking about him so glowingly, but they kept saying that they didn’t think he ever lived up to his potential, that the alcohol had hindered his life and maybe stopped him from achieving something bigger. And that thought kept running around my head. So I just scribbled something on an old sticky note and gave it to Eli.

The note contained eight words which have become the second most important driving factor in the life of Eli Heidenreich, given to him by the most important driving factor. It read simply:

Don’t let potential be written on your tombstone.

“It was really a mantra that I thought was important,” says David. “Do everything you can to be the person you’re supposed to become. I just wanted him to take Mark’s lesson and apply it the best way he knew how. And I do think it’s helped steer him and put things into perspective for him, and it drove him a little bit too.”

Back in Bancroft Hall we discuss the quote and Eli pulls out a baseball cap to show me. On it is the acronym DLPBWOYT.

Don’t let potential be written on your tombstone.

“Dad gave me that sticky note and he made these hats,” says Eli. “And it was just something that I really thought about. Like, I felt that I could be a good football player, but how good? Did I wanna be remembered as the kid that went out and worked every day to reach that potential, or the kid that just kinda sat around and hoped that he’d be good and didn’t really do anything to earn it.

Of all the paths Eli Heidenreich has had in front of him on his journey to the brink of the NFL, this one was perhaps the most important.

Unsurprisingly, he chose the former.

Back in Pittsburgh, David Heidenreich is ready to get out of his car and tackle the arctic blast that’s sweeping the city. Before he goes I ask him about his son’s professional future and what it would mean to him to see Eli playing on Sundays. He pauses for a few seconds before he answers, and it feels like he’s gathering himself, that perhaps the emotion of those words and the reality they offer are all a little too much.

“It’s a lifelong dream for him, and for us as a family,” he says. “It’s surreal in a lot of ways. Eli always said that he’d go as far in life as football would take him and I think we all thought it would just be college. But not any more. He’s worked so hard for years to give himself this chance.”

Whatever happens, David knows if Eli needs him, he’ll be around. And if he plays ten snaps or ten years in the NFL, his son will be standing there at the end of it all, just like he’s always been.

Smiling and sweaty.

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