Meet Prospect X, the most overlooked player in the NFL Draft

Prospect X sits down at the upscale Italian restaurant. There’s no seating chart for this dinner, and he doesn’t know anybody that he’s eating with in this group of seven, so he takes the first available chair to avoid the awkward dance. He’s dressed nicely for the occasion: khaki jacket, jeans and a polo tucked into his belt. Tomorrow at the facility, he’ll wear khaki pants and one of only two button-down shirts he owns.

This NFL team is getting his very best.

An employee for the team sits down next to X. He looks important, but X figures anyone who works for an NFL team is doing a lot better than he is, so he doesn’t ask about his specific job title. X didn’t grow up an NFL fan and doesn’t follow the league closely, so he figures this person is probably an area scout and doesn’t worry about it any further.

When X picks up the menu, he’s confused by most of the options. Gnocchi?

He reads it out loud and pronounces it no-CHEE. The rest of the table — two other NFL Draft prospects, two other scouts and another employee who drove them to dinner — laugh and pull up pictures of the small potato dumplings on their phones. The small town X calls home doesn’t have any restaurants, so he’s never heard of this dish. He ends up ordering the only thing he knows how to pronounce: chicken fettuccine.

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X isn’t shy, so he asks the team employee questions about his life. “How cool was it to play at (employee’s big-time college program)?” X asks him. “Must be a lot cooler than (X’s smaller program).” The team employee laughs at this precocious straight shooter.

After dinner, X shakes the employee’s hand and returns to his hotel. The next day at the team facility, a different employee who organized the visit pulls him aside. “Hey, (team employee’s name) really liked you,” they said.

“Who’s that?” X asked, not recognizing the name at first.

“The assistant general manager,” the employee said. “The one who was sitting beside you last night.”

Ohhhh.

Such is life on the draft circuit for a small-school prospect who has never had this kind of attention.

I spent the last two months searching for the most overlooked prospect in the 2023 NFL Draft after starting this project four years ago at Sports Illustrated (shout out to my former editor Gary Gramling for creating the concept). This year, after polling NFL scouts, tracking pro day workouts, watching tape and thinking like a general manager, I picked a player I believe is the draft’s best-kept secret: no combine invite, no all-star game appearance, but a legitimate shot to get drafted.

Dane Brugler’s The Beast, the complete 2023 NFL Draft Guide, is now available.

Each of the past four years, readers have made their best guesses as to his identity, which will be revealed in a follow-up story after the draft, but for now — and for the sake of the NFL teams on his tail — he is “Prospect X.”

X is meeting so many new scouts and assistant GMs he can’t keep their names straight. Until this year, X had an iPhone SE that was so old it still had the home button, and the vintage feature was barely functioning anymore. X didn’t care because he thinks technology is the “worst thing ever,” to the point that he refers to a cellphone as a “telephone.”

But just before his pro day this March, X’s mom took him to get a new telephone because she knew her son needed to stay in touch with all the NFL teams calling him without warning for the past two months. At this point, he thinks he’s talked to every team.

“After I get done with this, I might go to a flip phone or something,” he says.

He played at a school whose football program is about as old as his last iPhone (if he gets drafted, he’ll be the first from his school). X is a bit old for a skill position prospect, but he had 22 NFL teams at his pro day.

The weather had been nice the previous week, but the temperature suddenly dropped. His school does not have an indoor facility, so X had to run and do all of his position work outside in the damp and bone-chilling wind. NFL scouts and coaches bundled up in hats and gloves while X stripped down to showcase his speed, the main reason he’s on the NFL’s radar.

When an NFC North scout whose team is interested in X made a remark about the cold, X played it cool. “It’s alright, it’s cold in (NFC North city) too,” X said.

Then he ran a very fast 40.

GO DEEPER

‘The Beast’ 2023 NFL Draft guide: Dane Brugler’s scouting reports, player rankings

X went to the smallest high school division in his home state. His parents thought he was too small to play tackle football in elementary school, so in fourth grade he told a friend’s mom that his mom was totally fine with him playing football, then snuck off with her to secretly sign up for the team.

He played both ways in high school and was the team’s kicker for three seasons. In his final high school game, he played 160 of 163 plays. X wasn’t highly recruited and didn’t receive any FBS scholarship offers partly because his high school’s offense did not showcase the position he plays, but also because he didn’t realize the significance of the high school camp circuit.

“I was very ignorant to the whole process,” he says. “I just thought you played football and college teams would come.”

They might come to larger high schools, but they certainly weren’t coming to his town, which he compares to the run-down town of Radiator Springs, from Pixar’s “Cars.”

“We got a Dollar General in the town a few years back, and that was like a big whoop-dee-doo,” X says. “Holy smokes, we’re really going global!”

It wasn’t until the summer before his senior year that X started going to football camps. One camp had a fastest man competition, where “I blew the other two guys out of the water,” X says. That was the first time he ran a 4.4, and he finally caught the attention of one small football program.

“They sucked,” he says. “They were not winning a lot of games, but I was like, that’s gonna be where I want to go to school.”

After briefly exploring an alternative career path, X enrolled late to that first football program that showed interest in him. He played there for two years when his coach was fired and the offense was set for a major upheaval.

This was just before the NCAA allowed the free transfer, so X had to move down if he didn’t want to sit out a season, and his timing couldn’t have been worse. The pandemic hit just after he transferred, and his new team never played any games that season. X spent a “miserable” year scrimmaging against his own teammates.

When he finally got going again, he set three school records at his position in just two seasons.

When asked why X has a real chance to get drafted, scouts listed several traits: Dominant on the field, test freak, size. Despite that, X doesn’t show up often on lists of prospects or seven-round mock drafts. Another player who shares his last name is written up much more often.

X was on the Senior Bowl watch list but didn’t get picked, and he was really close to making the combine cutoff — a scout said X had 40 percent of NFL teams vote for him, and the percentage needed for his position to earn an invite is around 50-60 percent. So he watched the combine on TV at his girlfriend’s apartment, rooting for all the prospects he’d spent the last couple months working out with at his training facility.

“I see myself as a guy who really got it out of the mud,” he says. “I didn’t really get a lot of opportunities and chances that people in bigger schools would. I guess I would be the underdog, but whenever you put me on stage, I compete as though I’m the main character.”

“He’s just as talented as any other (X’s position) in college football this year, and I don’t care what university they’re at,” his college offensive coordinator says.

Some scouts agreed with his OC’s opinion and said if X had played for a bigger school, he’d be graded a lot higher in this class. His coordinator was “scared to death” X would transfer up before this past season after getting calls from SEC schools. But X stayed put because he was happy on this small campus near the ocean and believed his coaches would get him NFL-ready.

“He has improved every time I’ve seen him starting from last year to this past fall and this offseason circuit,” said one scout who has X’s school in his area. “His straight-line speed will always get him a chance, but his improvement as a route runner has been good to see the past year and half.”

X knows his first NFL opportunity will be on special teams, and he’s a talented returner too. His college coordinator says X ran several position meetings each week and that NFL scouts have been impressed that X’s “football knowledge was as good as a coach.”

The night before his pro day, X met with scouts from an AFC South team and an NFC South team and had dinner with a scout for an AFC East team. Right after his pro day workout finished, he met with an AFC West team that put him through an hour of chalk talk and then invited him for a visit. He then ate lunch with a scout for another AFC East team.

X has taken some long bus rides in his life, but he hasn’t traveled by plane much, and he’d never been to any of three cities he visited this spring.

He traveled to a warm-weather team close to the ocean, a team with scenery and weather patterns he wasn’t used to, and a midwestern team in a city not known for being a very sought-after place to live. Of the three spots, X described the least popular destination as his favorite. X hated how many people were in the city by the ocean, but he thought the midwestern town was “beautiful.”

“All I’ve ever heard all I’ve ever heard about (this city) is how s—ty it is,” X says. “I get there and everyone is saying it’s crappy because they have never lived (where I’m from) their whole lives. I’m looking at this city like, this is the coolest place ever. All the city lights and it’s right there on the river.”

At the team with the scenery, X really enjoyed the coaches, who he thought were tough. “They seem like they really get after it,” he said. “I don’t like people who pamper people.”

Each NFL team gets to bring in 30 prospects to their facility for a visit during draft season, the main purpose of which is to get medical records on players who weren’t on the all-star scene, which is why some of the names getting visits during this time of year can seem random.

X said he spent five hours at a hospital on one of his visits getting scans and X-rays on multiple parts of his body, emerging just in time to grab dinner with some of the coaches. His athletic trainer gives him almost daily updates about which teams have requested his medical records.

Every team he’s talked to has been fascinated by his brief foray into another career. His boss at that job has worked with more than 1,600 employees and said X “stood out like a sore thumb” because he was such a hard worker and always put forth 100-percent effort. The boss said X had a lot of potential and was surprised when X told him he was quitting to go play college football.

“He’s got stuff that you can’t teach, and he’s got makeup,” the boss said.

This draft weekend, X will return to his hometown and host a big barbecue that he’s calling a “country-style kickback.” There will be four TVs set up in the yard, and his mom has even hired a photographer so she can enjoy the moment and not run around taking pictures. He’s expecting about a hundred people, former coaches from childhood to college along with friends and family. It’s his way of saying thank you to everyone who has helped him along the way.

X thinks his dad will be more nervous than he will be during their draft day party. Dad has been calling son frequently. “Hey, have you heard anything from teams today?” About a month ago, X’s mom had to sit her husband down and tell him that for everybody’s good, he had to stop using social media.

“I said, ‘Look at me and listen, I don’t want you on the internet or social media,'” she says. “‘You are not going to make it to draft day.'”

X’s dad says his draft anxiety got so bad that he woke up one day and couldn’t remember where he was supposed to go for work. X’s dad travels across their home state conducting safety and training meetings at electric co-ops, and on that day, he had to give a training on, of all things, stress management.

“The first thing I told them is, ‘You want to talk about irony, let me tell you what I’m dealing with,'” dad says. “And it was nice to be able to use real world examples.”

NFL Network recently reached out to X’s college to get video for its draft coverage. A scout for a team X visited thinks he’ll get drafted, and a scout for an NFC South team said his team has a grade on X that means they believe he will make an NFL roster.

A week before the draft, a package from an NFC East team arrived at his parents’ house with a hat, a shirt and a typed-up note from the general manager. “WE HOPE TO SEE YOU IN (NFC EAST CITY).” The team only sends out these recruiting packages to about a dozen prospects —a select group of guys it thinks will be drafted late but would like the chance to sign if it’s unable to draft them.

The special teams coordinator from the midwestern team in X’s favorite city has kept in touch with X at least once or twice a week since his visit. X will be happy for any chance to compete for any roster spot, but even though that team has some big names at his position, it is where he dreams about ending up.

“It just felt right,” he says.

While on that visit, X said the coaches he met with particularly enjoyed the first note written in his character report. Likes to sit on the beach and drink beer. That was his go-to answer when scouts asked him how he spent his free time. X says the position coach and assistant position coach told him when they read that, they said to each other, “We need to meet this man!”

X hasn’t had time lately to sit on his favorite beach with a Miller Lite in hand. And with a busy NFL future converging on the present, that will have to wait.

(Illustration: Sam Richardson / The Athletic; Photo: iStock)

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