Meet Prospect X, the most overlooked player in the 2024 NFL Draft

SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA — Prospect X tightens his grip on his fork. His hand swallows up the frail utensil. He takes a deep breath and sighs it out, shaking his head back and forth to reset.

“Come on!” he shouts as he wills himself to take another giant bite.

The meat lover’s skillet normally comes with two eggs, but X ordered his with four extra. He’s a regular here at this small-town diner, and the waitress jokes he cleans out their fridge “ordering 25 eggs” each time he comes by.

The skillet is the second of three plates of food he absolutely has to put away for lunch. X has already polished off a massive two-patty burger topped with bleu cheese, bacon and another egg. He hit a wall halfway through the six-egg skillet with bacon, ham and sausage. He’s still got a Nutella and banana crepe taunting him on plate No. 3.

X’s tattooed biceps bulge out of a navy blue short-sleeve shirt baring the logo of an NFL team he recently visited. He’s always been a big eater — when he was out to eat with his parents around 8 or 9 years old, he cried at the prospect of ordering off the kid’s menu. “Two chicken fingers?” he says. “What’s that going to do for you?” — but he’s gained nearly 30 pounds this offseason in his quest to get ready for the league.

This kind of extreme eating is tough work. He’s up to 306 lbs, and while he’s training his body to hold that new weight, he has to keep eating. “My mom would be like, ‘Get a to-go box!’” he says. But giving up is not an option. “I know what my goal is, and 300-plus looks way prettier than 290.”

Sitting next to him in the diner booth is his roommate and best friend, his college team’s Australian punter. X offers him a bite of his skillet, and he takes a small forkful. “That was a little-ass bite, bro,” X says.

He fights through the rest of the skillet, sips water, stretches and cheers himself on again. The sweet crepe goes down relatively easily, and he takes a picture of his three spotless plates to send to some of the other prospects he’d trained with this winter — they couldn’t believe how much he’d eat.

He gets tired of eating like this, but this is what it takes when you’re a small-school prospect in a run-down town and the draft is just a week away.

I spent the last two months searching for the most overlooked prospect in the 2024 NFL Draft. After canvassing scouts, tracking the results of pro day workouts, watching tape and strategizing like a general manager, I picked a player I believe is the draft’s best-kept secret: a small school prospect with no combine invite and no top-three all-star game appearance but a good shot to get drafted.

For each of the past five years, readers of this series have made their best guesses as to X’s identity, which will be revealed in a follow-up story after the draft. But for now — to allow him to be honest about the pre-draft process and for the sake of the NFL teams in pursuit — he is “Prospect X.”

X’s college isn’t completely unheard of, but the program recently jumped up to Division I and hasn’t seen a player drafted in nearly a quarter century. The lawn outside the old brick weight room looks neglected. The grass is patchy, lumpy and dotted with weeds. Even the taxidermied mascot that greets guests at the entrance, an exotic vintage hunting trophy, looks scrawny and sad.

It’s one of those places where people say the next best thing to do when you get there is to get the hell out. “You really have to have a reason to be here,” says the school’s athletic communications staffer. “You don’t pass by going to a different town.”

This year, X is the reason to come to this hilly cow town. Fourteen NFL teams came for his pro day — a scout for one NFC team was mad when he saw the cars roll in that morning and even madder when he saw a college scouting director for another team arrive. This scout’s team is sure they were the first in the NFL to discover X, and they hoped they might be able to keep him at least a little bit under the radar. Another scout from the same team was upset to hear I’d picked his player for this series.

Any hope that X would slide by the 18 teams not present that day went out the window when he demolished his workout, a strenuous gauntlet of footwork and pass-rush drills, and posted 40-yard dash, shuttle and 3-cone drill times that would have put him in the company of peers who were invited to the combine.

“He freaking dominated,” his head coach says. “Smaller guys in his position were fatigued and struggling towards the end. He finished and he says, ‘That’s it?’”

X showed off active hands, speed and athleticism. After the workout, X’s head coach says a veteran area scout for the geographically closest NFL team approached the coach and told him, “He got drafted today.”

X’s head coach was new this past season, and at first he didn’t realize how good a player he had. “I was probably hard on the offensive line when I first got here because we were just getting whipped,” he says. “‘What are we doing? We’re awful!’ Well, no, he’s pretty good.”

He’s been spreading the word to his NFL connections ever since, including his first cousin, a current NFL head coach whose team has shown significant interest in X.

“(My cousin) held almost every lifting record when he left college,” X’s head coach says. “He wasn’t that guy when he got there, but he made himself into that. And that’s who X is. I told him, ‘You’ll love him.’”

X’s mom is the biggest NFL fan in the family. She says she bleeds the color of her local team. Her dream growing up was to be on the field handing out water bottles during games. She was the loudest cheerleader at X’s pro day but didn’t want to be too obvious staring at all the NFL scouts to see which teams were present, so her son-in-law took a video to review later.

X had dinner with scouts for an NFC North team and an AFC East team in advance of his pro day. NFL Network and ESPN have contacted X’s athletic department to get highlights to use in their draft broadcast if his name gets called, and the league requested X’s Catapult GPS data. X’s current defensive line coach says the amount of NFL interest feels the same as several players he coached at a Power 5 school who were all drafted and now play on Sundays.

The transfer portal has made it even harder to get noticed as a small-school player because most small-school players don’t stay there. X transferred from a teeny-tiny school to a bigger but still small school.

“There’s a growing trend that if they can play, they have probably already transferred out of FCS, DII, DIII,” says the all-star game director. “So who is really there?”

A few months before his pro day, X caught the eye of scouts at an all-star game for small-school players. Just eight NFL teams attended. His performance in the small-school game got him called up to another lower-tier all-star game. He stood out with multiple sacks — and by wearing a feather in his helmet all week at practice, a tribute from a bird he’d shot hunting.

His defensive coordinator tried to get X into the three bigger all-star games so he could show off against better competition, but he wasn’t selected.

A few years ago, a talented player went undrafted out of X’s current school. He’s now an NFL starter. The defensive coordinator, who was the NFL liaison for the school, tried to tell scouts then just how good this player was. “They listened,” he says. “But they didn’t hear me.” This year, he’s warning the scouts again.

“X is gonna be one of the best d-linemen in any d-line group he gets in,” he says. “You’ve got to draft him.”

When Prospect X drives around his college town, he honks and whoops a greeting at anyone and everyone he passes, sometimes startling them in the process.

He’s a wild man on the football field and a total softie off of it. He freely dispenses hugs and makes a point to talk to everybody on his team. “Just to make sure you feel seen,” he says. “It’s easy to go through a whole practice and not start and no one talks to you.”

X started playing tackle football when he was 6 years old. He tried out flag football the year before but didn’t really understand the concept. “He wanted to tackle people and move people around,” his mom says.

When he was around 8 years old, X wrote a message to himself in dry-erase marker on a little whiteboard in his bedroom: I will be a professional football player!! In Jesus Name! He’s taken it with him everywhere he’s moved since.

X’s hometown is much bigger than his current college town and still bigger than his first college town, all in the same state. He wasn’t recruited by any major programs as a skinny offensive tackle, so he wound up playing baseball and football at a tiny Bible college that his head coach there called “the strictest non-seminary bible institution” he’d ever been a part of. (A few rules: No rated-R movies, no dancing, no co-ed mingling in dorm rooms, required chapel attendance multiple times per week and a nightly curfew and bed check).

X caught the eye of the football coaches there during a recruiting visit when he two-hand dunked a basketball while wearing cowboy boots. “Whatever it takes, I want this kid,” his defensive line coach says. “If he’s dunking the basketball, I know what I can turn this kid into.”

Easily identifiable because of his long dark hair, coaches first played him at defensive end, where he was really raw — “a wild wire,” his defensive line coach says. By his third season, opponents started scheming to stop him. “He’s a problem,” they’d tell his coaches on the field pregame.

“Offenses became very one-sided,” his first college head coach says. “They’d say, ‘Man, who’s the guy who looks like the guy from Aquaman?’”

X spoke in front of his team at chapel one Sunday and inspired 63 of his teammates to get baptized the next day. “It was all him being transparent in front of a group of 100-plus 20-year-old guys,” his coach says. The coach canceled practice and he and X performed each of the baptisms together in the community pool.

“They just kept coming,” X says. “It was a movement.”

After three seasons at Bible college, X started to worry he wouldn’t get noticed by scouts. But he was torn about leaving, so he fasted for a week and then went to sit at a park with his Bible, vowing not to leave until he had an answer. He says he heard God tell him to go, and he heard it twice. So he sent an email to his current college’s defensive line coach. He didn’t know the program would be moving up to Division I, but Division II would have been an upgrade.

Usually the coach ignores these kinds of emails, but this one caught his eye. He watched the film X sent and was floored by his explosiveness and power. A few hours later, the defensive line coach was busy checking in high schoolers at football camp when “this grown behemoth of a man walks in,” he says. He knew right away who it was.

“He is a man amongst boys, the violence and the intensity that he moves with,” the coach says. “There were times where an offensive lineman could do everything right from a technique perspective and he was just too much of a force to handle.”

“He did what you want lower-level college players to do, dominate in competition,” a scout for a team that’s shown interest in X says. “Someone will probably pull the trigger. He has upside talent.”

X visited four NFL teams in April. It was his first time flying first class. He traveled to a team in a city that keeps secrets, two midwestern teams — one gritty, one pretty — and a workmanlike team with a winning tradition.

Each NFL team brings 30 prospects to their facility for visits during draft season, the main purpose of which is to get medical records on players who weren’t at the combine. X spent two hours getting MRIs done in the city that keeps secrets. On that same visit, X ran into the team’s star defensive player, who is known for his nonstop motor.

“People talk so highly of his work ethic and they were thinking I’d be in awe,” X says. “I wasn’t. I bring that, too.”

X seems to improve the mood of everyone he interacts with. He took a selfie with a personnel employee he connected with during a visit to the workmanlike team. That employee wrote down three words in a notebook after their conversation that day. “I love X.” At that visit, X could feel the intensity of the winning legacy. “The walls have freaking memories,” he says. The team’s entire defensive staff installed three defensive fronts and ten plays with him, taking him through his own personal solo walk-through.

“It was nerve-wracking, but I did it and I killed it. And I was having fun while doing it, too,” he says. “I’m not gonna hold back on who I am wherever I go.”

He especially liked their weight room because it reminded him of the bare-bones colleges that raised him. “They don’t have any lights in there,” he says.”I love the grind. I love sweating in a dungeon.”

Every one of his coaches tells a version of the same story: They showed up at 5 a.m. and X was already on the field, sweating and putting himself through individual work, busy drilling his hands and his feet. “Then he goes to practice,” his defensive coordinator says. “That’s not normal.”

“When you do stories like this, everybody’s going to say things that maybe are not 100 percent true,” his head coach says. “Everything you’re about to hear about him from anybody is 100 percent true. First on the field, last one to leave the field.”

X hated being second to the facility behind the custodians in the morning, so he started sleeping there nights before practice, either upstairs on a pile of water bags used for squats or on a pole vault mat outside on the field. “Just laying under the stars,” he says. “It’s beautiful out there, but some days, it’s lonely, man.”

During practice at his first college, his coaches noticed he seemed to always be chewing. The first time his DL coach saw X nibbling, he interrogated him about it.

“Dude, what are you doing?” his first DL coach asked. “Nothing,” X replied.

So the coach turned back around. Next thing he knew, X pulled a mango out of his football pants.

“And that’s just the first time,” the coach says.

Twizzlers inside his helmet, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, gummy bears, X always had food on his body somewhere. “Raw pocket candy,” the coach says. “Yes, he’s disgusting, but it gets worse.”

Once during an intense individual period, X pulled out a pocket knife and started breaking up a piece of sugar cane and eating it. When it was his turn to participate in the drill, he’d put the knife away, stash the sugarcane back up in his belt and hit the bags. X’s current DL coach said a trail of Nutri-Grain bar wrappers and empty pineapple fruit cups in the DL area at practice would inevitably lead to X.

The coach says, “That kind of speaks to his commitment to it all, right?”

X and his Aussie punter roommate could have their own buddy comedy. They finish each other’s sentences and speak in a combination of Gen Z lingo, inside jokes and nicknames. That’s gas! They like to go fishing and hunting and drifting on the honeybee farm that X works on part-time. And on the drive out of town they like to stop and say hello to a mangy-looking emu who stalks another farm’s fenceline.

A week before the draft, X received a text from a team in his home state. It was the first time they’d made direct contact with him. X and his roommate jumped up and down in their apartment squealing “like little girls talking about a boy,” X says.

“Drafted, undrafted, I’m going in there with the mindset of an underdog,” he says. “I’m just loving this process with all my heart, embracing it and telling my buddies about it, too.”

X came back from one of his team visits with a white NFL towel, the kind that clips onto a player’s belt. He gave it to his roommate, who has pro dreams of his own. The punter hung it above his desk, where he’ll see it every day.

“I just gave that to him for some freaking motivation,” X says.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)