SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA — “Ball!”
Prospect X faces one sideline and then flips his hips a sharp 180 degrees to make a back shoulder catch. He repeats that twice on each side, catching each ball his college quarterback sends his way. Then he jogs to the line of scrimmage and quickly takes up a ready stance. It’s sunny and 70 degrees — a beautiful spring afternoon at his home stadium, and his cheeks are already pink from the work.
“Take your time,” the NFL coach says, his voice echoing through the empty stadium. “You’re the only one out here.”
X relaxes a bit, and asks the coach if he’d ever been to this part of the country before.
Two weeks ahead of the draft, this NFL coach has come nearly 1,500 miles for a 30-minute workout with Prospect X. And that’s because X didn’t play much slot receiver in college. His body type demands an adjustment in the eyes of NFL evaluators, so his role will be changing as he enters the NFL, and this coach’s team needs to get a better understanding of exactly how they could use this versatile speedster.
“What’s my landmark?” X asks. “Do you want a certain depth?”
X is full of detailed questions for the coach as he explains each route. X’s advisor within his challenging major says that he was never satisfied with just being told an answer in class. “Under what situations is that assumption valid?” X would ask him. “There’s a difference between understanding something and knowing something,” the advisor says, “and he really wanted to understand it.”
Because X hasn’t trained much as a slot receiver, this is even more important to him. X completes a speed cut on a 10-yard out route and then takes four steps back inside, exactly as instructed, to catch the ball.
The coach claps enthusiastically. “Nice job!”
After about 25 routes, the coach is satisfied. X’s college is filming the workout, and they’ll send the video back to the club. X thought this might be an hour-long workout, and he’s ready for more. He’s cut like granite and could run into the wee hours of the night if anybody asked him to. Instead, the coach asks him to take a walk around the field so they can talk out of earshot of X’s coaches, and ESPN’s reporter, who have been watching the workout.
As they finish their slow lap, X asks the coach for any advice he has for him. Be available, learn as much as you can, and remember that any team who takes you knows that you’re not a finished product. They want you for your potential.
This is welcome news for a sub-power 4 prospect who’s been fretting a bit over learning a new job last-minute and being judged on what he knows right now. It’s the reason he didn’t get any offseason attention — no combine invite or all-star game appearance — because no one knew quite where to put him. A blistering 40 time at his pro day has attracted much more NFL attention in recent weeks.
“How do you know about my sleeper?!” one NFL special teams coordinator asked, exasperated when ESPN asked him about X.
ESPN spent the past few months on a hunt for the most overlooked prospect in the 2025 NFL draft. After polling scouts and coaches, tracking pro days, watching tape and thinking like a general manager, we landed on a player who we believe is the draft’s best-kept secret.
For each of the past six 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 — for the sake of the NFL teams in hot pursuit — he is “Prospect X.”
AFTER HE’S SHOWERED and has watched the film of his afternoon workout, X heads downtown with his girlfriend to one of their favorite restaurants. Before he can even look at the menu, the server recognizes him.
“[Prospect X!] welcome back,” he says. “Thank you so much for everything you did for [X’s COLLEGE] football.”
X thanks him back. He can’t go anywhere in his hometown or college town without someone stopping him, and on this night, he gets two extra scoops of homemade ice cream with dessert, and he isn’t charged for the burrata appetizer. “This happens all the time,” his girlfriend says. “I reap the benefits.”
When they started dating, X’s girlfriend says her family freaked out when she told them about her new boyfriend. Of course they’d known about him since he was a high school player in a historic town. Once, his younger sister name-dropped him to get into a frat party. It worked.
X appreciates all the kind words, but he really doesn’t love all the attention. He’s the quiet, serious, studious type. He’s such a rules-follower that he didn’t even drink coffee in college because he knew caffeine in high amounts is an NCAA-banned substance. “He’s very strict with himself,” his mom says.
“He doesn’t do well with free time,” says dad.
He doesn’t even particularly like going out to eat, and he’d stay home if given the choice. So he can’t wait until he gets to the NFL, where nobody will know who he is for a while. He spent two months training for his pro day at a facility in another state, and he says it was “so refreshing” to not be known there, and “have that feeling that you have to earn everything again.”
Despite his status as a local hero, X’s head coach says he was an “afterthought” to scouts at the start of this past football season, who came calling on his school to check on a couple of other players. X was last on the list, if he was on it at all. “It was just, oh, we’ll keep an eye on him,” the head coach says.
The head coach is respected by NFL personnel for his track record of producing players, and his office wall features a signed jersey of a current NFL starting quarterback, one that the coach who worked out X has also coached.
The director of strength and conditioning for X’s school says one NFL team that recently hired a new general manager sent a scout to campus in October, but he didn’t ask about X, who was by that point well on his way to a career season.
“Aren’t you going to ask about X?” the strength coach asked.
“Who?” the scout replied.
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So all season, the strength coach campaigned for his guy. “If he’s not on your list, you don’t know what you’re doing,” he told every scout.
He repeatedly messaged clips of X to a popular college football analytics Twitter account that features the fastest players of the week. He asked them to please test X’s MPH so he could be featured, too. But they never responded.
“He never really put crazy miles per hour out there because his first three steps, he separates so much that he doesn’t have anybody that’s actually pushing him to his highest velocity,” the strength coach says.
But because he’d been timing X in 5-yard builds and 10-yard flys for his entire college career, he knew exactly what 40-yard speed X was capable of, and he told everyone who would listen that X was going to run extremely fast. The kind of time that gets a player drafted. In fact, he told scouts he’d “bet his house on it.”
“Bring your popcorn,” he told an NFC West scout ahead of the pro day. “We might sell concessions.”
But every coach and agent says their players will run fast, and then they don’t. So the strength coach’s bet didn’t mean much, and scouts were late to get on board because X had performed so many different roles in college — whatever his team needed — that he didn’t land at the top of any one position.
“The first three years of his body of work was, what is he?” says the head coach. “I don’t know that anybody would have looked at him enough to say that kid’s gonna run [fast at his size]. There’s some plays in the past where you’d say that kid’s really fast, but it’s [non power-4], so how fast is he? He’d been fighting that a little bit.”
X ran just as expected on his pro day, in front of 13 NFL teams, and his strength coach was able to keep his home. “You know it’s a good time when the scouts all smile at each other and then show each other their watches,” the strength coach said.
“He eats the turf,” says an assistant coach. “It’s loud when he runs, it’s gaining ground, it’s strong.”
The strength coach says that after X ran, the NFC West scout told him: “We’re gonna try to go after him.”
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And when X ran routes that day, his head coach noticed the scouts maintained an iron-clad focus. “Sometimes when there’s different drills being done, you can just see the intentionality of the [scouts] watching fall off a bit,” he said.
Before his pro day, X had talked to only one NFL special teams coordinator, one other assistant coach and one NFC West scout. Since then, he has had phone calls with two NFC position coaches and two AFC assistant coaches, and he met with another AFC special teams coordinator and position coach on a visit to an NFL facility. And he’s worked out for two NFC teams.
“People are feeling like they forgot, like they missed something,” X says. “And so everyone’s kind of jumping on the scene right now.”
X’s head coach says he’s been asked by many teams recently — what position does he see X playing in the NFL?
“He’s probably a little bit of a [last-minute] panic conversation,” the head coach says. “… [The scouts] walked away, saying, OK, we gotta figure this out.”
“He’s a wild card that you want to have,” the special teams coordinator says, “You don’t know exactly what you’re going to do with him yet until you get him here.”
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PROSPECT X PACES in his parents’ kitchen. He’s back home for the first time in months to fulfill an NIL obligation, but while he’s here, he also needs the kind of basic life skills help only parents can provide.
“Do you know where I could go find those immunization records?” he asks his mom. “I need to fill this out today.”
The NFL team that is bringing him in on a ’30 visit’ in a few days has sent him some paperwork to fill out to release his medical information, and he needs to know the dates of all his vaccinations, something he’s never thought about before. Each NFL club is allowed to bring up to 30 prospects into their facility for a pre-draft visit, and since he wasn’t invited to the scouting combine, teams don’t have a medical on him. The team requesting his records will be able to share those, and their own evaluation of him, including scans and X-rays, with the other 31 clubs. His draftability depends on tracking down this information.
“I’ll have to look for your pediatrician records,” his mom says. I can dig out your baby book.
“X! Would it not be in MyChart?” his sister asks.
“It could be,” he says, sighing in frustration, “but I don’t know if I can even log in anymore.”
He sits down on a recliner in the living room and stares at his phone screen, trying out different passwords. His mom disappears and comes back with his baby book and a box of mementos, including stacks of newspaper clippings covering his high school football exploits. This box is from X’s late grandpa’s stash. He printed out or clipped every article about his grandson and took copious notes on yellow legal pads of X’s individual stats and the team’s performance.
X’s grandpa was a popular youth football coach, and he’s the one who first taught X about the game. Before X was old enough to play tackle football, the two spent hours together in the basement. Grandpa explained strategy to X while he tried it out on Madden.
X graduated high school with 12 varsity letters and was asked to be the sixth grade commencement speaker at two elementary schools. Neither mom nor dad have any idea where his relentless drive comes from. He writes down his goals and, “it’s like he wills himself to do something,” his mom says.
A year ago, X made a list of four big goals for the 2024 college football season, and he checked three of the four off his list. But he didn’t have any NFL-related goals last year. It felt too far ahead and he preferred to stay in the moment.
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As a high school junior, X thought his football days were almost over, because he hadn’t been recruited by anyone, anywhere. Those few months after his junior football season were a “darker time,” he says. He’d read that Bills quarterback Josh Allen got his opportunity to play at Wyoming by emailing his tape to dozens of college coaches, so X did the same. He emailed every FBS school in his region but didn’t get any traction.
When he went to the junior day at the closest FBS program, it became clear why. Each coach introduced themselves to the kids and parents and listed their recruiting areas. None of them recruited his home territory, though multiple coaches were dedicated to covering smaller and more populated counties of a neighboring state. So X wound up at a smaller school that he chose for its academic offerings.
Now that she’s delivered the baby book, X’s mom leaves him in the living room to finish his forms.
“He can’t hear us,” she whispers as she walks down the stairs into their cold basement. “So I need to tell you something.”
“He’s brilliant. I mean, brilliant.”
She points out his childhood bedroom wall, decorated with dozens of copper plaques he’s earned for both academics and football in high school and college.
“The guys literally look at him like he’s a machine. You have to remind guys that he’s a human being, he’s just really disciplined.”
Prospect X’s college strength coach
X couldn’t attend his college graduation because he had football practice, so he sent his parents to accept the department’s top senior award on his behalf. X’s mom says one of his professors told her that X was so smart that a professor had to ask another professor for help reviewing a paper he turned in, because they weren’t familiar with the mathematical models he’d used in it. And another time, a professor sent his paper to the head of the department to make sure that X really wrote it.
“They thought that in such a busy schedule, how can he do so much work, researching and writing an outstanding paper?” the department head said.
“The guys literally look at him like he’s a machine,” says his strength coach. “You have to remind guys that he’s a human being, he’s just really disciplined.”
He’s “a walking computer,” one of his assistant coaches says.
But as a freshman, X’s coaches said he didn’t stand out in the way he does now. He was buried on the depth chart, and was trying out a few positions he hadn’t played before.
His coaches didn’t realize his full potential until the postseason — when he got a real jump in playing time and became the spark on offense that his team was sorely missing. “I suppose the rest is history,” his head coach says.
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X CHECKED TWO new states off his list when he visited an AFC team one week before the draft. The night before he left, X and his girlfriend researched all the teams’ coaches so he’d be familiar with their background, and they watched YouTube videos about the city, so he’d know what to expect.
Although the team consistently ranks far from the gold standard on the NFLPA’s report card grades for its facility, X was impressed by all the amenities available to players, stuff that he didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe. “These zip-up compartments that help with sleep and recovery,” he said. “And these water … I don’t know, essentially, like, water beds?”
He’d turned in his forms on time and got his scans and X-rays done right in the building. He met with a position coach briefly, and he spent the bulk of his time, about three hours in multiple sessions, with the special teams coordinator. They watched his tape and then spent a lot of time watching a current NFL player to whom many teams compare him — an all-purpose player that can help on offense and special teams.
X says the coordinator got into granular detail on the team’s vision for him, and he learned specific protections. Their conversation spilled into dinner at the team cafeteria, where they ate build-your-own-burrito bowls.
“He was like, ‘I just can’t help but see similarities that you can exceed some certain abilities that [current player] has,'” X says.
When X was done for the day, he walked around the neighborhood near the facility and admired how clean and green it was.
During his layover back home, an AFC West team called to confirm they had the right number for him on draft day. The conversation was so quick that X didn’t even get the name of the scout. He’s also talked with an AFC South team’s assistant coach, who connected him to the team’s injured player that he’d likely replace. They talked for an hour about what the role entails, and X was stunned the injured player was so helpful.
The first NFL coach to talk to him in the draft process was a veteran special teams coordinator, who reached out during the scouting combine and left him a kind voicemail: “You have a ton of film, you don’t have to be at the combine. I wish you were, but don’t worry about it.”
The coordinator has strong connections to X’s college conference, and he says recruiting in the NFL is an “underrated” tool. He’s known about X “for a while,” and he hopes that being the first NFL coach to acknowledge him as special will count for something on Saturday of the draft.
While X was on his 30 visit, an ex-NFL player now working for a rejuvenated franchise scheduled a private workout with him. This former player first called X the day after his pro day, and when X saw the area code for the player’s former team, one he was a huge fan of growing up, he answered right away.
Like the first workout, X won’t have much time to prepare, but he prefers it that way. He found all the pro day training and scripting to be a little bit like “a glorified pageant,” and he’d much rather respond to actual coaching than show up to perform a hand-picked set of routes. “It’s like a dance recital,” he says. “You better look really good, because you practiced it a bunch.”
“I am just going to go out there and move how I would move as an athlete. And be ready for coaching, and take advice from a great receiver like him.”
One scout said half the scouts at X’s pro day think he will be drafted. The other half see him more as a priority free agent. X’s agent said a special teams coordinator told him he doesn’t think X makes it past the fifth round. The agent posted an unlisted two-minute highlight video of X to YouTube and distributed it only to NFL personnel. It has nearly 600 views.
As of now, the team he visited has only one late-round pick. But the former receiver’s team has two, and the other team he worked out for, in the same division, has even more.
X didn’t even think about making any draft day plans until this past week. His parents bought tickets to a concert Saturday in Las Vegas months ago, before they understood it was NFL draft weekend and before they realized their son may have some important incoming calls. They had a whole trip planned with a big group of friends. But a week ahead, they decided to sell those tickets because they want to be there at their family home with X on his big day, to see him get drafted or sign as a priority free agent. “Either way,” his mom said in a text. “We’re so nervous and excited.”