Revealing the identity of Prospect X, the most overlooked player in the NFL Draft
Kalyn Kahler
May 2, 2023
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Prospect X’s front yard is covered in individual black and white letter signs that spell out CONGRATS ‘X’ N-F-L D-R-A-F-T D-A-Y-!
There’s a football-themed photo backdrop decorated with turf and his green and blue college jerseys. Kids at the party gather around a poster board that says “Where Will X Score Next?” They color in the outlines of blank
NFL helmets with their best guesses. There’s a
Jets guess, as well as
Titans,
Eagles,
Steelers and
Rams. A little girl named Harper chose her favorite team, the
Dallas Cowboys.
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X’s mom wears a custom-made gray draft day shirt with letters on the back that read “X is the wide receiver your coach warned you about.” She makes the rounds to chat with friends and family who are busy heaping plates full of Boston butt, baked beans and potato salad.
X is pretty calm as the day begins, enjoying his time with old friends and keeping an eye on the TVs set up in the yard. He’s been drafted once before, so he knows a little bit of what to expect — which is to say, he has no idea what to believe today.
GO DEEPER
Meet Prospect X, the most overlooked player in the NFL Draft
The Titans receivers coach called that morning to tell X to know that if they have a chance, Tennessee will be picking him in the fifth, sixth or seventh rounds. That could mean something, or it could mean nothing.
Back in 2017, the last time a team told him they were going to pick him, he didn’t believe it for a second. It seemed completely nonsensical. But then they did. He knew this time around was a different league — and sport — altogether, but he hoped it would turn out the same, and that in a few hours, he’d be a Tennessee Titan.
“I was just playing baseball for fun and then accidentally got drafted,” X says. “With football, I’ve been busting my ass for a pretty long time.”
X never was truly himself as a baseball player because football was the sport he couldn’t live without, so when a Red Sox scout showed up at one of his last high school games, X thought he was there to see the team’s pitcher. No, I’m here to see you, the scout told him.
“Well, I ain’t no baseball player,” X said. The scout told him, “If I’ve got anything to say about it, then I’ll make sure you become one.”
The scout invited X to a tryout, and he was the best hitter there. X remembers all the scouts in attendance clamoring to find out more about this unknown big-hitting outfielder. “I am committed to go play college football,” he told them all. “I don’t know why I’m here right now. They just invited me, so I showed up.”
A week later, a Red Sox contingent came out to his tiny town and took him to lunch. They had to drive 20 minutes to get to the closest restaurant. Then, on the day of the draft, the Red Sox called him to ask him if he would play baseball if they drafted him. He said yes, if they drafted him, he would play. But he still didn’t think they would do it.
Then the team called his dad to ask the same thing. Yes, his dad said, if X said he would, then he would. Next thing X knew, his grandparents and his mom were in tears as the MLB draft livestream announced the Red Sox had picked the kid from the middle of nowhere in the 20th round.
“What is even going on right now?” he remembers thinking. “I was so confused. I had zero intent of playing baseball, and my name is called on the TV.”
(Courtesy of Sullee Boddiford)
X knows this time around will be tougher. There are only seven rounds in this draft, and he’s coming out of a small and new football program that has never had a player selected. Plus, he’d had wrist surgery in December, and teams wanted to know all about his injury history.
As the picks go by in the fourth and fifth rounds, family and friends keep asking him: X, what’s going on? He shakes his head and says he has no idea. He hasn’t heard from the Titans again, but when they’re on the clock in the fifth round, he thinks, maybe this is it.
Twenty seconds go by, thirty seconds, and his phone doesn’t ring. Tennessee picks a tight end. He goes through the same routine at the top of the sixth round, when the Titans are up again. This time, it’s an offensive tackle.
By the middle of the sixth round, X is starting to get the feeling he won’t be drafted for the second time in his life. His agents have heard from seven different teams interested in signing X as an undrafted free agent. One team even offers a priority free-agent deal during the fourth round. As the sixth round moseys along, X and his agents have narrowed the pool down to two suitors:
Denver, a team that had brought him in on a 30-visit, and Dallas, a team he hadn’t mentioned to
The Athletic during the draft process because he’d hardly heard from them.
Denver head coach Sean Payton calls to make his pitch. So does Dallas head coach Mike McCarthy. X isn’t an NFL fan, so he’s not at all starstruck by getting personal phone calls from these two Super Bowl winners. X loved Payton’s staff during the draft process because he thought they were tough and meant business. The only thing he really knows about the Cowboys is that they are America’s Team.
Payton and McCarthy’s arguments barely register with him. He knows it’s probably the same speech they are giving to all their priority free agents, and he’s going to pick the team that feels right, no matter what the head coach tells him.
He takes his calls from his living room, with one of his agents sitting beside him. X’s mom sits behind him until she gets too nervous and has to walk away. Every time his phone rings, which has to be about 30 times, she feels like she could throw up.
Both teams are offering basically the same money, on the high end for a priority free agent. X surveys each roster and draft class. Denver took a receiver with their first pick in the draft, in the second round, but Dallas didn’t take one until the seventh. He thinks he’d have a better chance in Dallas, not only to play special teams but to make it as a receiver. He also knows one of Dallas’ coaches well after overlapping at his first college stop, and that familiarity helps to push him toward the Cowboys.
In the seventh round, the Titans select a small-school receiver, but it’s not our X.
When the draft is done, and the Cowboys draft room gets word that X has picked America’s Team, the staff holler and pound the table. They didn’t think he would be available after the draft, and the Broncos and Sean Payton — who brought X in for a visit and sent two scouts to his pro day, one of whom ran the workout — made for stiff competition.
Dallas had pulled off a damn coup.
We got David! They shouted.
As many of you correctly guessed in the comments section, in my direct messages and my email inbox, Prospect X is David Durden, who played wide receiver, returner, and one season of gunner for the University of West Florida, a Division II football program born in 2016.
Durden (6-foot-1, 204 pounds) started his college career at Mercer College’s FCS program, then transferred down when head coach Bobby Lamb was fired. His rusty Radiator Springs-like hometown is Midville, Georgia, population: 380. One reader-sleuth even turned to the
Google Reviews of Midville’s Dollar General to confirm Durden’s identity.
He ran a 4.46 at his pro day, and yes, it can get miserably cold in Pensacola, Florida. “The cold pro day gave it away for me,” one scout texted after the first story published. “My stopwatch finger is still blue.”
NFL evaluators track prospects’ ages like doting parents of newborns. Durden is 24 years and four months, which used to be an unheard-of age for a rookie. But now that players are using their extra year of eligibility from the 2020 season, old age isn’t as scary to evaluators as it once was.
Durden played four college seasons, two at Mercer and two at West Florida after the team didn’t play at all in 2020. He’s also older because missed the 2017 season exploring his alternative career as a professional baseball player.
“You were a redshirt freshman in college, well I was playing professional baseball,” Durden says.
Tom Kotchman, manager of the rookie-level affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, said that Durden only knew one speed. “Every time he hit a ball, he ran it out,” Kotchman says. “It doesn’t sound like it’s a big thing. But in the Gulf Coast rookie league where it’s 105 heat index every day, it’s like, pace yourself a little bit more.”
Kotchman had a long list of rules for his young players. If you called him “Coach” or showed up late, you could get fined. If you missed the first base bag, you had to take it home with you. No dipping allowed. “Learn these people’s names,” Kotchman said. “Study them. They’re making decisions on you. They’re not dude or guy or whatever. No, learn them and we go by first names.”
“I feel like I’m ready for the professional level because I already know how all that stuff works,” Durden says. “They don’t have to teach me that. I understand that when you make a mistake at that level, they take money out of your pocket.”
Kotchman said he thought Durden could have had a long baseball career if he wanted it. “I’m shocked I remember as much as I did about this kid,” Kotchman said. “But he made me remember, just by the way he played, and I was so impressed with how much improvement he kept making.”
Durden knew a lifetime of baseball wasn’t for him about midway through that summer, when during one long, boring and extremely hot game, Kotchman asked him a simple question. How is the game going?
“Kotch,” David answered. “I’m having more fun watching the grass grow.”
Mercer coaches were thrilled to hear from him and welcomed him back. By the time his rookie-league season ended, he was too late to enroll in classes, so he went to work on a farm and enrolled that winter.
David says Dallas “came out of nowhere” on Saturday. One of his agents, Patrick Sullivan, says, “Dallas wasn’t one that communicated with him as much as others before the draft.”
Cowboys director of college scouting Mitch LaPoint said McCarthy only called two or three players with recruiting pitches that day. The Cowboys’ scouting staff doesn’t ask the head coach to make calls unless it’s a guy they really, really want.
“We’ve had a lot of love for this guy,” LaPoint says. “We’ve been on David for a long time.”
The decision between drafting Durden or South Carolina’s Jalen Brooks, the receiver they took in the seventh round, came down to what other teams might do. LaPoint said the team felt Brooks was more likely to get drafted by somebody else in the seventh round.
Though Durden doesn’t remember the details of his conversation with McCarthy, LaPoint can fill in the blanks on Dallas’s sales pitch. Dallas lost receiver
Noah Brown in free agency, and LaPoint sees Durden fitting in nicely in the blocking receiver, core special teamer type of role that Brown vacated.
“We gave David some good money,” LaPoint says. “But I think the pitch really was this guy’s ability to play inside and outside and then the return value and special teams value. You’re gonna have a chance to compete there.”
LaPoint knows Payton and the Broncos made a strong pitch, but he thinks Durden’s relationship with Dallas assistant tight ends coach Chase Haslett, a former tight ends coach at Mercer, sealed the deal.
“I’m sure Denver was probably frustrated,” LaPoint says. “Because they put in the resources to bring him in.”
Durden’s agent, Bus Cook, is shocked he didn’t get drafted, and he thinks if Durden had played for an SEC program, he’d be a top 100 pick. “Sometimes the safer pick is to take a kid at an SEC school versus a Gulf South Conference school,” Cook says.
Durden never heard from his favorite midwestern team in the city by a lake, the
Cleveland Browns, nor the team by the ocean that also brought him in for a visit, the
Chargers. And Durden’s mom Jeana has her own opinion about those damn Titans.
“Honesty is the way we are around here,” she says. “You don’t hurt our feelings as long as you are honest. For somebody to not necessarily be honest is disappointing.”
As a mom, Jeana had a hard time watching her son work through what was true and what was not during the draft, and she told her husband John, “I’m gonna go get Botox tomorrow after all this stress.”
Durden signed his contract Sunday night, but he still doesn’t feel like he’s made it anywhere.
“I’ve never really needed a lot of motivation to want to play the game of football,” he says. “But this just will make it that much more fun to go out there and prove it — Hey, you didn’t pick me.”
Little Harper is the daughter of a family friend, and her guess on where David would score next ended up being the correct one. She might know more about the Cowboys than David does right now. He hadn’t even heard about the team’s massive The Star complex until after he made his decision.
But a fancy locker room and huge campus isn’t important to this Division II product. He’s tired of training by himself, and he’s itching to get back to real football. He’s exhausted from the entire process, and he can’t wait for rookie mini-camp to start. “I’m ready to run into somebody,” he says after waking up from a nap the day after the draft.
After being informed that no live contact would be allowed during camp, Durden replies, “Well, just playing football would be fine.”
After all, it’s better than baseball.
