NFL Draft: Is Thomas Perry the most unlikely pick in this year’s class?

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Shortly before he turned 16, Thomas Perry surprised his parents with a very unusual request for a birthday present. At the same age that many kids beg for a trendy car or truck to drive, Perry asked for a single oversized tractor tire.

Amused but curious, Perry’s dad asked his son why exactly he wanted the tire.

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“So I can flip it up and down the road,” the young offensive lineman responded matter-of-factly.

The monstrous tire that the family acquired weighed several hundred pounds and came up to Perry’s chest. Flipping it end-over-end became a staple of Perry’s workouts, first around his cul de sac, then to the main road and back and eventually a mile and a half to and from the center of his small, rural Connecticut hometown.

“He would push himself harder and harder,” his mom Karen told Yahoo Sports.

Stories like that help explain how Perry is on the precipice of accomplishing a remarkable feat. He is the rare 21-year-old with the self discipline and drive to will himself into becoming a legitimate NFL prospect while playing for an academically rigorous Vermont liberal arts college where football dreams aren’t supposed to blossom.

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Middlebury College is a member of a conference that doesn’t allow its football programs to participate in the NCAA Division III postseason, let alone serve as a pipeline to the NFL. Opportunities for coaches to hold offseason practices or workouts are limited, so it’s up to individual players to work by themselves if they want to improve.

The most successful athletes that Middlebury has produced are world-class ski racers drawn to the school because of its remote location between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. The only former Middlebury football player ever to crack an NFL roster is a place kicker, former Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl champion Stephen Hauschka.

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And yet here is Perry, an interior offensive lineman with enough promise and upside to entice 25 NFL teams to send scouts to western central Vermont this past fall. The 6-foot-3, 317-pound senior is projected as a possible day three NFL draft pick on Saturday after earning an invitation to the East-West Shrine Bowl in February and outperforming pass rushers from powerhouse programs.

Should Perry fail to latch on with an NFL team as a late-round pick or an undrafted free agent, he has a heck of a backup career option to pursue. Perry demonstrates the same attention to detail in the classroom that he does on the football field, maintaining a 3.92 GPA as a molecular biology and biochemistry major and mathematics minor. He’ll have his choice of medical schools after his football career is over.

“He’s a rare human being, man,” Duke Manyweather, a renowned offensive line trainer who has worked with Perry, told Yahoo Sports. “I’ve coached future hall of farmers, all-pros, pro-bowlers, highly intellectual players, players from Princeton, players from Yale. This dude is different. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Blame the pandemic

How did Middlebury College happen to develop a draft-worthy offensive lineman, a weight-room wonder who might be the strongest player in this year’s draft class? Blame the COVID-19 pandemic for derailing the end of Perry’s high school career and wreaking havoc on his recruitment.

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Perry was a two-sport standout at Haddam-Killingworth High, a small-town public school in Connecticut’s lowest-enrollment division. As a junior, Perry earned all-league honors as an undersized 6-foot-1, 250-pound offensive lineman and took third in the heavyweight division of the 2020 state open wrestling tournament.

That was supposed to be a springboard for a big senior year.

Then the pandemic hit.

Out of nowhere, the spread of COVID-19 wiped out the spring and summer camp circuit before Perry’s senior year and canceled his final season of high school football as well. The only film that Perry had to show would-be recruiters was video highlights from his junior season at Haddam-Killingworth.

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“If it weren’t for COVID, I think he probably would have been off to an Ivy League school or maybe UConn,” Perry’s dad Scott told Yahoo Sports.

Instead, those schools all passed on Perry — even Brown, the Ivy League program where his dad and uncle both played.

The most desirable remaining options were academically prestigious D-III programs, schools where Perry could fulfill his goals as a football player and a science major. Middlebury especially appealed to Perry because of the abundant nearby ski slopes and hiking and mountain biking trails.

When Middlebury coach Doug Mandigo watched clips from Perry’s junior season, he was impressed but not awed.

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“His film was good,” Mandigo said, but “it was a bad level and he was undersized.”

The deciding factor was that Perry was an ideal academic fit.

“He had a great high school transcript, he was a good player on film and he was looking for this kind of environment,” Mandigo said. “We were one of the only D-III schools to offer.”

‘This kid is different’

It took all of one day for the Middlebury football coaches to recognize that they had unearthed a hidden gem. Perry arrived on campus standing an inch and a half taller and carrying 25 more pounds of muscle than he had when he last visited the previous year.

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His first session in the weight room remains legendary at Middlebury. Other staffers barged into offensive line coach Dave Caputi’s office to tell him he had to come see how much the new kid was lifting.

“He showed up the strongest kid in our program,” Caputi told Yahoo Sports.

The run-heavy Wing-T system that Perry’s high school coach favored did not prepare him for pass protection on downfield throws, but he worked tirelessly when he came to Middlebury to overcome that learning curve. When Mandigo would take his son to campus for early Saturday morning skating sessions at the hockey rink, he’d often find Perry hard at work inside the school’s fieldhouse doing pass protection drills by himself.

The strict diet that Perry has followed since late in his junior year of high school further highlights his self discipline. Eager to consume enough protein and calories to promote muscle growth and weight gain, Perry wolfs down a 12-egg breakfast each morning. He washes that down with three glasses of whole milk, part of his mission to drink a gallon of milk a day.

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Perry’s favorite hobby is basically testing the limits of what his body can handle. He loves the stuff normal people dread. He’s been known to go on marathon-length solo hikes just for fun or to bike up to 100 miles on mountain terrain.

Nowhere is Perry’s desire to challenge himself more apparent than in the weight room. He performs feats of strength worthy of powerlifters and strongman competitors. The Middlebury coaches began videoing Perry bench pressing 380 pounds 12 times, squatting nearly 600 pounds or hex-bar deadlifting 725 pounds.

“We were afraid no one was going to believe he could put up those numbers,” Caputi said with a laugh.

While Perry broke into Middlebury’s starting lineup midway through his freshman season and earned first-team all-league honors the next three years, the extent of his potential became clear as he began to learn to harness his physical gifts. Perry’s senior-year film is littered with man-amongst-boys clips of him ragdolling overmatched defensive linemen or redirecting one would-be pass rusher and then stonewalling the next.

“He would bury guys in our league, throttle guys in our league,” Mandigo said. “Honestly, it was funny to watch at times.”

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A pivotal moment in Perry’s development occurred last year when he entered the orbit of one of football’s most influential offensive line gurus. Duke Manyweather watched video from Perry’s junior season and came away intrigued by the Middlebury offensive lineman’s blend of power, agility and all-out hustle.

Last July, Perry cut short an internship doing medical research in a lab at Yale to come hone his craft under the tutelage of Manyweather at his facility in Frisco, Texas. For five weeks, Perry trained alongside all-pro NFL linemen like the Philadelphia Eagles’ Lane Johnson and top-tier prospects like LSU’s Will Campbell.

At first, Manyweather noticed members of his training group sizing up Perry with a skeptical eye. The quiet, shy science major from the tiny New England liberal arts school showed up, as Manyweather puts it, “dressed like somebody’s dad.” Perry wore white Nike Monarchs and a solid-colored polo shirt tucked into some khaki pants.

The doubts about Perry melted away as soon as the small talk stopped and the training began. Heavy metal music blasting from his headphones, Perry gave maximum effort on every lift, every rep, every drill. He brought the same focus and attention to detail during film breakdowns.

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“All of a sudden it goes from, ‘Who is this awkward kid? to ‘Oh s—, this kid’s different,’” Manyweather told Yahoo Sports. “It’s almost a Superman transformation. Clark Kent turns into his alter ego.”

SUBHEAD

Ignored by the major-college and professional ranks when he was a player, Manyweather saw a little of himself in Perry. The former offensive lineman at Division II Humboldt State made it his mission to spread the word about Perry and help get him exposure.

Last August, Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy scouted Perry at Manyweather’s urging and posted a praiseworthy evaluation to social media. Perry “is going to blow up the Combine next March,” Nagy tweeted, adding that it was “scary to think what he’ll do to poor D3 kids” during his senior season.

The endorsement from Nagy turned heads in the scouting community, as did Perry headlining Bruce Feldman’s annual college football Freaks list a few days later. Soon after that, NFL scouts began arranging visits to come watch Perry in person and began peppering Mandigo with questions about how he recruited Perry to Middlebury and about his upside.

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Scouts had enough interest in seeing Perry face stronger competition that two college all-star games both included him on their midseason watch lists. When the Senior Bowl only selected Perry as an alternate, the Middlebury offensive lineman accepted an invitation to be the only D-III player at the East-West Shrine Bowl.

A week of practices in front of NFL scouts offered Perry the platform that he needed to prove that he wasn’t a product of lackluster competition. Playing center for the first time after lining up almost exclusively at left guard during college, Perry still more than held his own against top pass rushers from Georgia, Florida, Nebraska and other big-name programs.

“I told everyone he wasn’t going to embarrass himself, and, sure as s—, he had a great showing,” Manyweather said. “It was him getting on guys and they couldn’t do anything. He was ending the fight before it even started with some of his aggressive sets.”

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Those close to Perry envision him as more of a high-upside developmental prospect than one who is ready to contribute to an NFL team right away. They liken him to a college sophomore in terms of football experience, given the loss of his final high school season and Middlebury’s nine-game seasons and limited offseason practice opportunities.

Where will Perry be selected on Saturday? As always, it’s difficult to say. The feedback that Manyweather has received has been anywhere from the fifth to seventh round. The volume of phone calls about Perry has picked up this week, Manyweather said. NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport described Perry on Tuesday as “a small school sleeper … generating a ton of buzz.”

Only a handful of current NFL players have made the leap from Division III to pro football. None have taken a more improbable path than Perry. Even Mandigo admits that Middlebury producing an NFL-caliber prospect “might never happen again.”

If Perry beats the odds, it will be because of his self discipline as much as his talent.

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Manyweather is the sort of rare bird who arrives at work every morning at 4 a.m. He usually gets a morning workout in and then gets everything prepped for the rest of his workday.

Imagine Manyweather’s surprise this winter when Perry also began showing up to the facility by 4:15 a.m. every morning. He would use the hyperbaric chamber or the light beds and prepare his body for the training group’s 6 a.m. workout.

“He was there every single morning,” Manyweather said, “and at first it would piss me off because I like that time in the morning to be my time.”

Eventually, Manyweather came to realize that Perry was his type of person, focused, hard working and determined.

“He’s incredibly disciplined,” Manyweather said. “That discipline in everything he does is what is going to set him apart.”

This news was originally published on this post .

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