Kwity Paye College

Kwity Paye's college career is the sort of tale that sounds fabricated after three pints down the pub: a lad born in Guinea, raised in Rhode Island, who rocked up to Ann Arbor and spent four years making Big Ten offensive tackles seriously reconsider their career choices. Paye joined the University of Michigan as a raw, absurdly athletic defensive end and departed as a first-round NFL Draft pick — a rather tidy return on investment for somebody who apparently didn't play organised American football until his sophomore year of high school. Whilst everybody else was busy memorising the playbook, Paye was busy learning the entire sport from scratch. He got rather good at it, rather quickly.

Ann Arbor: Where Kwity Paye Became an Absolute Menace

Paye landed in Michigan's 2017 recruiting class out of Bishop Hendricken High School, a place better known for producing tidy, well-mannered young men than 260-pound human battering rams. He redshirted in 2017, which is essentially a polite way of saying the coaching staff wanted to keep him away from the buffet table and inside the weights room for a year. It worked. By 2018 he was rotating in, and by 2019 he had properly arrived: 12.5 tackles for loss and 6.5 sacks, a stat line that had NFL scouts suddenly developing a keen interest in Michigan's defensive line meetings. His 2020 campaign was a strange, pandemic-shortened affair, but Paye still did enough in a handful of games to collect All-Big Ten recognition, which is impressive given that half the country was apparently doing its Christmas shopping in October. What made Paye so maddening for opponents wasn't merely the size — it was the speed. A man that large should not be able to move that quickly, yet there he was, chasing down running backs in the open field like an unusually muscular postman who has spotted you pretending not to be in. Michigan's coaches used him everywhere: hand in the dirt, standing up, dropping into coverage, presumably making tea at half-time. He was, in short, a nightmare wrapped in maize and blue. By the time the 2021 NFL Draft rolled around, the Indianapolis Colts snapped him up with the 21st overall pick, and Michigan fans were left with nothing but fond memories and a lingering sense of relief that they'd never had to block him. Paye's college career wasn't the longest or the loudest, but it was the sort of story that turns a bloke who'd barely seen a gridiron into one of the most feared defensive ends in the Big Ten. Not bad for a late starter. Not bad at all.