Dreaming of the NFL: Unlikely prospects still hope for the big time

Kyle Loomis just didn’t like college. He was a punter for Oregon State, a major college program in the Power 5 Pac-12. He had a big leg as a kicker, and Loomis was on his way as a pro prospect. Then classes got in the way. He quit.

“I was really sick of school. I was burned out on school,” He said. “I just wanted to figure out what I wanted to do. I had even thought about doing something militarywise while I was in high school.”

Loomis, 27, signed up for the airborne infantry in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, and stayed in the military for four years. Ankle surgery prevented him from going overseas when his unit deployed.

But he still had plenty of bang left in his foot when he left the service and decided to go back to college. Randomly, he picked up a football again. “I was helping a family friend punt. He wanted a few tips. I showed up and hit a few balls and realized I could still do it,” Loomis said.

He could not only still do it; he could do it well. At Portland State he led the nation (FCS, Football Championship Series) in punting as a junior and senior. In practices in Mobile this week, the ball boomed off his foot with distance, height and a tight spiral. Phil Savage, the CEO of the Senior Bowl and a former NFL general manager, said Loomis will end up in a preseason camp next season for an NFL team either as a draft pick or invited free agent.

He has had three years of school and is studying criminology. He needs 28 more credits for a degree. His graduating class has been out of high school three years, so he is eligible for the draft.

“I wasn’t thinking about ever playing football again. I was committed to the military,” Loomis said. “When I was deciding what school I wanted to go back to get my degree, that’s when I decided I could play football again.”

As a high school senior, Jaquiski Tartt weighed 183 pounds as a defensive back at Davidson High School in Mobile. He could run, but he was light and had played just one year of high school football. He had been a basketball player.

The big schools, like Alabama and Auburn, prefer their defensive backs to be sturdier for the rock-em, sock-em Southeastern Conference and more developed. The big schools also try to nail down commitments from players when they are high school juniors, but Tartt was in basketball. He was an unknown.

But he has changed. At 22, he is still 6 foot 1 but now weighs 220 pounds and is as fast as he was at 183. The side story is that he is the best friend of Jimmie Ward, a safety for the San Francisco 49ers. Overlooked at Davidson High, just like Tartt, Ward went to Northern Illinois and became a first-round pick.

Tartt graduated from Samford in December with a degree in geography with a specialty in geographic information systems, or computer mapping. It will be a while before he uses the degree, as NFL.com projects him as an eventual NFL starter.

“If you do the right thing, if you play hard, if you have some skill, the NFL will find you, even at a small school,” he said.

Duke has a solid, major college athletic program, but it is known more for turning out professionals in basketball than football. Laken Tomlinson navigated through one of the toughest academic institutions to become an All-American guard and an NFL prospect, but that is not the most compelling part of his journey.

He moved to Chicago from Jamaica in March 2003. In his home country, he played cricket and soccer and was mostly barefoot. The Chicago neighborhood where his mother unpacked the family was not outdoor friendly in March, and bare feet would have met broken glass.

“Chicago is dangerous. I grew up in Rogers Park, and around that time it was the edge of a rough patch, crime-wise. It had a lot of big gang busts,” he said.

A mentor, Bob Sperling, guided Tomlinson into a prep school in downtown Chicago, but to make that work, Tomlinson had to take a subway and bus, a 1 hour and 40 minute commute to school every morning for four years. He got up at 5:30 a.m.

Tomlinson, who at 22 is 6 foot 3 and 330 pounds, turned down a scholarship offer from national champion Ohio State and went to Duke. If a career in football doesn’t work out for him — though most scouts in Mobile expect it will — he will fall back on a Duke degree, which he earned in December: a double major in psychology and evolutionary anthropology.

Sometimes, impatience will take a prospect off the rails.

Lynden Trail, 23, is 6 foot 6 and 260 pounds and can run 40 yards in 4.5 or 4.6 seconds — better than average for a linebacker. He was a touted high school recruit out of Miami’s Overtown neighborhood, an especially disadvantaged part of the city. He does not want to go back to those streets as a flop.

“The area I came up in Miami, historic Overtown, is not the best area in the world, but the best thing my mother taught me, man, was that you don’t have to be a product of your environment,” said Trail, who has a 9-year-old daughter and a steady girlfriend in Virginia. “I try and push forward and inspire those still there who are trying to do things with their lives as well.”

He signed with the University of Florida out of high school but languished on the depth chart in 2011 as a second-team player because the Gators had stockpiled sensational defensive linemen under coach Will Muschamp. Trail said he worked hard to get playing time but felt he was being overlooked and decided to transfer. This is a point where prospects become suspects. They lose their work ethic and confidence and disappear.

Trail got back on track. He said the same 70 schools who recruited him in high school inquired about him when he announced his decision to transfer. His high school coaches suggested a mellower environment at Norfolk State, an FCS school. “I found some peace there,” he said.

He could find a job after this week. Pro scouts are looking at him as a possible tight end but also as a difficult matchup for an offensive lineman because of his height and speed.

Ali Marpet may be the only player in Mobile looking for a job to pay off college debt. Everyone else at the Senior Bowl likely was on an athletic scholarship, but Hobart is Division III, which does not permit athletic grants-in-aid. “It costs $57,000 a year to go to school there,” he said. He received some aid, and paying his debt, he said, is “not going to be pretty.”

Marpet, 21, will earn a degree in economics this spring from Hobart, a small private school in Geneva, New York. He knows the big money of the NFL would knock out that debt quickly, but can he get an NFL job coming from a small school as a 290-pound offensive lineman? No player from Hobart has ever been drafted by an NFL team, he said.

“He’ll project as a player. Somebody will take him because of his toughness,” said a scout who could not be quoted on the record talking about prospects.

Marpet played at a small high school in New York that was off the radar for the big schools that recruit in the East, so he decided on Hobart, a terrific small school football program.

“When I was first going to Hobart, it was not a realistic dream to play in the NFL, but when Blesto and National [two national scouting services] came by and I was able to run a 40 for them, they saw some athleticism to go with size,” he said.

“I’m not intimidated by the big-school players. Once I worked out with guys from the SEC, I knew I could hang with them. The first few plays were quick, but after that, I got used to it.”