If your favorite team wants their top draft pick to care about nothing else outside of football, Oregon edge defender Kayvon Thibodeaux probably isn’t their guy.
If they want a dominant pass rusher who will make life miserable for opposing quarterbacks on the regular, regardless of his other interests, they should race to the podium and make sure they land him come April.
Thibodeaux continues to shoot down questions about his love and passion for football, and he did the same when asked about it Friday morning at the 2022 NFL Scouting Combine.
“I don’t think I necessarily had to convince teams of it, but that’s the media narrative, right? There always has to be some narrative that’s drawn,” Thibodeaux said, via NFL.com. “For me, I’m an L.A. kid. If you know the adversity I went through to get here and the things that I had to sacrifice and the things that my mother had to sacrifice for me to be here, you’d really understand how I feel in my heart. When you talk about fire, when you talk about passion, you can’t even really explain it. I get emotional even thinking about it. All the sacrifices it took me to get here, I wouldn’t have made all those sacrifices if I didn’t love the game. I’m blessed to be here and I’m just happy that these teams want to get to know me.”
Ever since he set foot on campus at Oregon, Thibodeaux has been destined for the top of the draft, thanks to a rare combination of size, athleticism and explosiveness. Despite missing a decent chunk of the 2021 season due to injury, Thibodeaux is still widely regarded as one of the most talented and promising prospects in this year’s class.
Thibodeaux’s not the first top prospect to deal with concerns about the fact that football might not be all he cares about, and he won’t be the last. Any team that passes on him for that reason, though, will be making a huge mistake.
