Montgomery Takes Mobile; The Excitable Dunker

MOBILE, ALABAMA - You may have heard some hype about John Carroll University wide receiver Tyren Montgomery this week. Everything you heard is 100% true. The lad looks like Julio Jones.

Montgomery made the Catch of the Day on Tuesday, before I arrived in Mobile for Senior Bowl practices. I got to see him make the Catch of the Day again on Wednesday, climbing a ladder in the end zone to snatch a Cole Payton bomb away from San Diego State cornerback Chris Johnson. He reeled in another impressive catch along the sideline a few plays later, juking his defender with a quick move upfield, but by then the press pool had awesomeness fatigue.

Montgomery stands just over 5-foot-11 but looks bigger. He has natural speed and fluidity. He jumps like a spider cricket. Wearing his gold helmet, he looked like a polished Notre Dame receiver, not a tiny-program wonder who never played a down of football, even in the sandlot, until about five years ago.

Montgomery was a basketball player in high school. He graduated in 2019 and walked on for the LSU basketball team. He returned home after one semester due to a family illness and academic issues.

Montgomery had a football epiphany while tossing the pigskin around with his younger brother in the backyard. His brother, about 13 at the time, told Montgomery that he could play in the NFL. “Me and my brother, we’re two peas in a pod,” Montgomery said. “So yeah, I listened to him.”

Montgomery posted videos of his backyard exploits on Facebook, caught the attention of a flag football coach, played in a flag tournament in Vegas, then parlayed his flag football highlights to get a chance to play for Nicholls State.

What do you think is the most unlikely part of Montgomery’s 100% true story so far? For me, it’s a pair of teenagers in 2020 actually using Facebook.

Anyway, Montgomery needed a year to clean up his academics, played eight games for Nicholls State in 2023, caught 12 passes, suffered a minor injury and ran out of eligibility. He could still play at the DIII level, however, so he ended up playing for the John Carroll University Blue Streaks, catching 32 touchdown passes in two seasons and breaking all sorts of program records.

Montgomery was invited to the American Bowl, one of the lower-level all-star showcases only hardcore draftniks think about, and performed well enough to earn a “call up” to the Senior Bowl.

“I ran my first route at like the age of 19,” Montgomery told Camryn Justice of News5 Cleveland, the source for much of the biography outlined above. “Whenever I started doing the flag football stuff and I realized my abilities … I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this league thing, this is me.’ I felt like it was my calling in life.”

When I got a chance to speak to Montgomery on Thursday, I asked him if he ever even “ran a route” say, in the playground at recess before age 19.

“No, I was a basketball player,” he said. “I used to brush my mom off. She used to tell me I was going to be an NFL star, and I used to be like, ‘Mom, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m going to the NBA.’”

Seriously? No sandlot football? Not even: go out 10 steps and make a cut next to the Buick?

“No. I mean, if I was cutting, I probably was doing a crossover dribble.”

Did Montgomery even watch football? “I had no interest.”

What about Madden? “No Madden. Just NBA 2K. Take MyCareer [a game mode] and grind it. And Call of Duty.”

The preceding highlight reel gave me the giggles; Montgomery (now 24 years old) looks like an uncle dusting some Pop Warner lads to teach them a lesson in humility. Montgomery is well aware that he faced low-level competition and has a lot to both learn and prove. “I ain’t been playing that long, so I feel like everything has room for improvement.”

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of a 24-year old DIII guy with an implausible backstory who suddenly becomes the talk of the Senior Bowl. Small school sensations who take Mobile by storm often end up as WR4-types in the NFL. If they are lucky enough to go that far.

Fine. But let me dream that an undiscovered All Pro is about the take the NFL by storm and invent the hoops-to-flag-to-stardom pipeline. And that I was among the lucky ones who saw him first.

Iowa offensive tackle Gennings Dunker has unruly ginger hair, a moustache that could mop up a fifth of Scotch, and a problem.

“Sometimes I get too excited,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “Like sometimes I need to hit a single and I’m, you know, I’m going for a triple or sometimes even a home run.”