MIAMI — This is a story about perseverance every substitute teacher should assign this week.
One week before last year’s Super Bowl, Colts starting right guard Kyle DeVan called his old high school principal, Ed Santopadre, looking for work. DeVan, cut three times by the Jets and once by the Redskins since going undrafted out of Oregon State in the 2008 NFL draft, had moved back home with his mother and stepfather in Vacaville, Calif.
“It was a tough time,” DeVan recalled Tuesday at Sun Life Stadium during Super Bowl Media Day. “I got my resume together and started to look at the future, figure out if I wanted to get into coaching and teaching and give up football.”
While DeVan fought that internal tug-of-war, he accepted Santopadre’s offer to fill in as a substitute teacher in his hometown district. The pay was $100 a day, but it bought DeVan some time to decide whether to keep his NFL dream alive.
Some mornings, DeVan walked into 5th-grade classrooms to his lesson plan for the day. On others, he taught high-school math. One day after school, the former California state heavyweight wrestling champion received the hint he had been searching for by paying closer attention to the mat.
“Just seeing how those wrestlers went out and competed every day, the things they do, it made me realize how much I missed athletics,” DeVan said.
When the coach of the Boise Burn of arenafootball2 called with an offer days later, DeVan proved just how much he missed it. The next morning he drove 10 hours from Vacaville, about 35 miles southwest of Sacramento, to Boise committed to resuming his football career.
He made $250 for Burn victories and $200 for losses — less than what he was making as a sub teacher back home. But it was professional football, even if Idaho still seemed farther away from Indianapolis in his head than it looked on the map.
“The Burn had a lineman get injured and I had nowhere else to go, no job, no place to play,” DeVan said. “I always felt like I could play in the NFL if I got the right system, the right team at the right time.”
Turns out the Colts were that system and that team at the right time for everyone. Just before last April’s NFL draft, DeVan’s agent, Leo Goeas, set up a workout in Indianapolis that not even Colts President Bill Polian could have predicted would be the first step toward signing a Super Bowl starter.
After agreeing to a contract that ended his AF2 career after four games, DeVan kept on making strong impressions through organized team activities and into training camp. He possessed quick feet and an even quicker grasp of the Colts’ complex offense that compensated for an undersized, 6-foot-2-inch, 306-pound body.
By midseason, he had beaten out Colts former second-round draft pick Mike Pollak for the starting job at right guard. Sunday against the Saints in Super Bowl XLIV, in DeVan’s 12th straight start, the former substitute teacher will be trying to school New Orleans’ defensive line.
“I don’t know how I did it,” DeVan said. “I just worked hard and believed in my dream.”
The reality is DeVan fits in perfectly on a Colts line of proud rejects that has given up only 10 quarterback sacks this season. Center Jeff Saturday spent a year out of football working for an electrical company in North Carolina before the Colts gave him a second chance to forge a Pro Bowl career. Left guard Ryan Lilja was cut by the Chiefs when the Colts found him.
Polian’s plan: Find hungry linemen, never starve for success.
“Very rarely do you find guys who have gone Kyle’s route,” coach Jim Caldwell said.
Not everyone’s awed. Lilja chided DeVan for sharing his tale with strangers so publicly in a way that only buying dinner for every Colts lineman will forgive. Saturday kidded that the more attention America pays DeVan’s story, the more “pitiful,” he makes it sound.
“You’ll think the guy has been really struggling but as you can tell by his physique he was not missing meals,” Saturday said. “And we tell him, ‘Don’t ever forget, we all know, you are still above (300 pounds). Don’t pretend.”
Then Saturday got real.
“I think for anyone to be out there makes you appreciate a lot about the NFL,” Saturday said.
Back in Vacaville High, they appreciate DeVan more this week than they ever did when he was roaming the halls. Rather anonymously roaming the halls.
“You couldn’t find five students here who knew Kyle was a football player because to them he was just a big guy walking around the halls, talking Shakespeare with students and watching the weight room,” said Santopadre, the principal. “But he was good at it and could control a classroom. …There’s something about having a 305-pound guy who was a former state wrestling champ around that makes you feel safe.”
Peyton Manning can attest to that.
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