Byron Young spends his Sundays defending counters, but it wasn’t that long ago that he was working behind one.
The rookie linebacker has stepped up on the Los Angeles Rams’ defense this season. At 25 years old, he is older than most first-year players in the NFL, and an atypical stop on his football journey helped get him to the league.
Young played high school football at Carvers Bay in Hemingway, S.C., about 30 miles from his hometown of Hemingway, but was hardly recruited by any colleges after graduating in 2017. He soon found himself in Columbus – Georgia, not Ohio – working at a Dollar General.
The retail gig was certainly a detour for Young, as he spent more than a year there before walking on to play JuCo at Georgia Military College in 2020. Still, it was a place that helped him mature into a future NFL player.
I’d say just being a hard worker and being somebody that’s really disciplined,” said in an interview with NBC about what he learned at Dollar General. “I was really disciplined at that job and showing up on time and being reliable and everything. Just building on my work ethic. I feel like it really kept me humble and made me a harder worker.”
Once he got to Georgia Military, he said his NFL aspirations “became real.”
He played one JuCo season before transferring to Tennessee. He thrived at the SEC school, leading the Volunteers in sacks in 2021 (5.5 sacks, tied for first) and 2022 (seven sacks), and was named to the 2022 All-SEC First Team by the conference’s coaches.
