PROSPECT X RETREATS to the basement of his parents' house. Upstairs, his grandmas, aunts, step-grandpa, cousins, best friend, best friend's girlfriend, his girlfriend, his older brother and their parents are waiting in the family room. X felt a little nervous this morning, but he's enjoying the mini family reunion, and he has entertained them with tidbits about the draft process and his college teammates who have been drafted. He has been so busy with football the past five years that he can't remember the last time he spent so much time with them.
But the family room was getting loud, and as the fifth round stretched on, he needed some quiet to take the flood of calls coming from his agent and from coaches with two NFL clubs that brought him in on one of their 30 predraft visits.
X has received so many calls and texts that he's starting to lose track of time and space. The club with multiple fifth-round picks that his agent thought was his most likely landing spot took another player at his position, so they are now unlikely to draft him.
But then X's phone rings. It's that club. When he sees the number on the screen, he thinks this could be The Call.
Maybe: Super Bowl-winning head coach
It's immediately clear that the head coach isn't calling to draft X. He's calling to remind X of the bond between them, a connection formed on X's visit. He's calling to tell him how well they fit together and how much they'd love to have him in their city -- that is, if they can't draft him with their final pick.
X is appreciative but frustrated. Thoughts of going undrafted invade his mind as the sixth round of the draft creeps along.
Upstairs, his girlfriend, Hannah, can't stand the waiting. She has her arms around X's mom, Renae. One of X's grandmothers stands at the door to the basement stairs, straining to hear his conversations. His aunt walks by the door on her way to get something.
"I wasn't trying to overhear," she tells the rest of the family. "But I heard something about the [head coach's club] and something about signing."
Hannah and Renae both stand up from the couch at the same time to head downstairs. Renae surrenders and sends Hannah as the family representative to see what's going on.
X's aunt is wrong. X is actually having a really hard time deciding between the head coach's club (Club A) and Club B, in the same division. If he goes undrafted, he's leaning toward Club B, because he feels a stronger connection to the defensive coordinator, who spent a lot of time with him on his visit and has been in touch with him almost every day since. He'd also love to learn from their famous star pass rusher.
Hannah texts an update to Renae to try to calm her down: He's thinking Club B.
Then Renae hears X raise his deep voice. She can't quite make out his exact words, but his tone has turned and the conversation sounds spirited. The draft is now well into the sixth round, and she's worried.
She'd asked him earlier that day if he was OK with going undrafted, and he told her no. He wanted that seal of approval, he wanted to achieve his goal and he wanted to do it for all of his family supporting him. Bottles of champagne are chilling in the fridge -- she'd bought them earlier, hoping they'd have a chance to make a toast.
"Jerry, you better go down there!" she tells her husband, X's dad.
Jerry and X's older brother Adam make it downstairs just in time to hear X say, "If a kicker gets drafted before me, I am going to lose my s---!"
X is blunt, and known for telling it like it is. Adam reminds X it's all politics at this point, but he feels proud of his little brother, because that fiery attitude is what has taken him this far in football.
Thankfully, X doesn't see the television screen when the Packers draft a kicker with the last pick of the sixth round because he's back on the phone with Club A.
This time, it's the defensive coordinator. They'd thought X was a lock to sign with them after the draft, and now they hear he's leading toward Club B? The defensive coordinator makes his last-ditch plea, similar to that of the head coach.
Club A wants X badly. He's one of their top priorities in undrafted free agency, and with about 25 total picks left in the draft, they need to finalize this as soon as possible or move on to other free agents.
"I would love to play for you too," X says. "So you guys should just pick me. I'm a great player and I'm gonna be great for your locker room."
But Club A isn't going to draft another edge rusher with its final pick, and not when a player at a valuable position is surprisingly still on the board. Before the defensive coordinator can change X's mind, a Jacksonville area code interrupts.
"Sorry, coach, I'm getting a call," he says. "Can I answer it?"
X hangs up to answer the Jaguars.
X has heard directly from the Jaguars only once that day. A personnel staffer sent him a long text with multiple bullet points selling the team and the Jacksonville player lifestyle -- a blatant free agent recruiting pitch. X thinks this call is going to be a lot more of that.
"Hey, we're on the clock in the seventh round, pick 233, and we're going to select you to be a Jacksonville Jaguar and we can't wait for you to come kick everybody's ass," a voice on the other end says.
X has been emotionally stable all day, but those words, Select You To Be A Jacksonville Jaguar, are the password that unlocks a vault of tears.
Six seconds pass by in silence. X is so overwhelmed that he doesn't know who he's talking to and he can't form words.
"... You good?" asks the voice on the other end.
"Yeah," X says, fighting with his own body to speak over his uncontrollable sobs.
"Awesome. Here's your head coach, Liam Coen, he's going to talk to you."
Adam has never seen his brother break down this way before.
When X's name flashes on the ESPN broadcast minutes later, his family cheers. He tries to bury his face in his black T-shirt, then rests his head on his tattooed arms and cries again.
"Oh, Zach, we're all so proud of you!" his grandma, Ellen, says. "What are they saying about Zach? I can't hear."
The broadcast said nothing about Zach for several minutes, until the crew mispronounced his name when listing off multiple seventh-round picks: Zach Doo-Free.
It's Zach Durfee, but that's OK. He accustomed to anonymity.
AS MANY READERS correctly guessed on X, and as one general manager speculated in his postdraft news conference, Prospect X is Zach Durfee, edge rusher, Washington, former Division II walk-on at the University of Sioux Falls.
Despite playing a premier position for a Power 4 team and being on Washington's 2023 roster that went to the national championship game, Durfee was overlooked because he played in only 17 games over three seasons. He sat out the better part of two seasons because of red tape (he was denied an NCAA two-time transfer waiver in 2023) and injuries (he dislocated his elbow, had surgery for turf toe, and then dislocated the other elbow).
Obscuring him even more, Durfee started his college career, improbably, as a normal student. In student-athlete terms, he was a muggle, or a NARP, a non-athletic regular person, when he enrolled as a freshman at North Dakota State in the fall of 2020. Durfee graduated from Dawson-Boyd High School in Dawson, Minnesota (population 1,466) and originally committed to play Division III basketball at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.
He wasn't recruited to play football because he'd done a sideways flip that "he had no intention of landing" at a captain's practice the summer before his senior football season and broke his leg on said landing. Durfee still doesn't like to discuss his freak accident because he's convinced he would have received a football offer that year if he'd just been able to play -- at quarterback.
That spring, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted life, and threatened to eliminate most of his freshman basketball season. So Durfee withdrew from Gustavus Adolphus and enrolled at North Dakota State, thinking he would have a more normal college experience at a bigger school.
But nothing was normal that year, and Durfee missed the routine and purpose of playing sports, so he spent a lot of time lifting weights at the school's rec center. A strength coach noticed this 6-foot-4 kid who spent so much time in the gym, and told him he should join the football team.
Durfee tried to walk on to the Bisons' football team as a tight end, but the team wouldn't take him, citing pandemic restrictions.
"That got his wheels turning," Jerry says.
So Zach left Fargo after the fall semester and went back home to reset.
"He was just down in the dumps," Renae says. "The COVID year was hard, just feeling kind of lost and just very different, and he didn't handle that as well as others."
His parents gave him one semester to figure out what he wanted to do next. That's when he sent out his basketball highlights to small college football recruiting coordinators in his area and walked on to the University of Sioux Falls football team for the fall of 2021.
Zach had always had size and rare athletic ability, but up to that point, he hadn't performed to his athletic potential. Something was missing.
Jerry said he once challenged Zach to play better when he coached him in fifth-grade tackle football. It was the only time he played defensive end before college. "Oh, that poor person on the other side of the line after I [did] that, it shocked me," Jerry said. "We would see glimpses of that throughout his athletic career, but it just wasn't that consistent."
Zach struggled in summer conditioning but kept showing up. Renae says that a day or two before the home opener during his redshirt season, Zach told his parents he was stressed out because he was sick with a cold, had lost a toenail and was worried about getting behind on his schoolwork.
"He texted my husband and I that he wanted to quit," Renae says. "And we're like, 'No. No, you don't get to. You have to finish this out.' And then the next week, he was scout team defensive player of the week, and it's like something clicked in him. He bought into what was going on, and he took off from there."
"It was a killer instinct thing," Adam says. "When that flip switched in him, I think it had a lot to do with him stepping away from sports and realizing I really want to be an athlete again."
Zach hadn't played football in two years, and hadn't played defensive end since childhood, so he redshirted that season and spent the year developing into the best scout-team edge rusher.
"He did not know how to get into a stance, did not know how to read an offensive lineman for his key," says Luke Olson, his position coach at Sioux Falls. "... You could just see him watching scout team film during the year, just figuring it out day by day, week by week, and he started winning a good amount of reps."
In the 2022 season opener at Minnesota State Moorhead, Durfee's first college game, he had four sacks on only 23 snaps.
When the Cougars played their crosstown rivalry trophy game against Augustana, where Zach's older brother Adam had played baseball, he had three sacks and was named the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference defensive player of the week.
"From a measurement standpoint, he translated to a different level of football," his then-head coach Jon Anderson says.
He finished with 11 sacks and was named first team all-conference, but Sioux Falls missed the playoffs and fired Anderson and his staff. The coaches who had welcomed him and created his first home in college football were gone, so Durfee entered the transfer portal.
In January 2023, the NCAA still had transfer restrictions in place. The NCAA allowed student-athletes to transfer one time without having to sit a "year in residence" before becoming eligible, but Durfee knew when he entered the portal that the NCAA considered him a two-time transfer. His next college would be his third, meaning he would need the NCAA to grant him a waiver to allow him to play that season.
But neither he nor the bigger colleges he visited thought that would be a problem because Durfee never played a sport at North Dakota State and wasn't recruited to play a sport there, so his transfer to Sioux Falls had nothing to do with athletic competition. Plus, Sioux Falls fired the coaching staff and Durfee's freshman year had been the COVID-19-impacted 2020 season.
Durfee visited Washington partially because Anderson had coached with then-Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer when DeBoer was the head coach at Sioux Falls. But the small-town boy instantly hated Seattle when he arrived for his visit. "All I'm seeing is skyscrapers or big, big buildings on the drive over there," he says. "It's all city. And I was like, 'Yeah, this is not the place for me.'"
Seattle couldn't have been more different than the town where he grew up, with one flashing red stoplight. The one that had a Dairy Queen and a Subway and a bakery where he loved to stop to get an apple fritter. The one that revolved around the high school sports teams. Renae says Zach could be "a stinker" at home, but Jerry says they knew their son was a good kid because they'd get reports from their neighbors and people they knew in town about how nice he was to the little kids who looked up to him.
Despite his initial disgust at big-city life, Durfee committed to Washington the day after his visit because he felt a familiarity with the coaching staff, and because they told him they'd be playing in the national championship game. The coaches were right about that, but they didn't anticipate that Durfee wouldn't be on the field to help them get there.
The NCAA denied Washington's application for Durfee's waiver in July. When Renae got Zach's text with the news, she was so mad that she channeled her anger into cleaning her entire house. "Your heart drops to your stomach," she says. "Even talking about it now, I still just get bitter."
"He should have been able to tell his story and common sense prevail," Jerry says. "But that was not the case."
Durfee says the NCAA never interviewed him directly during the process.
Washington filed an appeal, and Max Lebowitz, Washington's assistant athletic director of compliance, said the appeals process went back and forth for months, until the final denial in December 2023.
"The frustrating thing is, the guy wasn't even trying to be a student-athlete at his first institution, and because of a technicality, he has to sit out for a year," Lebowitz says. "In your gut, you feel like he should be allowed to play. This is not what the rule was intended for when it was created."
Washington's compliance and coaching staff didn't know when the NCAA appeals committee would rule, so Durfee practiced on the scout team defense and rotated into the starting defensive line every week too.
"He attacked every single day as if he was playing that weekend," says Ron McKeefery, who was then Washington's head strength and conditioning coach. "That takes a special kind of person that can come back from disappointment every single day, to say, 'OK, what can we do to get better that day?'"
In practice each week, Durfee made life difficult for Washington's starting tackles -- Roger Rosengarten and Troy Fautanu, who were both drafted early and are now NFL starters. And because he wasn't playing on Saturdays, he became a mythical figure to Huskies fans, who heard the rumors about the incredible ineligible edge rusher, and read the quotes from his Washington teammates who regularly pumped him up and advocated for the NCAA to free him.
"He became a guy that everybody rallied around," McKeefery says. "Because he was a menace on the field, and they felt the difference of going against him, versus one of our backups, or even one of our starters."
Durfee didn't gain steam in the predraft process until he ran fast (4.58-second 40-yard dash at 6-foot-4, 247 pounds) and jumped high (39-inch vertical) and far (10-foot broad) at his pro day, but scouts have known about the scout-team all-star since that 2023 season, when they visited Washington practices and were quickly drawn to the anonymous edge rusher.
"You'd ask, 'Is that the Sioux Falls transfer?'" one NFL scout who visited practice that year said. "And the coaches would be like, 'Yeah, dude, just wait till next year when he's eligible. He's one of the most talented dudes we got.'"
Durfee's agent, Chase Callahan, first heard about him that year via Rosengarten and Fautanu, who are also represented by the same agency, Excel Sports Management. The tackles told him that Durfee was their best rusher. "They said, 'This guy's a problem,'" Callahan says. "So then we watched all his Sioux Falls film, and he reminded me of [Rams edge] Jared Verse when he played at Albany. You came away with the same feeling."
"They had two other pass rushers and this guy was standing out at practices," said another scout who visited Washington in 2023. "The coaching staff was like, 'Wait until you get a load of this guy.'"
The scouts would have to keep waiting. Durfee played only a handful of snaps in the Sugar Bowl that season, after he became eligible when a federal court issued an injunction that forced the NCAA to suspend its transfer restrictions. Durfee was part of the last group of student-athletes limited by those restrictions, and he says he still has resentment toward the NCAA.
DeBoer left to become Alabama's head coach, so new head coach Jedd Fisch and his coaching staff quickly got up to speed on the still-unproven legend of Zach Durfee.
"He was the best player on the field, on defense when we had him," Fisch says.
The famous former NFL head coach who noticed Durfee doing his job during spring practices was Bill Belichick, whose son Steve was Washington's defensive coordinator in 2024.
But not long after Belichick admired Durfee and told him he could do anything he wanted as an edge rusher, he dislocated his elbow at practice and needed surgery. He played in six games that season and ended the year with another surgery, this time for turf toe.
The 2025 season was Durfee's best. He sat out only two games, but he still wasn't 100% healthy. He hurt his other elbow in the fourth game and played with a brace the rest of the season. He texted his parents, who were at the game, to let them know he was sorry he wouldn't be coming back in.
"It's like the wind gets knocked out of you," Renae says.
But for this injury, Renae was glad Zach had Hannah for support.
Zach's girlfriend is Hannah Stines, senior guard on the Washington women's basketball team She'll be playing overseas this fall during Zach's first NFL season.
Hannah and Zach have had very different athletic careers. She was a heavily recruited three-year starter from Orange County, California who has never been injured. She's pretty sure she's only ever sat out one game. Stines was the ninth-best guard and No. 40 overall player in ESPN's 2022 recruiting rankings.
"There was never that path [for Zach]," Jerry says. "That he's a top recruit, he's gonna go D1, we expect him to get drafted someday. There was none of those things. Without that clear set path for us, it's just been one pretty cool surprise after another."
A FEW DAYS before the NFL draft, Jaguars executive Brian Xanders walked into general manager James Gladstone's office waving a printout: Meet the 2026 NFL draft's undiscovered gem: Prospect X.
"I think our top guy on the committee is this Prospect X!" he said.
Xanders, the leader of the "committee," Jacksonville's undrafted free agent committee, had been Durfee's biggest fan in the building and had moved him to the top of the committee's list after watching all of his 2025 tape.
"The thing that stood out was the athleticism, the balance, the shorter quickness in range and speed," Xanders says. "He did not miss a lot of tackles. He had a lot of pressure and disruption in the pass game."
Durfee's pro day numbers earned him a positive grade in Jaguars senior VP of analytics Jake Temme's proprietary athletic testing score and solidified his spot at the top of the committee's list.
"We always joke, you surrender the results to the process," Xanders says.
And the process kept delivering Durfee. In early April, his tape landed on Gladstone's desk and the general manager liked it so much he moved him onto the Jaguars' "hot list" of 55 prospects slotted in the spots of their draft picks from rounds one through seven that they want to draft.
The Jaguars didn't bring in Durfee for a predraft visit, because all 30 visits are reported to the league office, and Gladstone says they didn't want to show their hand, especially to the four clubs that did. "We do our research through other means," Gladstone says. "So that we don't have to necessarily risk that becoming public knowledge."
Like the Rams, Gladstone's prior employer, Jacksonville uses only 30 visits to get medical information on a player, not to bring prospects into the facility as a recruiting trip. Both Club A and Club B had the upper hand on signing Durfee as a free agent because they brought him in to spend time at the facility and meet their staff.
Many NFL clubs will use their 30 visits on players who did not attend the combine, because those are the prospects that clubs didn't have the chance to medically examine in Indianapolis. Gladstone says they sourced Durfee's medical information in other ways, but he declined to detail how. He said that Durfee strapping up his dislocated elbow and playing through the rest of the season, "is a clear sign of the toughness we would like to see in many people we invite into this organization."
Xanders says he solved the mystery of Prospect X in the first few paragraphs of the article and was giddy that his special prospect received national attention because the increased interest meant they might be more likely to draft him.
"Anytime somebody gets a mention who may very well be underappreciated or is not being considered widely," Gladstone says. "His profile is one that people would become more in tune with."
Xanders featured Durfee in his own guessing game for Jaguars staffers. He grouped tall edge rushers over 250 pounds to see how they stacked up in "clutch production" (pressure rates, third-down pressure rates and true pass sets) and then anonymized their profiles. By just looking at the numbers, Durfee fit right in with higher-round prospects.
"It was eye-opening," Gladstone says. "With some of these other players who are really thought highly of, and talked about at great length, Durfee's in the conversation when you look at these metrics."
Jacksonville drafted another edge rusher in the fourth round, so Gladstone says he knew if they waited until priority free agency to sign him, Durfee was likely to choose another club that had more room at the position. Xanders had a vision for Durfee -- right defensive end, ability to swing outside to Sam linebacker and contribute on special teams with his speed and length -- and Gladstone was sold.
"Let's just go ahead and make the decision ourselves," Gladstone said.
Gladstone told Xanders to make the call, and Durfee left him waiting awkwardly in silence for six seconds.
"I could tell he was emotional," Xanders says. "It was a big day for him, because he had such a wonderful, six-year path to get there."
RENAE POURS EVERYONE a glass of champagne for a toast. "Where's Adam?" Zach asks.
Everybody's there except his big brother, because Adam might have been more anxious than Zach, and he needed a few extra minutes in the basement to collect himself. He's feeling an "intense pride" in his brother, "just going to college as a student at NDSU, to where he is now, and all the obstacles he had to overcome," he says.
"I'm getting to live out some of my childhood dreams too, through everything he's doing, and it's surreal."
Renae brings Adam his glass of champagne and tells him that he should be proud, too. He's part of the reason Zach was drafted. Three years apart in age, the two were always playing sports together and pushing each other.
Zach goes down the stairs to get Adam just as Adam is coming up and the two brothers hug in the middle of the staircase. They wipe their eyes and rejoin the toast, though Jerry has already downed his champagne in the time his boys took to stop crying.
"Four years ago when he told us he was going to walk on to play football, who would have known that this is where it would lead to," Renae says, holding up her glass. "The journey has not been easy, for you, for us, but we want you to know how unbelievably proud we are. This is the next step in an even better journey for you."
"To Zach!"
Everyone cheers.