San Francisco 49ers first-round pick Javon Kinlaw was a standout defensive tackle at the University of South Carolina, but did not even start playing football until he was 15 years old.
“The guy hadn’t played any football. He was very raw,” his high school football coach at Goose Creek High told the Charleston Post & Courier in 2018. “But we just took him under our wing because he didn’t have a lot of support.”
Kinlaw was sent by his mother to live with his father in South Carolina at age 13 after spending most of his childhood homeless in Washington D.