DeShone Kizer will turn 22 on Wednesday, and he has already packed a lot into his life and football career in the past five years.
It’s been a rapid ascent from his junior season at Central Catholic, when he quarterbacked the Fighting Irish to an Ohio Division II state championship, to September of this year, when he became a National Football League starter as a rookie with the Cleveland Browns.
Although Kizer has struggled along with a downtrodden Cleveland team that takes an 0-15 record into its season finale at Pittsburgh, the rapid rise of the Toledoan was the choice of a 24-member Blade sports panel as the top regional (professional, college, other amateur) sports story of 2017.