Carson Schwesinger’s storybook rise continues as Browns draft him in second round

There was a time when Carson Schwesinger had zero stars, zero college scholarship offers, seemingly zero hope to amount to much in football.

His high school coach pitched UCLA counterpart Chip Kelly on taking Schwesinger as a consolation prize after the Bruins lost out on fellow Oaks Christian linebacker Ethan Calvert, who was headed to Utah.

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“I went up to coach Kelly and I said, ‘You might want to consider this kid Carson Schwesinger as a walk-on — he’s a poor man’s Ethan Calvert,’” Charles Collins told The Times last fall. “And what I meant by that was, he didn’t have all the hype but he was a football junkie, he had a passion for the game.”

Over the next few years, that passion propelled Schwesinger from walk-on to scholarship player to the Big Ten Conference’s leading tackler and a finalist for the Butkus Award that goes to the nation’s top college linebacker.

Read more: ‘Something that we couldn’t pass up.’ Nico Iamaleava’s signing builds buzz at UCLA

On Friday it made the Bruins standout a second-round pick of the Cleveland Browns at No. 33 overall, the first player from UCLA or USC selected in the NFL draft.

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Schwesinger’s rise was rooted in something his father, Dennis, once told him.

“It doesn’t matter how good you think you are,” Carson said last season, repeating the message, “you’ve got to make sure that everybody else thinks you’re that good to where they have to put you in.”

That mantra drove him to block so many kicks as a member of UCLA’s scout team that Ikaika Malloe, then the Bruins’ special teams coordinator, promoted him to all four special teams units. Schwesinger earned a scholarship before the 2022 season and became a part of the rotation at linebacker for the next two seasons.

His full potential wasn’t unleashed until the third game…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/carson-schwesingers-storybook-rise-continues-231328302.html

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Publish date : 2025-04-25 23:13:00

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