Kendall Blanton had yet to play a down of organized football when he made a proclamation to his seventh grade teachers: “I’m going to play in in NFL.”
“They kind of laughed,” Blanton recalled recently, 13 years later. “They were like, ‘You know, that's gonna be hard to do. Let’s not put all our eggs in one basket.’”
It turns out, he's a man of his word.
Of all the star players who will take the field in Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI at Stan Kroenke’s palatial SoFi Stadium, few followed a path like Blanton. He didn’t play the sport until his freshman year of high school, in Blue Springs, Missouri.