Bill Belichick made a bunch of new fans down south this spring.
According to Western Carolina coach Mark Speir, a couple of weeks after the Patriots took cornerback Keion Crossen in the seventh-round out of WCU, Belichick allowed Crossen to take a day in the middle of rookie minicamp earlier this month to fly back and participate in the graduation ceremony.
“Look, I know there are some people out there who aren’t Bill Belichick fans,” explained Speir. “But he let (Crossen) come back to North Carolina during rookie minicamp to walk across the stage and get his diploma. He practiced in New England on Friday, flew home that night, got his diploma, and flew back on Saturday. For his family to be able to see him graduate, that was an awfully classy gesture by the Patriots organization.
“There are a lot of new Patriots’ fans here in Cullowhee, North Carolina because of what Bill Belichick did for Keion.”
Why was it so important to let Crossen miss a day of minicamp?
Let's start with the fact he was the first member of his family to graduate from a four-year college. But in truth, it goes back a few years before that -- first, according to Speir, he’s not your average underdog. When Crossen was “5-foot-nothing and about 148 pounds” in high school, Speir said he was just “skin and bones.” But his speed caught the eye of the Western Carolina coach -- as a high schooler, Crossen finished second in the state at the 1-A level in the 400-meter dash.
“The first thing we thought was ‘Man, this little guy could fly.’ We didn’t have a guy with that kind of speed,” he said. “That was the summer before his senior year, so we saw him run, and as the recruiting process went on, we kept in touch with him. And we eventually signed him to a partial scholarship. He was just this 150-pound kid who could just fly.”
During the recruiting process, Speir heard more about Crossen’s story — about him getting up every morning to walk down to the Dollar General Store on the corner to catch a bus for a 50-minute ride every morning to the only high school in the county, about him getting a ride home at night from a coach, and about him — despite all that — continuing to get good grades.
“What struck me the most?” said Speir. “He had every reason in the world to make up an excuse, to say it was all too hard, and just throw in the towel. And nobody would have questioned it.
“But he didn’t.”
As a freshman, Crossen settled for a partial scholarship to Western Carolina. According to Speir, they weren’t quite sure what they were going to do with him.
”But with that speed, I mean, he can do something,” Speir recalled reasoning. “And after a year, that partial scholarship turned into a full one. And the rest was history.”
In his four seasons at WCU, he finished with 165 career tackles, including 106 solo stops. He put the capper on his college career with a senior season that saw him end up with 67 tackles, and one of the most important plays in the recent history of the WCU program. In an upset of Samford on Sept. 23, he helped propel WCU into the national rankings for the rest of the season.
“That was his moment,” recalled Speir. “They came in here ranked 17th in the country, and their quarterback Devlin Hodges — who is going to be drafted — led a good offense into our place. At the end of the game, they were on our goal line, and they ran a drag route in the back of the end zone. It looked like the receiver was wide open. Hodges threw it, and Keion batted the ball down.
“That was the first time that Western Carolina beat a ranked program since 2005. Keion’s speed and tenacity saved us. The next week, we were ranked in the national polls, and we stayed that way until the very end of the season.”
At the end of the season, he didn’t get an invite to the combine, but his Pro Day totals — 4.33 seconds in the 40 dash, a 39.5-inch vertical, a 6.67 3-cone and 10-foot-11 broad jump — would have put him in the top three of all cornerbacks who did get a combine call. As was the case at WCU, the speed drew the attention of the Patriots.
Keion Crossen's @WCU_FB Pro-Day numbers ranked against all CB's invited to the #NFLCombine ? #NFLDraft2018 pic.twitter.com/5nX6ndeQgd
— MBK Sports (@MBKSports) March 20, 2018