Former Caneyville resident Landon Young was a five-star recruit coming out of Lafayette High School. A top-10 offensive tackle and top-100 player, period, he could have written his own scholarship offer to any school he wanted to attend.
Young committed to the University of Kentucky prior to his sophomore season and never wavered. At that time one of the country’s most-coveted players wasn’t picking a UK football program sporting a renovated stadium, swanky new training facilities and that had played in five straight bowl games; he was picking a UK football program coming off a 2-10 season and showing off proposed infrastructure changes via PowerPoint slides.
“He’s a guy that we’ll rely on for a long time with other recruits,” said Dan Berezowitz, who has been on Mark Stoops’ staff since he arrived and has been chief of staff since 2018. “Could’ve gone to Ohio State, Notre Dame, wherever. He had tons of opportunities but decided to stay home and really change the course of what was going on at Kentucky.”
Several of the marquee names in college football were late-comers to Young’s recruitment, but early attention from the Alabamas of the world might not have made much difference in his final decision. Young wanted to play for the team for which he grew up rooting, and whose home games were a mere mile from his high school campus. He wanted to help Stoops and company execute the vision they started pitching to him about eight years ago.
Mission accomplished? Kentucky didn’t play in a Southeastern Conference championship game or for a national title, but aside from those lofty goals, it’s hard to belittle the program’s accomplishments over the last five years, of which Young was a significant part. He played meaningful snaps as a true freshman and probably wouldn’t have even been around for last season if not for a knee injury suffered ahead of the 2018 campaign.
Berezowitz said there was a brief pitch to try and get him and center Drake Jackson to return for their extra year of COVID-19 eligibility, but fellow senior Luke Fortner ultimately was the only graduating offensive lineman to take advantage of that opportunity. Young declared for the NFL Draft and signed with an agency (Sportstars), but another season to represent his state was something he did give some thought.
“But at the same time I think I was mentally and physically ready to step up to the next chapter of my life,” Young told the Herald-Leader last week. “It’s definitely tempting because you want to climb that draft board as much as you can, but at the end of the day the draft isn’t the destination.
“Playing in the NFL is the destination. … You want to be able to go out and be a generational guy on the football field and make an impact on a team somewhere.”
Draft stock
Jordan Reid of The Draft Network wasn’t comfortable projecting Young’s stock because he hadn’t yet thoroughly studied his past season. Pro Football Focus analyst Austin Gayle said he too needed to study more tape, but that Young wasn’t high on his site’s radar as of late February.
Kyle Crabbs, also of The Draft Network, wrote in late January that Young projects as “a fringe roster level prospect” who should be a late-round draftee or priority free-agent target following the seven-round event.
“His physical profile is one that cannot be taught and he will have a home on a 90-man roster this summer with no questions asked,” Crabbs wrote. “From there, the question becomes how much improvement and consistency Young can produce with further NFL coaching.”
Most years, the names projected to get picked in the first few rounds are more or less predictable, even if the order is less so. That might hold true this year, too, but with team scouts more limited throughout the 2020 playing season and during pre-draft events because of the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to make heads or tails of anything even beyond the first round is dicier than usual.
It follows that prospects like Young would be even tougher to project in terms of draft position this year, but it’s difficult to think that a multi-year starter and coaches’ First Team All-SEC selection won’t get legitimate consideration from franchises looking to shore up their offensive lines. His size — 6-foot-7, 321 pounds — speaks for itself, but there are concerns about his athleticism and pass-blocking technique, the latter especially a tough film study due to Kentucky’s run-heavy offense over the last few years.
Young is training in Arizona up until the week of UK’s Pro Day on March 31. During that event — this year acting also as a conduit for the NFL’s official combine — he and six other Wildcats will try to improve their draft stock. He’s aware of what teams’ concerns might be regarding his ability, and eager to demonstrate his improvement.
“I know there’s a lot of people out there that don’t think I’m as athletic as I think I am, so I think at Pro Day I’m gonna be able to go out there and put some numbers up that people don’t think I’m gonna do before that,” Young said. “And that’s a lot of people across UK, period. Like Brandin Echols, people think he’s gonna run a 4.6 40 (yard dash) or worse, and I have faith and he has faith that he’s gonna run a faster 40 than that.
“The same thing with me. It’s gonna be up to me to go out there and prove how athletic I am. That I can bend my hips, that I can get out in space, that I can make blocks, that I can use my technique the way it should be used.”
‘A great player’
At Lafayette, Young was a class ahead of Jedrick Wills, who last April was drafted in the first round by the Cleveland Browns.
Wills at Alabama displayed an elite combination of footwork, technique and ferociousness that made him a no-brainer to go in the first round. Young is unlikely to duplicate a first-round windfall regardless of how well his Pro Day goes, but his selection in any round would give the city of Lexington selections in back-to-back NFL drafts for the first time since 1988 when Dermontti Dawson was selected in the second round (Marc Logan was picked in the fifth round the year before).
Eric Shaw, who coached both Wills and Young at Lafayette and played in the NFL himself, thinks Young will be an asset to any franchise.
“When he left me to go across the street, the ceiling was high,” Shaw said. “And I still think his ceiling is high. … Wherever he goes, he’s gonna be fine. He’s going to be really good and accomplish a lot of the things that he wants to accomplish in his life.”
Shaw was impressed by Young’s ability to bounce back so quickly from a knee injury that required surgery and caused him to miss the entirety of UK’s 2018 season. Young credits that injury for helping him better understand SEC defenses; he’d have rather been on the field, but seeing the game from the sidelines for a year made him a better player.
“When you get hurt during a football season and you’re a kid that’s played three sports your whole life, it’s like everything he knew got taken away from him for a whole fall,” Berezowitz said. “But you never knew that with Landon. He never was not involved, and stayed around. It’s easy when you’re injured to just focus on rehabbing, not be at practice, not be in team meetings. You’re not around the stuff. But he traveled some and made it work and stayed involved and was still a leader of the group, enough that when he came back he was still voted as a captain on the team.”
“I know there’s a lot of people out there that don’t think I’m as athletic as I think I am, so I think at Pro Day I’m gonna be able to go out there and put some numbers up that people don’t think I’m gonna do before that,” Landon Young said. Ken Weaver
Young’s work ethic, and general outlook on life, were forged through his family’s farming ventures. He studied at the Locust Trace AgriScience Center while in high school and graduated from UK with a degree in animal sciences following the 2019 fall semester. Following what he hopes is a lengthy pro football career, he wants to return to school to become a veterinarian and eventually follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father as a farmer.
The influence of those men, as well as that of late offensive line coach John Schlarman, oozes from Young when he talks about the importance of discipline and routine in his life. He looks forward to returning to campus for UK’s Pro Day and further training leading up to the draft, but admits it’s difficult knowing Schlarman won’t be there as this book closes.
Young, as well as Jackson and Fortner, took on weightier leadership roles than most seniors as Schlarman battled cancer. They effectively became coaches on the field, Berezowitz said, a testament to Schlarman’s ability to teach well beyond the game.
He also helped make the offensive line — a unit often outclassed against SEC foes in decades past — into one of the program’s most consistent and mightiest.
“A lot of places don’t see offensive line play as something that’s exciting or something you want to go and do, but I think UK made it to where offensive line looks fun, that it’s not always just about getting the blame and everything,” Young said. “You can go out there and be dominant.”
Young was more often than not. How that translates in the pros remains to be seen, but he has displayed a decent track record when presented with opportunity.
“Landon was a highly rated guy out of high school, but a lot of times those guys didn’t pan out,” Berezowitz said. “ … What you put into it is what you get out of it as a college player. Everything he had, Landon left on the table to be a great player at Kentucky.”
By Josh Moore, Lexington Herald-Leader
