Culture
Making the jump from college hoops to the NFL: ‘I was like, what? Change sports?’
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — After pouring in 19 points for Coastal Carolina in a first-round loss to Southern Miss in the Sun Belt Conference tournament on March 4, Colin Granger went back to the team hotel in Pensacola, Fla., to have dinner with his parents and discuss his future.
In football.
Granger had told Chanticleers coach Justin Gray that if Coastal went on an unexpected run in the conference tourney, it would be his sign that he would continue his basketball career overseas, where he had multiple offers from professional teams.
If not, Granger would become the first client of George Fant, the 10-year NFL veteran who was starting a business in which he identifies and trains college basketball players he believes can make the jump to the NFL — a transition Fant made in 2016 after leaving Western Kentucky.
So when the Chants were bounced in the opening round in Pensacola, Granger talked it over with his parents before calling Fant and telling him he was on board. A month later, Granger worked out for five NFL teams at a private pro day at his Atlanta-area high school. And three days after that workout, Granger signed with the Carolina Panthers as a tight end in one of the more non-traditional transactions in their history.
Because Granger did not play in college and at least four NFL seasons have elapsed since he finished high school in 2020, he was eligible for last year’s draft. That meant the Panthers or any team could sign him as a free agent this year.
Shortly after finalizing his contract with the Panthers on Monday, Granger was eating lunch in the cafeteria at Bank of America Stadium with three edge rushers on their pre-draft visits — Texas A&M’s Shemar Stewart, Boston College’s Donovan Ezeiruaku and LSU’s Bradyn Swinson. Granger told the group he’d just joined an NFL team despite not having played football since eighth grade.
“I tried to tell them the story and they just literally laughed in my face,” Granger said. “They were like, ‘Dude, come on. Like whatever, bro, just tell us what are you actually doing?’ ”
What Granger is trying to do is follow a trail blazed by Fant and other former college basketball players — including several high-profile tight ends — who carved out successful NFL careers. Fant believes Granger can make his mark in a Panthers tight end room that currently has Tommy Tremble, Ja’Tavion Sanders and Jordan Matthews at the top of the depth chart.
“Don’t be surprised if we see Colin out there playing early and often,” Fant said.
Tony Gonzalez (Cal), Antonio Gates (Kent State), Jimmy Graham (Miami) and Mo Alie-Cox (VCU) all became receiving tight ends after playing hoops in college, with Gonzalez and Gates both becoming Hall of Famers. Gates and Alie-Cox — like Granger — did not play college football.
The 6-foot-8, 240-pound Granger played football and lacrosse through eighth grade, which is when he first suited up for his middle school basketball team. Within eight months, Granger had his first basketball scholarship offer from Mount St. Mary’s.
“My freshman year of high school, I had just stopped playing football. The head football coach called me out of class every single day, and he wanted me to play football,” Granger said during a phone interview Monday.
But other than the occasional comment from a strength coach about how he might look in pads and a helmet, Granger had pretty much forgotten about football as he worked his way through five basketball seasons at three schools — Ohio University, Western Carolina and Coastal Carolina (he averaged 7.2 points, 4.4 rebounds, including 2.0 offensive rebounds last season).
And then he got a DM from Fant, who explained his background and said he was looking to work with college basketball players who projected as NFL prospects.
“I saw it was a real account, that it was a real NFL player,” Granger recalled. “But I was like, what? Change sports? I’m trying to beat freaking N.C. State tomorrow. I’m not worried about that.”
George Fant, second from right, and his team spent several weeks working with Colin Granger, middle, before he signed with the Carolina Panthers. (Courtesy of George Fant)
Fant, who played sparingly in his only football season at Western Kentucky, started his niche headhunter business with his trainer and agent. Fant started going through an online database of every Division I basketball player, scanning their heights, weights and statistics, paying particular attention to offensive rebounds. When he found guys he liked, he would look for YouTube videos and see if their athleticism might play in the NFL.
“I just saw Colin kind of pop off the screen to me. (Initially) I thought he could be a guy that could play offensive line like a Lane Johnson kind of guy,” said Fant, a free-agent offensive tackle with nine years of experience. “Once I got him to Kentucky, though, and I got to see him run around, I knew right away he was a tight end.”
Following the loss in the Sun Belt tournament, Granger returned to Coastal’s campus to pack his stuff, spent a few days at his parents’ house in Florida and then headed to Fant’s home in Bowling Green, Ky., arriving around midnight on March 10.
“He walked out in his driveway and met me,” Granger said, “and I moved into his guest room.”
The two spent 2 1/2 weeks working out in Fant’s home gym while Fant and his agent, Jeffery Whitney, organized a pro day for April 4. In between sets on the bench or during breaks in speed training, Fant would give other tips to a player who hadn’t been on a football field in nearly 10 years.
“Right away he bought in and was the kind of guy you didn’t have to tell something twice,” Fant said. “Once you were able to show it to him, he took it and learned from it right away and got better.”
Justin Gray, Granger’s coach at both Western Carolina and Coastal, predicted that Granger’s work ethic would be well received in Kentucky.
“I guarantee you as soon as he got there and they saw how hard he works and how dedicated he is and how disciplined he is, it’s like, ‘Man, this kid has a chance,’” said Gray, who just wrapped up his first season at Coastal.
“He plays as hard as he possibly can. He’s a great offensive rebounder, defensive rebounder. The ball’s in the air, he goes after it. He’s tough as nails. He eats nails for breakfast. He’s not soft, nothing about him is soft. And then he’s competitive.”
A competitive attitude is great, but Granger still had to show scouts his physical traits. The Panthers — represented by pro scout Adam Maxie — and four other teams last Friday came out to Lambert High in Suwanee, Ga., where Granger ran the 40-yard dash in 4.8 seconds and posted a 40-inch vertical leap, according to him and Fant.
Granger, who caught passes from former Georgia State quarterback Zach Gibson at the workout, was thrilled with his vertical jump but thought he’d run a faster 40.
“My 10-yard split, my 20-yard split all during training, I was running 4.7 numbers,” he said. “I only trained for three weeks. My trainer told me, ‘Dude, if I got you just for another three weeks, you’re a 4.6 guy.’ I’m fast. It’s the little bit of the mechanics that shave off those tenths of a second.”
Granger only did seven reps on the pro bench (225 pounds), but chalked that up to the difference in weight training in the two sports. “I’ve got muscle and I can put it on there,” he said. “But an Olympic lift like that, we didn’t really straight bench-press like that all the time.”
Fant was pleased with how things went. “I think the craziest part of this whole thing is we only had 2 1/2 weeks to train him,” he said. “My trainer, Jacob Davis, was able to get hands on him and do the impossible, and get him ready for a pro day in two weeks.”
Granger was scheduled to attend the Atlanta Falcons’ local day this week. Instead, he’s under contract with their division rivals, thanks in part to Fant’s ties to Carolina general manager Dan Morgan, coach Dave Canales and tight ends coach Pat McPherson from their time together in Seattle, where Fant signed as an undrafted free agent in 2016 and started 10 games as a rookie.
Fant said he appreciates the Panthers’ giving Granger a chance, and expects him to make the most of it. “He’s a big guy and he’s able to high-point the ball,” Fant said. “He’s able to catch the ball really, really naturally.”
Gray, a Charlotte native who played at Wake Forest from 2002 to 2006, believes Granger’s basketball skill set will transfer to the gridiron.
“Don’t get me wrong, I coach basketball. So I would assume ball in the air, he’s gonna jump up and get it at its highest point. He did that for us. He was really good at offensive rebounding, being able to dunk it back in. Playing with people around him wasn’t a thing,” Gray said. “But it’s a different sport, man, and it’ll take an adjustment period. But I know with his discipline and his consistency, he’ll be just fine.”
Granger, who met Chuba Hubbard on Monday while getting fitted for equipment, said the biggest adjustments will be learning an NFL playbook and getting used to the physicality.
“I’m excited to go get hit. I used to love hitting people in football. It’s a grown man’s league. I know it’s gonna hurt a little bit more now. But guess what, I’m big now and I’m only getting bigger,” he said. “I just want to go out there and pop someone or get popped, get put on my ass and just feel it. Be immersed in the game. Get that first hit out of the way and I think I’ll be fine.”
(Top photo: Scott Kinser / Cal Sport Media via AP Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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