Nathan Shepherd's improbable journey to the NFL

Dave Naylor

TSN Football Insider

Follow| Archive

There was a time when Nathan Shepherd’s dream of playing in the National Football League seemed so remote, so outrageously far-fetched, that he kept it mostly to himself.

That was just four years ago, when at age 20 he was out of football, out of money and working 12-hour shifts in a Toronto-area box factory.

In between shifts he worked out, focused on saving his money, took online courses to maintain his eligibility to return to school and hoped for a chance to play football again.

Hard to imagine then he would blossom into one of the top-rated defensive tackles for this year's NFL Draft, last week cracking the Top 50 prospects list compiled by longtime scout Gil Brandt on NFL.com. ESPN draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. has Shepherd at No. 88 is his Top 300 rankings, while NFL Media draft analyst Mike Mayock has him at No. 43.

Shepherd, one of the oldest players in this class at 24, is projected to be selected in the first three rounds of the event, which begins Thursday night in Dallas.

“It feels like back pay for everything I’ve done in years previous,” Shepherd said. “All the hardship and adversity you face wants to knock you off your feet and you don’t always see the rewards until you get to the end of the tunnel. The best thing I did was keep pushing through.” 

Shepherd’s journey to the NFL has included five years of football at schools in two different countries, separated by a two-year span in which he took whatever job he could find and refused to let go of his dream.

It was a road he never imagined when he left high school in Ajax, Ont., in 2011 for Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, the only Canadian school that plays in the NCAA Division II ranks. There he transformed himself from a 205-pound high school linebacker into a 250-pound defensive lineman.

Financial issues forced Shepherd to withdraw from SFU after his second year and he found himself at a crossroads. 

“First I worked at a plant nursery, then I worked construction,” he said. “In the spring of 2014 I made my way back to Toronto, moved back in with my family and got a job in a printing factory. It basically was like printing off boxes, beer or pop cartons. Then I’d work out either before or after.”

Those workouts were done with one of the few people who shared Shepherd’s belief that he could one day make it to the NFL.

Paul Watkins is a Toronto Transit Commission bus driver and former powerlifter who runs a business called Football in Training. Watkins knew Shepherd from his church in Ajax, Ont., and had worked with him as a youngster. 

The two reconnected when Shepherd came back to Toronto from Vancouver. Watkins quickly realized his work wouldn’t just be about building Shepherd’s body – it would also be about rebuilding his spirit.

“Mentally, he was broken…My first thing wasn’t to get him to the NFL,” said Watkins. “My first thing was to get him to believe in himself again. Once I did that, the sky was the limit.”

Shepherd and Watkins would sometimes meet before work shifts, sometimes after. When Watkins was working a split shift they would meet in between.

Watkins would often pick up Shepherd at his home. When he couldn’t, Shepherd would ride his sister’s bike to meet him, often in the rain. Watkins can remember Shepherd arriving with his gym shorts soaked, wringing them out before their workout could begin.

“[Watkins] was someone who told me that I was going to get drafted and I was going to play in the NFL,” said Shepherd. “I appreciate his confidence because he was telling me I would be an NFL draft pick when, not only am I not with a team, I’m not on scholarship and don’t even have the money to get into a school. No one is looking at me. I’m not enrolled or anything and he was like, ‘You’re going to get drafted.’ So that was really surreal.”

​On Mondays and Thursdays, Watkins would work Shepherd’s lower body, first with squats and then leg presses. Chest and triceps were for Tuesday, back and biceps on Wednesday. Friday was circuit training for cardio, using medium weights during timed events to condition Shepherd’s muscles to operate under stress. 

Watkins never charged Shepherd for his time in the gym. 

“I told him don’t worry about [paying],” Watkins said. “Sometimes the receiving is in the giving. He’s the only one I never took a penny from.”

Watkins drew a harder line when it came to the commitment he demanded from Shepherd to do 1,000 pushups a day, which proved to be as much a mental challenge as a physical one.

He handed Shepherd a quote that read, “The day I no longer do 1,000 pushups a day is the day I decided I no longer want to go pro.”

“I was doing pushups on my break because there were some times that it was a 12-hour day and he would make me get in my pushups,” Shepherd said. “That was something that helped me get my size, just building some endurance with something like that. So whatever it was, I wasn’t going to give up. I didn’t want to look at myself and say, ‘I didn’t do everything I could.’ ”

Shepherd also used role models to motivate himself, focusing on Canadian-born NFL players like Orlando Franklin, Tyrone Crawford and Stefan Charles, a current member of the Kansas City Chiefs from nearby Oshawa, Ont., who Shepherd met once and describes as “someone in the community a lot of guys looked up to.”

And there was also Nate Burleson, the Canadian-born NFL receiver who was friends with the owner of a bar in Vancouver where Shepherd worked as a bouncer after he left Simon Fraser.

“My boss was friends with Nate Burleson so basically my job was to chaperone him and his friends for the night, make sure that they were okay and they got back to their hotels,” said Shepherd.

“Nate asked if I played football and we got to talking and he also told me, ‘You’re going to make it to the league one day.’ That just meant a lot because hearing him say I’m going to make it to the league, and I’m thinking little does he know I’m not with a team right now. I didn’t exactly tell him. I just said things are kind of unclear right now and he just told me to keep grinding and working and that I’d make it one day.”

That day is upon him, the culmination of a journey interrupted that resumed when his highlight tape from Simon Fraser got into the hands of a coach at Fort Hays State, an NCAA Division II school in Kansas.

The school happened to have three senior defensive linemen graduating and, although they couldn’t promise Shepherd a scholarship, they did promise him the opportunity to earn one.

So he used the money he’d saved to pay tuition for the spring semester of 2015. He went on to earn a scholarship and a starting position for the next three seasons.

By last fall, he was a second team Division II All-American and his conference’s defensive player of the year. A cattle call of NFL scouts made their way to Fort Hays, a school that hasn’t had a player drafted by an NFL team in more than 30 years.

What they saw was a rare physical specimen at 6-foot-4 and 315 pounds, with speed and agility to make tackles for losses along the line of scrimmage.

“The No. 1 question the NFL asks [is], ‘Do you love football?’ ” Fort Hays State wide receivers coach Al McCray, who recruited Shepherd, told USA Today. “Read this kid’s story and you tell me if this kid loves football or not.”

Even during last season, Shepherd was seen as, perhaps, only a fifth or sixth-round pick.

But that changed when an invite to the NFL-sponsored Senior Bowl college all-star game last January gave teams a chance to not only see him practice up close, but also get a sense of his dedication and maturity.

Specifically, the way he responded to coaching he received at the game, including instruction on how to handle himself in interviews with teams and media.

“He has a firm handshake. He’d look you in the eye. He was very energetic and he had a story to tell,” said Phil Savage, executive director of the Senior Bowl.

“You could really see him take in the coaching on the field, whether it was technique or hand usage. The raw ability was there and you could see him making progress right before your eyes. At the combine he performed well and I'm sure he gave a good impression in the interviews. You put it all together and that's why you're seeing his name come up for the first two days of the draft.”

Being drafted this weekend will mark the start of another journey for Shepherd, one that once seemed beyond his reach. He plans to approach it with the same hunger and dedication that’s carried him this far.

“I’m always going to be someone where nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “And whatever happens, I’m going to have a free-agency mindset. And once I get there, god-willing, then I can reflect and I definitely will. And use that to continue to propel myself through my career and know that whatever barrier you have in your way you just knock that thing down one at a time.”