Kalyn Kahler
PROSPECT X DOESN’T want to be having a draft party because he knows nothing is guaranteed to happen today. So when his mom suggested they pick up a bunch of party appetizers like buffalo wings, pizza rolls and mozzarella sticks, X vetoed all that. He doesn’t want it to feel like a Super Bowl party because there might be nothing to see at all. During negotiations about this day with his mom, Dina, who is known to go overboard preparing food, X compromised on a taco bar and cilantro rolls.
He also had his parents politely turn down the local news crew that asked to film inside his family’s home. That call from the local news reporter, along with ESPN’s interest in him, prompted his parents to give away their AC/DC tickets in Las Vegas and stay home for draft weekend.
X’s pro day was the last scheduled pro day in the predraft calendar, so it was attended by more pro scouts and scouting assistants than the usual college area scouts and scouting directors crowd that his type of unique athletic talent might typically draw. Many teams were in full staff draft meetings by then. It was only after X ran a 4.39 40 and jumped a 41-inch vertical on April 4 that his dad, Shane, realized he didn’t feel right about road-tripping to Vegas during the final four rounds of the draft.
So X is now wedged into the corner of the gray leather couch, between Shane and two high school coaches, Arie and Mike. Across the living room, Dina, X’s sisters Haley and Abby, his girlfriend Andi and his former roommate Aiden are drinking and snacking and trying their best to fill the tense atmosphere with loose, fun conversation. But X still feels “intimidated” about being the center of attention, especially because Aiden and his family drove two hours to be here, Andi’s mom and brother drove two and a half hours, and his older sister, Haley, drove three.
Each time his dad feels a little too nervous, he uses another beer as an excuse to get up and walk to the kitchen. X isn’t drinking today, and he rarely does. In high school, he took an oath with a local charity that he wouldn’t drink alcohol while underage. He stuck to it and though he’s 24 now, it’s still a practice.
He didn’t pay much attention to his phone during the fourth and fifth round because he knew it would be a big surprise if he went that early. But now it’s the sixth round and he’s starting to lock in, looking at the draft order to see the teams he has talked to the most. He holds his phone tightly with Cincinnati on the clock at No. 193, its final pick of the draft. That’s the only team he visited in the predraft process, the city that he found to be green and clean, and special teams coordinator Darren Simmons spent so much time with him breaking down his vision of Taysom Hill 2.0: personal protector on punt, dangerous trick play threat and valuable depth at quarterback. But the Bengals go with a true running back, Tahj Brooks, of Texas Tech.
Andi is trying to play it cool, but she keeps looking over at him every 30 seconds to see if he’s on the phone yet. And Dina is in the worst shape of anyone. She was totally unprepared for the weird sadness she’s feeling as she watches her kid quietly wait for a call that might never come. She didn’t even know that there were more than 32 picks in the later rounds and is amazed that the draft is somehow still going. So during the sixth round, almost four hours into the third day, she leaves the living room to “get a glass of water.” But really it was getting too stuffy in there, and her nerves are at a breaking point, so she goes to her bedroom and gets on her hands and knees and prays.
Please, God. Please let this happen for him.
Then Andi walks into the bedroom. “It’s going to be OK,” she tells Dina. “I promise. X said that all he wants is a shot, and he’s going to get one.”
Together, they rejoin the group in the living room to continue the wait.
X scans the draft order for the teams he has talked to most. Denver traded back and have the final pick of the sixth round. New Orleans has two seventh-round picks and an assistant coach there texted him to say the club was going to try to pick him up with one of its last two picks. Dallas has two seventh-round picks, but he hasn’t heard a word from the Cowboys since they came to campus to work him out. Washington has a sixth and a seventh.
Andi, Abby and Aiden are talking loudly because the Las Vegas Raiders and the Los Angeles Chargers still have to pick before Denver is up, and X hasn’t talked to those teams much, when suddenly, Shane turns down the TV. Andi looks around, wondering why he didn’t just tell them to be quiet if he thought the competing sound was too distracting. But Shane points at X, who now has his phone to ear.
“Yeah, thank you sir,” X says. “No, I can’t wait.”
He hangs up and leans back on the couch and laughs uncomfortably. He looks down at his phone to check the 527 area code for Las Vegas again to make sure it was real. He doesn’t say anything right away and he can’t quite figure out how to react. He’s not even sure who the first voice was on the line. He feels like he might cry so he takes a deep breath. A month ago, he thought he would be fighting for a rookie minicamp invite, and now he’s the 213th pick of the draft?
“Who, Tommy Mellott?” Dina shouts, waiting for him to say something.
“Are you a Raider?” Shane asks.
“Yeah, I think so,” Tommy says. “Well, that’s what they said.”
1:15
Tommy Mellott gets the draft call from the Raiders
Watch as the Raiders call Tommy Mellott to tell him they are drafting him.
WHEN ESPN SURVEYED NFL scouts for their suggestions for Prospect X, the most overlooked player in the draft, one gave his recommendation in the form of two clues.
He won an award for football, and he’s got a story to tell.
It turns out an award-winning player can still be overlooked if he spent his college career at an FCS school in a giant state with a tiny population that is barely recruited by big college programs and primarily playing a position he won’t play in the NFL.
As many readers correctly guessed on Twitter/X and on Reddit, Prospect X is Tommy Mellott, quarterback, Montana State.
Nicknamed “Touchdown Tommy” for his prolific scoring, Mellott won the 2024 Walter Payton Award for most outstanding FCS offensive player, beating out the Raiders’ third sixth-round pick, North Dakota State quarterback Cam Miller. And last year, Mellott won the FCS’ scholar athlete award. He graduated in December with a 4.0 in financial engineering, a major with a course load that includes calculus, physics and economics classes.
In his four seasons, he led the Bobcats to two Big Sky football titles, four FCS playoff berths and two FCS championship games (he lost both to his new teammate Miller and NDSU).
Mellott is from Butte, Montana, and is a cult hero throughout the state, which does not have an NFL or FBS team. The Bobcats and the University of Montana Grizzlies are the biggest football shows in the state, and Touchdown Tommy was the main attraction.
A local T-shirt company made Touchdown Tommy and “Tommy Football” shirts that earned Mellott a cut of the revenue. A Butte high school jersey that Mellott signed recently went for $8,500 at a charity auction.
“I’m not ‘Dina,'” Dina says. “I’m Tommy’s mom. Everybody knows us as Tommy’s mom or Tommy’s dad.”
“He’s on a first-name basis in every corner of the state,” said Bill Foley, a journalist who has covered Butte sports for more than 25 years.
The PA announcer at the Butte High School baseball game in Belgrade, Montana, interrupted the game to deliver the news that Tommy was drafted. Little sister Abby says she didn’t pay for drinks all Saturday night in Bozeman. And Dina says they were able to snag a last-minute table at a popular restaurant that night in Butte because the hostess recognized her name when she called ahead. “Oh my God, congratulations!” the hostess told her. “We’ll find him a table.”
Andi Newbrough was a dancer at the University of Montana, and anytime Tommy visited her in Missoula, he would get stopped by rival students on campus. The worst was when he went to watch her dance at a Montana basketball game after the 2023 football season, where the Grizzlies football team was honored for winning the rivalry game and the conference championship. The video screen played a highlight video that featured several of Tommy’s lowlights and close-ups of his face. “I just felt like I had a million eyes literally just beating down on me,” he said.
At just under 6-feet tall and possessing a rare skill set traditionally suited for a running back or receiver, few believed that Mellott should play quarterback. “I don’t think that anybody would ever be like, ‘Oh, he looks like a quarterback,'” he says.
But his high school head coach, Arie Grey, kept him there because, “He’s that type of player that every single play he needed to touch the ball. You can lose guys every once in a while, if you put them in other spots.”
And that was the same thinking at Montana State with head coach Brent Vigen, who was the quarterback coach for Carson Wentz at NDSU and the offensive coordinator for Josh Allen at Wyoming. It’s Allen’s Buffalo Bills jersey that hangs on his office wall. Vigen didn’t recruit Mellott himself, he had arrived at Montana State during the winter of Mellott’s true freshman year, and the Bobcats didn’t play that year because of COVID-19. So Vigen got up to speed on the speedster during spring practices and decided to play him mostly on special teams, with a little bit of receiver and wildcat quarterback mixed in during the regular season. Mellott started the season as the fourth quarterback on the depth chart and moved up to third only because of an injury.
When Montana State played at Montana with a conference championship on the line that season, Mellott made his first start at receiver. The Bobcats lost 29-10, and Mellott is the type of player who credits everyone else for a win, and takes personal blame for every loss, so he called his offensive coordinator Taylor Housewright to apologize for what he called, “growing pains.” After that, he called his parents to air some more frustration. While he was on the phone with them, Housewright called him back, and Mellott had no idea what he was calling for but figured it couldn’t be good.
Instead, Housewright told him he would be the starting quarterback for their first playoff game after the bye week. He would be leapfrogging the backup even though he’d barely taken QB reps in practice since fall camp.
The offense had lost its juice heading into the postseason, and the coaches knew two things — their opponents would have no film on Mellott, and he added a dual-threat dimension to the playbook.
Mellott called his parents back to tell them the unthinkable. He would be starting at quarterback as a freshman for the FCS playoffs.
“So then we didn’t tell anybody,” Dina says. “It was this big secret, like they didn’t want anybody to know who would start.”
Montana State unveiled Mellott and won its first playoff game at home over the University of Tennessee Martin. Mellott rushed for 191 yards and two touchdowns. Neither quarterback passed much because the winds were whipping in Bozeman.
“After his first game, I think everybody in the building and everybody in the stadium could feel like, ‘Oh, he’s got it, whatever it is,'” said Sean Herrin, director of football strength and conditioning at Montana State.
In the next game, against the No. 1 seed and defending champ Sam Houston State, Mellott caught a touchdown, ran for a touchdown and passed for a score in the first 16 minutes of the game. Mellott took the Bobcats to the national championship game, where he hurt his ankle on the opening drive and couldn’t return.
The Bobcats lost badly to North Dakota State, but the Touchdown Tommy legend was born.
Montana State ran a two-QB system during his sophomore and junior seasons, splitting reps with transfer quarterback Sean Chambers. Mellott didn’t get to fully push himself as a passer until this season, a career year. He passed for 2,783 yards, 31 touchdowns and 2 interceptions. He also rushed for 1,050 yards and 15 touchdowns, his longest a 76-yard scoring run on a read-option at Eastern Washington, where he blew past seven defenders.
“Most guys don’t want to platoon with another quarterback,” said Chambers, who is now an offensive analyst and assistant quarterbacks coach for the Bobcats. “But I feel like he’s probably the only person out there in the world, honestly, that it was OK to do it with. Just because he’s a team guy. He wants to win. He’s willing to do anything.”
Last spring, Tommy wrote down a list of big goals for his final college season, and he achieved all but one.
Win the conference championship X
Win the Walter Payton Award X
Be the best player for the team X
Win a national championship
Tommy’s grandpa, Gene Fogarty, was the family’s original football hero — and was on Tommy’s mind throughout his amazing 2024 run and during the draft process. As a ninth-grade football coach in Butte for 15 years, Fogarty had a 90-12 record and was known for doing the dirty developmental work to get players at the junior high level ready for varsity. He was inducted into the Butte Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.
Fogarty was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when Tommy was a freshman in high school, but he was still a fixture at Tommy’s games alongside his wife, Margie. Tommy said he would run up into the stands to find “Pops” and “Una” and hug them after each game. Pops took down Tommy’s stats each game in loopy cursive writing on yellow legal pads and he loved to track individual stats by hand across all Butte high school sports. Dina says she thinks that kept his mind active and helped delay the onset of his Alzheimer’s.
When COVID-19 restrictions canceled Tommy’s spring senior track season, Tommy said Pops was very confused. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t see his family anymore, or go to games. Tommy’s parents live about 30 minutes from downtown Butte, up in the mountains, so Tommy spent many evenings after school at his grandparents’ house waiting for games or practices to start and talking sports with his grandpa. Without sports, Fogarty had no records to keep or game stories to read and clip from the paper.
Instead, the Mellotts would pile into their car and drive to meet Pops and Una in a parking lot. They would pull up next to the grandparents’ car and wave and talk to each other from inside their own cars. Tommy said his grandpa would try to get out of the car, and his grandma had to lock the car doors so he couldn’t. They didn’t want to risk any potential exposure to the elderly.
“He just didn’t understand why we weren’t going to lunch anymore,” Tommy says. “Why I wasn’t down there to have breakfast with him and hang out.”
Tommy went to school that fall, but Montana State opted out of the FCS spring football season. Pops continued to decline more rapidly without the activity he had been accustomed to. Fogarty had been an English teacher and was known to be a great speaker but lost his ability to speak.
“He was such a great dad, just somebody you trusted, and he was always there,” Dina says. “And then he became like a child himself. It was tough to watch.”
Then one day during finals week, Tommy’s parents called and told him to drive home because Pops was getting worse. Tommy was in shock on his drive to Butte, and he got pulled over by police at the halfway point. It was the only time in his life that he has ever gotten a speeding ticket.
He made it to his grandparents’ house in time to be with Pops as he passed.
“I truly believe that he’s up in heaven watching him play,” Dina says. “That’s what I want to believe, because it makes me feel sad that he never saw this whole huge career of his at MSU, when nobody thought Tommy would be the quarterback. They would be like, he’s too small, he’ll play like special teams, or they’ll turn him into a safety. And then no, he became the starting quarterback by the end of the first season.”
MELLOTT HAD BARELY heard anything from the Raiders in the draft process. He never visited or talked to any of their coaches. The only contact he had with them directly was when one scout called him to confirm that they had the right cell number, but the call was so quick that he didn’t even get the scout’s name. Then, the week of the draft, another unknown number sent him five slides, each touting different stats about the Raiders: Pete Carroll’s coaching record (82 Pro Bowlers), how the Raiders performed on the NFLPA report card (4th out of 32 teams and straight A’s), Raiders franchise history (three Super Bowl wins), notable players (Maxx Crosby, Geno Smith, Brock Bowers, Christian Wilkins, Jakobi Meyers) and gleaming photos of the new facility. Tommy thought it might be a free agent recruiting tactic.
Raiders special teams coordinator Tom McMahon, from Helena, Montana, said the lack of demonstrated interest was intentional. “You want [awareness of] the ones that you’re really, really interested in to stay in the building,” he said.
Raiders general manager John Spytek said he felt good about the medical information he had on Mellott from the Raiders’ medical staff’s sources, so while there was some risk in not examining Mellott directly, there wasn’t an urgency to bring him into the facility for a predraft visit, what he calls a “trip.”
“The risk also is that if you ‘trip’ somebody like this, you put yourself on the radar as a team that you’d want to get in front of if you want to pick him,” Spytek says.
So Spytek didn’t use a 30 visit on Mellott, in part to stay off of everyone else’s radar. The other part of it, he won’t get into. “We do lots of different things,” he says. “I involved my kid in the Ashton Jeanty chase, just to maybe get people to think that, well, he would never do what the 10-year-old says.” Spytek told reporters that his son would be “walking out of the family” if he didn’t draft Jeanty. The Raiders drafted the Boise State running back No. 6 overall.
Spytek said they knew Mellott was fast well before he ran a 4.39 because they had used an in-house program to measure his speed by his film and clocked him in the 4.4s. Mellott’s pro day speed at the quarterback position triggered him for a second look in analytics formulas and scouting systems across the league, and Spytek said their conversations about him got more serious in April and once he met with McMahon to outline Mellott’s role in more detail.
“There’s players in this league that have been quarterbacks and been converted that have been nightmares for me in my 19 years [coaching] special teams,” McMahon says. “Because they can run fakes as the personal protector on punt, they’re great kick returners, they’re great punt returners. A lot of them are very tough. We think that Tommy has those traits.”
“We want him to be a guy when you walk on the field that you got to know where he is and what he’s capable of because it’s unique and it’s different,” Spytek says. “If he aligns in the backfield, he could throw it. And if he aligns as a receiver, you could reverse it to him, and he could throw it. If he aligns with the personal protector, what does that mean? It makes teams have to spend energy and time preparing for things that may or may not happen.”
McMahon believes Mellott can be like Julian Edelman, Taysom Hill or Josh Cribbs, and he knew going into the draft that every special teams coordinator and assistant was well aware of the Montana State quarterback. The special teams coaching community is small and tight-knit and also very talkative.
So McMahon did his best to obscure his true feelings about Mellott whenever his name would come up in special teams text threads. “You’re just like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t know about him,'” he says. “You really want to play dumb, and a lot of guys do because it’s all about competition. You never show your hand.”
Mellott’s agent, Chris Murray, said he spoke to McMahon in January and that McMahon told him then he would like to run 10 fake punts per season with Mellott.
McMahon would neither confirm nor deny that account. “I won’t answer that, simply because of competition and I don’t want teams to think, OK they’re going to do this.”
But after the Raiders picked Mellott, McMahon said he got 10 texts from special teams coaches around the league, congratulating him for getting a player they loved, or cursing him saying that their team was just about to pick him.
MELLOTT DIDN’T VIEW himself as a legitimate NFL prospect until literally this month, so his plan was to follow Andi this summer to wherever she chose to go for medical school and then find a job there, likely something in investment banking. He hoped that they would stay in Bozeman.
But during his layover on his way back from the Bengals, Tommy and Andi caught up on the phone, and Andi brought up something they had never discussed before. She told him she was thinking about putting off medical school for the time being, so she could be there for him “and for us” as he started his NFL career. They hadn’t really been planning on him having a shot, and especially after his visit, “It was like, well, this could actually be a reality,” Tommy says.
Tommy said he wasn’t going to bring that up himself because he wants Andi to go after her dreams too, but, “I obviously was hoping that we could continue to be together.”
They’ve already started moving their things out of the Bozeman house they had been renting from a friend’s parents. And in true Mellott fashion, he didn’t feel any sense of relief when he was drafted.
“I was just super fired up to figure out what that plan is and start working towards it,” he says. “Like, what’s next? What can I do now to give myself a shot to keep playing and to be an asset for them?”
After the Raiders picked him, Mellott got a bunch of texts from coaches and scouts who he had met throughout the draft process. He had grown up a New England Patriots fan, and one text meant a lot to him. He had met Wes Welker, the former Patriots All-Pro slot receiver who’s now an NFL coach, when he had come to Bozeman to work him out for the Commanders on the Monday of draft week.
Welker’s text said: “Prove me right.”
