Defensive End · Jacksonville Jaguars

Zach Durfee

No. 58 · Rookie

He sent basketball dunking tape to football programs and somehow it worked.

Dawson, Minnesota sits about 140 miles west of Minneapolis. Population hovering around 1,500. It is the kind of place where you know the names of everyone in the stands. Zach Durfee grew up there, played at Dawson-Boyd High School, and by the time his senior football season ended — with a broken fibula — no school in any sport had offered him a scholarship.

He had a basketball commitment to Division III Gustavus Adolphus College. Then the pandemic arrived and that was gone too. He enrolled at North Dakota State and tried to walk on to the football team as a tight end. They turned him away, citing pandemic restrictions. He went home. His parents gave him one semester to figure something out. He spent that semester as a biology major, studying toward dentistry.

That is where most versions of this story end. The kid from the small town hits enough walls and finds something else to do with his life. A career in dentistry is a fine outcome. It is just not this outcome.

Durfee had one piece of athletic footage to his name: a basketball highlight reel. Dunks, mostly. He sent it to college football programs anyway. The University of Sioux Falls watched a basketball player throw down highlights and offered him a walk-on spot. They put him at defensive end — a position he had never played — and in his first season of college football he earned first-team all-conference honors.

Then came the thread that pulls the whole story tighter. Kalen DeBoer, who had previously coached at Sioux Falls, took the head job at Washington. His former Sioux Falls colleague Jon Anderson told him about Durfee. DeBoer's staff recruited him to Seattle, and suddenly a kid who had been turned away by a Division I walk-on program was playing Power conference football.

It did not go smoothly. Washington denied him an NCAA two-time transfer waiver, costing him a season. Then a dislocated elbow. Then double turf toe surgery. Then another dislocated elbow. Bill Belichick watched Durfee in spring practice and praised him publicly. Days later, he was hurt again. Over three seasons at Washington, Durfee played 17 games. Seventeen. The university gave him the Don James Perseverance Award at the postseason banquet — an honor that says more than most trophies do.

ESPN named him the 2026 draft's Prospect X, the player whose background defied the standard path. By draft day he was on the phone with another team, talking through undrafted free agent terms, when a different call interrupted. Jacksonville. Pick 233. The seventh round.

He cried so hard he could not speak.

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