The smartest, toughest 2025 NFL Draft prospect you've likely never seen play

New York Times

25-02-2025

When Thomas Perry turned 16, he asked his parents for a very specific birthday gift: one oversized truck tire.
Not four tires. Or an actual truck. Scott and Karen Perry had heard about Gen Zers having no desire to drive themselves anywhere upon turning 16, but this was different. Their son — who took marathon-length trail hikes, alone, for fun — was as anti-trend as it got.
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After asking him to repeat his request, Scott, amused but also now genuinely curious, inquired as to why, exactly, Thomas wanted one gigantic truck tire.
'So I can flip it,' Thomas replied excitedly, 'and push it up and down the road.'
Rule No. 1 for being a football player is you have to love all parts of being a football player — even the stuff most dread. Football players, the real ones, live for the strain. And Middlebury Division III All-American offensive lineman Thomas Perry, arguably the strongest player in the 2025 NFL Draft, from a school small enough to lose on a map, is a real one.
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He's the son of two lawyers, both of whom were both college athletes. His uncle is in the football Hall of Fame at Brown. His grandmother was a professional dancer who could throw smoke from any pitcher's mound (and from any arm angle) — the best athlete in a family of highly intelligent, highly able humans. Perry studied molecular biology and mathematics at Middlebury, carried a 3.92 GPA and will be a doctor one day. He's done 28 reps of 250 pounds (and 12 of 380) on the bench, has a near-600-pound squat, a 715-pound deadlift and explosion numbers in the 98th percentile for his position.
He also can do the splits.
A 'one in a million' weight room wonder with power everywhere and the flexibility of someone a hundred pounds lighter, the 6-foot-2, 311-pound Perry was an elite wrestler in high school. He speaks about the tortuous hours spent inside his team's sweat-soaked, foul-smelling wrestling room the same way the rest of us might talk about our favorite things to do at the beach.
Why do you love this stuff so much — the stuff so many others absolutely hate?
'Because it's hard,' Perry laughs, fully understanding some might not believe him.
He is a completely self-made player who willed himself into being a potential draft diamond through a work ethic that's made even the most seasoned pro trainers take pause. Perry could be the NFL's next version of Quinn Meinerz, an All-Pro guard the Denver Broncos drafted from DIII obscurity.
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This is Thomas 'The Tank' Perry.
His best friends call him 'TP' — Total Package.
High achievers don't get burdened with life's complications like everyone else. They're not immune to misfortune, they just tend to hit first.
Like the rest of the world, life tried to get Thomas Perry in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out most of his senior year of high school, including his athletic calendar. In another world, Perry might've continued his family legacy at Brown. His father had been an All-Ivy League player for the Bears; his uncle Bill was an All-American defensive lineman and a member of Brown's Hall of Fame and its 125th anniversary team. (Thomas wore No. 67 in college in honor of Bill, who died in 2017 after an eight-year fight with cancer — six years longer than doctors thought possible.)
Three of his cousins have played football at Brown, too.
At the pandemic's onset, Perry was a 6-1, 260-pound athlete who displayed elite strength in multiple sports at tiny Haddam-Kilingworth, a member of Connecticut's smallest classification. He also was one of the school's brightest students. And despite the fact his strength numbers would've stacked up with any prep athlete in the Northeast, the lack of exposure left him completely off all recruiting radars.
Others may have panicked. Perry never blinked. When gyms closed, he grabbed his mountain bike and road it 100 miles. He went on endless hikes, some nearly 30 miles long and usually by himself because no one else could keep up with the distance.
Training, eating (a lot) and sleeping are a few of his many passions. Enjoying those activities in nature is another. So when Middlebury, an academically elite Division III liberal arts college near Vermont's Green Mountains, became the first and only college football program to offer him a spot ahead of the 2021 season, he packed his bags and never looked back.
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To understand Perry is to know the popular 'Two Guys on a Bus' meme about perspective. The guy on the left is depressed as his window shows only the dark side of a mountain; the guy on the right is smiling ear to ear as his window reveals a wide-open, sun-soaked valley. From a football standpoint, Middlebury offered Perry very little. But for what he wanted in his life, Middlebury had everything — plus a chance to keep playing ball.
Perry is always the guy on the sunny side of the bus.
'I committed the day after they offered me,' says Perry, who essentially sees the challenge of the pandemic as something that led to the best decision of his life. 'It's been amazing. I'm majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry, with a math minor, and I get to look out my window and see the Green Mountains.
'I love it there.'
To say the feeling's mutual would be an understatement.
'I'm 66 years old, I've been coaching in this league my entire career and have coached some incredibly impressive kids here, both in the classroom and on the field,' says Middlebury offensive line coach Dave Caputi, who also spent 16 years as head coach at DII Bowdoin. 'He's the most unique kid I've had.'
It took Middlebury's staff less a week to realize Perry might be the most talented prospect they'd ever had. He weighed in around 260 pounds when Middlebury offered him. By the time he reported to his first fall camp, he was up to 275. During his sophomore season, now at 300 pounds, he landed a broad jump of nearly 10 feet, with equally impressive agility numbers that would've placed well at that year's NFL combine.
Most college strength coaches expect youngsters to break in the weight room. That's the idea — you break bad habits and replace them with good ones. No one has ever been able to find Perry's breaking point. He's a walking good habit.
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As part of the New England Small College Athletic Conference, Middlebury plays a nine-game schedule with no spring ball and a reduced training camp, so most of Perry's ridiculous strength gains happened on his own time.
Some of his lift numbers were so crazy for a Division III player that Middlebury staffers were concerned scouts wouldn't believe them without video. His presence on the field at guard was even more impressive, as Perry earned all-conference honors as a sophomore and junior before earning multiple All-America nods in 2024 as Division III's most physically dominant player. Perry is the only player in Middlebury history to earn an invite to either the Shrine Bowl or Senior Bowl (he participated in the former).
His college tape is effortlessly dominant, as Perry glides around the field with elite bend, maintaining power and recovery (not that he needs the latter much) from any angle and routinely finishes defensive linemen through the ground. It's not uncommon to see Perry decleat a tackle on his way to doing the same thing to a linebacker. There are several reps on which Perry pulls down the line on a trap or to lead on power, and his punch is so explosive it looks like the defender might snap in half.
For Middlebury, he's been the perfect student-athlete. Perry's impact on the program — how players train, how they view themselves and their playing futures — has been immeasurable. No other interior offensive lineman in this draft can make a similar claim.
'He's elevated how the guys think of themselves as students and football players here because he's so accomplished and just a great human being,' says Caputi, who believes Middlebury's players wound up respecting Perry even more because of how well he carried academics alongside football. 'He's just the kind of person you want to be associated with.'
Duke Manyweather has never been afraid of the hard way. He grew up near Compton in Los Angeles. He was an undersized center, a captain at DII Humboldt State, then briefly tried coaching before finding his calling in specialized training for offensive linemen. Over the last decade, Manyweather has trained some of the sport's best linemen. He went from an unknown to the first call for anyone in football — player, agent, coach, parent, reporter, whatever — looking for insight on play in the trenches.
No one watches more film than Big Duke. No one gets up earlier in the morning.
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Except for Thomas Perry.
Still an undersized lineman, Perry (6-2, 311 with 31 5/8-inch arms), has awoken in a hotel room near Dallas almost every morning since the 2024 season ended. The second thing he sees after his eyes open is a piece of paper with a question on it:
'How are you going to get better today?'
It'd be the first thing he sees, but Perry didn't want to upset hotel staff by hanging something from his room's ceiling.
Perry found Manyweather and his touted, Texas-based 'OL Masterminds' program when his dad emailed Manyweather shortly after the close of the 2023 season. He hit 'send' on Thomas' 21st birthday, figuring landing his son a chance to work with the world's best OL tutor was a better present than a second truck tire.
When Scott Perry first shared with Manyweather some of Thomas' lift numbers, the coach — just as Caputi had predicted once upon a time — asked for video proof. The next time the two spoke, Manyweather asked Thomas Perry to join his program in Texas full time for the summer.
My guy Thomas Perry Rolling!!! 18.5mph on the @SHREDmillSpeed @just_BryanM pic.twitter.com/nN5LyKbipe
— Duke Manyweather (@BigDuke50) February 3, 2025
'He's one in a million,' says Rob Mangino, Perry's private strength coach since high school. 'The first workout we did, I probably heard 'yes, coach' 50 times in an hour. Over and over — 'Yes, coach. What's next?'
'He loves to train. You'll have to pull him back sometimes.'
Perry lifts like he plays football: full-tilt. He's never still on a football field. He plays through the echo of every whistle, then sprints back to his huddle after every play, every time. He's never still in a weight room, either.
Mangino's training sessions begin with an extensive dynamic warmup, including stretching and mobility drills. Not long after Perry joined Mangino's program, the coach noticed his then-teenaged pupil had started showing up at the gym an hour before every session, so he could do an extra dynamic warmup before the scheduled one … before the lift session that was surely about to ring his body out like a washcloth.
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'Who does that?' Mangino still asks with wonder.
Not long after Perry joined Manyweather's program, word started to leak inside the scouting community that the strongest player in the 2025 NFL Draft might be a kid from a DIII school with an enrollment of fewer than 3,000. Perry was one of the small-school add-ons to Bruce Feldman's annual 'Freaks List' ahead of the 2024 season, and after another year of dominance on a level for which he was too talented, he earned an invite to the Shrine Bowl. (During the game to end that week, it took half the opposing defense to stop him after a catch on a trick-play, two-point conversion attempt.)
Perry repped at center for scouts during practices despite having never played there in college. Manyweather gave him a crash course on the position in just three weeks, and Perry absorbed nearly every bit of it.
One of the top-performing linemen throughout Shrine week, Perry ended every practice by finding each coach he worked with, shaking their hand and thanking them.
'Let's paint this picture, OK,' Manyweather says. 'Thomas played DIII ball at a school that really isn't a DIII powerhouse, like Wisconsin-Whitewater or (Wisconsin-)La Crosse. They play nine games per year, they practice 20 times for fall camp and don't have spring ball. There are no organized summer workouts.
'Yet, here we have a kid who — literally through his own process — has found a way to go about his business and work like a professional. Every elite guy I've ever worked with, from All-Pros to Hall of Famers, is detail- and process-oriented. That's Thomas. And when you take (his career in context with regard to experience), he's actually like a sophomore, football-wise.'
Perry's arguably also the most diligent notetaker Manyweather has ever seen. During one of his group film sessions, Manyweather threw in a joke while discussing a rep, drawing a laugh from most of the room. Perry, though, wrote down the joke in his notebook, not realizing (or caring) that it wasn't part of the lesson.
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And on one of the first days of Manyweather's 2025 draft training camp, when he rolled into the parking lot around 4 a.m. to get an early workout in before the rest of the day started, he found two people standing on the curb, in the dark, waiting for him to unlock the building.
One was LSU star Will Campbell, likely OT1 in the upcoming draft. The other, of course, was Thomas The Tank.
Perry's future is as uncertain as it's ever been in his life. He's dedicated himself to playing football for as long as he can. Perry doesn't have an invite to the NFL Scouting Combine, and the number of Division III players in the league at the start of last season could be counted on two hands.
The uncertainty doesn't bother him, though. It's hard to tell if he even feels it. Many prospects speak about the pre-draft process as the most stressful time in their lives. Perry still can't believe this is happening. He'd do this every day for the rest of his life, if someone let him.
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'I'm just a guy who loves training,' Perry says. 'I love that I get to wake up at 4 a.m., hit a triple session, eat a bunch of food, recover and then repeat it the next day. I just love that.
'I'm very thankful for this opportunity and I hope to make the most of it.'
Even if Perry doesn't hear his name called this spring, he'll have a strong chance of finding his way onto a team via rookie free agency because his physical gifts are rare.
Whenever football's over, Perry simply will do what he always does: He'll adjust — likely in medical school, probably on a campus with a great view. And there, he'll attack his journey toward becoming the world's strongest doctor the same way he attacks everything else:
From the sunny side of the bus.
(Top photo courtesy of Scott Perry)