[Eric Upchurch]

On September 7, 2013, Ryan Glasgow stepped onto the turf at Michigan Stadium in front of 115,109 fans (and another 8.65 million watching at home) for what was undoubtedly the biggest game of his life. Six minutes and 30 seconds of game-time later, Glasgow stepped into the turf at Michigan Stadium; just a redshirt freshman playing in his second game, he was double-teamed by future first-round NFL Draft pick Zack Martin and future third-round pick Chris Watt on the second play of Notre Dame’s second drive with such brutal swiftness that one of his shoes got stuck in the turf and failed to make the six-yard journey downfield with the rest of Glasgow.

The Notre Dame game was the first in-season wake-up call for a player whose time at Michigan has been shaped by a series of well-timed conversations and self-aware redirection. “We’re watching film that Sunday, getting coached hard—I mean, just got absolutely destroyed, but I think that served a purpose,” Glasgow says. “It kind of made me realize this is college football. People will just destroy you on the other team if you’re not ready to play.”

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That there have been plays for a coaching staff to critique involving Glasgow in a Michigan uniform is amazing considering the mind-bending alternative, and that has nothing to do with his status as a former walk-on or any depth issues present in the early Hoke years. That Glasgow played football at all is shocking considering his parents’ stance on the sport.

Glasgow’s parents, Drs. Steven and Michele Glasgow, decided when their children were young that they didn’t want them to play football. Hoping to steer their kids toward something less violent and aggressive, they first presented them with the opportunity to play other sports as an outlet for their energy. In second grade, though, Ryan turned the pressure up on his father.

He approached his father one day and told him that he wanted to play football. The local youth league didn’t start until kids were in fifth grade, so it came as something of a surprise that Ryan was pitching his case so early. Ryan’s father told Ryan to talk to his mother, and Ryan informed him that she said Ryan needed to talk to him. He told Ryan they stood together on the issue and would prefer he not play, and Ryan went for the ace up his sleeve. “I said, ‘Why do you want to play football?’ And this floored me, actually, and this was a manipulative thing that he said,” Ryan’s father says. “He said, ‘Dad, I want to play football because you played football.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not going to work, Ryan.’” (Dr. Glasgow played football at Penn.) His father told Ryan that he and his brother Graham were physically gifted enough to play many other sports.

Ryan dropped his head and started walking away when his father asked if there was another reason he wanted to play. He turned, his eyes lit up, and he said, ‘Dad, I want to run into people!’ His father then asked if there were any other reasons Ryan wanted to play. He had one more reason at the ready: ‘I want to knock ‘em down, dad,’ His father burst into laughter and told him that he could play. Ryan couldn’t believe what he just heard. “I said, ‘Look, if you think the greatest thing in the world is going out there and running into people and knocking people down then yeah,’” Dr. Glasgow recalls. “‘I mean, if we’re not letting you play football then you’re just going to be doing that some other way, so at least you should be out there with coaches in an organized sport and learn how to channel it and sort of go from there,’ and that was it. That was how they got permission to play. We had really planned on not letting them play; it was a very important thing to him.”

[After THE JUMP: “They can test how fast, how high, how much you lift, but some kids, they’re just football players.”]

[Eric Upchurch]

A few years later, an uncle gave Ryan and his older brother Graham a Gameboy and two Pokemon games, Red Version and Blue Version, for Christmas. The brothers were allowed to pick the one they wanted; Graham chose Red, and it wouldn’t be the last time.

Graham, whose five-year Michigan career ended in 2015, originally wanted to attend Ohio State. As Lindsay Schnell reports, he was going to go to OSU until Jim Tressel was fired, at which point his father sat him down and told him in no uncertain terms that he should strongly consider other options. “There probably would have been a really good chance I would have wanted to go to Ohio State if he went there,” Ryan says. “Him going to Michigan happened like literally a month before kids show up on campus. That occurred June 5th. He called the old ops guy, Bob Lopez, and switched.” Graham did try to recruit Ryan to Michigan—the two are only 13 months apart and always played on the same teams growing up—but he was fighting from behind.

Vanderbilt started sending letters to Glasgow after his freshman season. At times, they would hand-write them. The interest felt—and was—authentic. Glasgow got a feeler letter from Wisconsin after his sophomore season, and after that he felt like he was D-I bound, that it was just a matter or time before he was a three- or four-star recruit sorting through boxes of letters. The letters continued to come in, though they were mostly from schools in the MAC or I-AA programs.

Glasgow thought he had put together a fine junior season and wasn’t sure exactly why he hadn’t garnered more Division I interest. He was playing two positions at the time, guard and defensive tackle, and had played four throughout his high school career: tackle, guard, defensive end, and defensive tackle. His offensive line coach, Kurt Becker, thought Glasgow had all the physical tools to play at the next level, as well as the passion and work ethic.

Becker was an All-American guard at Michigan for Bo Schembechler’s 1981 Wolverines before going on to play for Mike Ditka’s Chicago Bears for eight seasons. Glasgow credits him with accelerating his football development. Becker coached every player hard regardless of how good or bad he was, an attitude Glasgow says is typical of college coaches but not necessarily high school coaches. Even though Becker was an offensive line coach, he knew Glasgow’s future was on the defensive side of the ball because of his defensive-minded attitude; Becker convinced Glasgow to play guard by selling him on the fact that he might never have another opportunity to play literally next to his brother Graham, who was playing tackle at the time.

When Becker discusses Glasgow’s playing days at Marmion Academy, he echoes a compliment his one-time Bears teammate Jim Harbaugh reserves only for those he holds in the highest esteem. “Some kids are just football players, right?,” Becker posits. “Ryan’s just a football player and he plays with a lot of heart and passion. They don’t have a test for that. They can test how fast, how high, how much you lift, but some kids, they’re just football players.”

Though impossible to quantify, some schools seemed to take note of Glasgow’s status as a football player after his junior season. He attended a camp at Indiana University in which he was told they were looking at him as a guard, and he would have the opportunity to compete that day with a few other players they had been scouting for a scholarship offer. Glasgow says he “played terrible.” Glasgow is his own harshest critic. He offered up about four critiques of his own play for every positive comment during our conversation, a pattern noted by his position coach, Greg Mattison. This harsh self-assessment, however, was corroborated by his father. The family had just flown back from vacation the day of the Indiana camp. When Glasgow hit the field he looked out of sorts the entire time. He did not receive the scholarship offer. By the time he and his father got in the car to go home, Glasgow was querulous. His father saw a teaching opportunity in the time they would spend driving back to Illinois.

Father and son both remember the car ride home from Indiana with uncommon clarity. “My dad just looks at me and he’s like, ‘You did this to yourself.’ It kind of gave me a reality check,” Glasgow says, then recounts what was at the heart of his father’s message. “You did this. You have no one else to blame. If you’re going to do that, why even go to these things? Why even play if you’re going to try and blame someone else and not take personal responsibility?” Dr. Glasgow recalls his message and provides additional context; Ryan tends to internalize the heart of a message sans mollification. “One of the great things about football, and this is in life, of course, is that in football, you’ve got so many plays on the defense. Maybe you play 35. That’s 35 chances to make things perfect,” he says. “It really is a wonderful thing. And one of the keys is, okay, you did badly. Assess why you did badly, flush it away, move on, short memory. You’ve got to have a short memory and just get after it, but please understand that this is on you.”

Glasgow entered his senior season determined to get the offers he thought were in the pipeline since getting the Wisconsin letter sophomore season, offers he had been daydreaming about since at least eighth grade. That year, Glasgow watched the 2008 BCS National Championship Game between LSU and Ohio State and was so enamored with what he saw that he was still talking about it in homeroom the next morning. He talked with a friend about how incredible it would be to play big-time college football. His friend told him it wasn’t possible; those guys on TV were just too good. Glasgow agreed but remained unfazed. He had grown up practically next door to Northern Illinois University, and the small-town game atmosphere had grown stale for him. He was taken by the pageantry of two of the most storied programs in college football, the buzz surrounding the season’s biggest game, and even the commercials during the broadcast. The stage was big. So was his desire to play on it. 

By the end of Glasgow’s senior year, however, he was left with only three opportunities that he was seriously considering. Vanderbilt’s interest remained strong. Glasgow had also been offered an opportunity to be a preferred walk-on at Minnesota and Michigan; Northwestern offered a PWO spot as well, which put them on the two-team list alongside Minnesota of games in which Glasgow is extra motivated to play, as he feels he could have earned scholarship offers to those schools. Minnesota had recently hired Jerry Kill away from Northern Illinois, where Ryan’s father is one of the football team’s orthopedic specialists; Kill had a long history with Glasgow, having offered him during his NIU tenure. Minnesota wanted Glasgow to play guard, a request that quickly dropped them out of contention. “He’s got much more of that defensive personality,” Dr. Glasgow says. “That permeates his being.”

Vanderbilt’s persistence manifested itself in the form of an official visit, on which Glasgow had the chance to spend some time with then-head coach James Franklin. Franklin promised Glasgow that he would be at Vanderbilt Glasgow’s entire career as long as he was allowed to “do what he needed to,” which included building new facilities. Glasgow wasn’t convinced he’d be there for long, whereas Michigan’s coaching situation gave him no pause. Glasgow says that Michigan is someone’s dream job, so he wasn’t worried about his coach pulling up stakes and heading somewhere else in the middle of Glasgow’s career. He met with Coach Hoke, who he describes as an earnest man and great developer of interior linemen; they still talk to this day. Hoke was going to be Ryan’s position coach, as he was handling the interior defensive linemen at the time. There’s no easily romanticizable ‘aha’ moment in which Glasgow fell in love with Michigan. It felt like a good fit, and Graham had already taken the leap of faith to play high-level college football. Ryan would bet on his work ethic and become a Wolverine.

[Bryan Fuller]

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Glasgow arrived in Ann Arbor in the summer of 2012 and was assigned to live in Stockwell during training camp. He quickly made friends and couldn’t wait to start camp. The freshmen discussing their high school glory days bolstered their confidence in those first few days before practice began.

That feeling continued to last through approximately the first 20 minutes of the first practice of fall camp. Hoke lined his charges up for a blocking drill, and Glasgow was tasked with taking on Will Campbell. At 6’5” and 310 pounds, “Big Will” had certainly earned his nickname. Campbell lowered his helmet and cracked Glasgow’s sternum, knocking out not only his wind but also The Freshman Confidence, the term Glasgow and his friends have since developed for first-year players’ pre-camp braggadocio. The air comes back. For most, The Freshman Confidence doesn’t.

Even so, Glasgow felt that he had a strong camp—until fall classes started. He is majoring in Economics. He arrived on campus, however, with the same aspirations as what seems like three-quarters of every freshman class: to attend the Ross School of Business. He credits his father with much of his desire to do well on the field and his mother with his desire to do well academically, and he credits himself with not doing as well as he would have liked during his first semester. Glasgow did well in his summer classes, but the combination of football practice and a full course load proved to be more than he was ready to handle. “Nothing was working out the way I’d planned on it. You always have this master plan and you’re like, everything’s going to work out,” he says. “Then life happens and reality kicks in and you’re just like, well, what do I do from here? It took me another semester to kind of gather myself, I guess.”

Glasgow was faced with gathering himself on the field as well. He redshirted 2012 and spent the year on the scout team, which meant facing off against an offensive line with three future NFL players daily. That time spent competing against the Lewan-Barnum-Mealer-Omameh-Schofield iteration of Michigan’s line was instructive, though less from the perspective of technique and more as a cautionary tale for the rest of Glasgow’s career. “It was just a bad attitude on my part, not seeing how much it could have helped me, and I just kind of took it for granted and went through the motions,” Glasgow says. “Didn’t really give as much effort as I should have.”

After the season, Glasgow resolved to avoid the on-field pitfalls of his redshirt season by hitting the weight room even harder than before. The additional strength has served him well over the course of his career; it didn’t have the immediate impact he had hoped for in 2013. Borrowing from his current head coach’s phraseology, he says that he had a delusion that strength would automatically translate to the field but soon learned that you have to play football to get better at football.

That offseason, the coaching staff moved Glasgow from nose tackle to 3-technique in the interest of depth. Earning playing time was certainly a possibility; Glasgow’s competition was two other redshirt freshmen and senior Jibreel Black. Glasgow felt good about the way some of the player-led line drills had gone over the winter, but he once again felt the crunch for time while taking a full 16-credit schedule during spring practices. Finding a way to balance the two proved difficult. “I took it for granted,” Glasgow says. “Just would show up to practice and do what I had to do. I didn’t do anything extra, didn’t do anything to try and get myself better. Wasn’t taking personal responsibility for how I was playing, I’d say.”

The depth chart entering 2013’s fall camp proved a stark reminder of the extra work that Glasgow needed to put in. He was listed fourth on the depth chart, with two members of his class—Willie Henry and Tom Strobel—listed above him. “I said, If I don’t do something I’m going to be left on the bench my entire career here and just go down as one of those preferred walk-ons or walk-ons that spent four years playing on the scout team,” Glasgow says. “I mean, that serves a purpose, but that’s not what I wanted to do.”

Glasgow had already started climbing the depth chart when he had his seminal off-field moment in the middle of fall camp. He and roommate Matt Godin were discussing playing time when Godin told Glasgow that Willie Henry and Tom Strobel had made plays in camp, but he had only seen Glasgow make about three tackles. “He sugarcoated it a little bit more but basically gave me the news I didn’t want to hear,” Glasgow says. “And that kind of lit a fire under my ass and propelled me into the season. I finished strong in camp and ended up second on the depth chart somehow, beating out Willie.”

The aforementioned Notre Dame game was an eye-opener; Glasgow continued to put in extra work, but Willie Henry was soon getting Glasgow’s playing time. Ondre Pipkins was injured in a game against Minnesota in early October, however, and Glasgow once again saw the field. “I was basically just a guy out there, not really doing much, just trying to do my job,” Glasgow says. “Not really anything more than that. Just trying not to mess up.”

Willie Henry had a fantastic 2013 season and Glasgow took note, telling one of the team’s defensive analysts in the offseason that he wanted to switch back to nose tackle. There were rumblings around that time about moving Glasgow to nose, and the coaching staff heard Glasgow out and approved the position switch. He started 2014’s spring camp lower on the depth chart than he would have liked; “That propelled me,” Glasgow says. He made up ground rapidly, starting the spring game and every game thereafter with the exception of Penn State, which Glasgow is quick to note. (Chris Wormley started that game, then was in the starting lineup the rest of the season next to Glasgow at 3-technique.)

Glasgow started the 2014 Michigan State game, but he was eventually pulled. “That was another moment where it’s like, this is rivalry football,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to play in these games if you want to be a good player, a big-time player.” The following week against Indiana he regained his confidence and made his first big play, recovering a fumble he forced himself. “I can do this,” Glasgow remembers thinking. “I can be a good college football player.”

[Eric Upchurch]

“I think the thing that motivates me is kind of some weird paranoia-type thing, a fear that I’m not doing enough or I’m being too lazy or someone else is doing something more,” Glasgow says. “If you don’t show up, you’re going to get your spot taken. That’s something I never wanted to let happen as soon as I got it. I tried to hold onto it with both hands and clutch it tight because if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do for a week or two, before you know it it’s gone. Everything you worked for is gone.”

Glasgow was finally finding success in balancing his responsibilities inside Schembechler Hall and in the lecture hall as his time-management skills improved. Glasgow cuts it as close as possible when it’s time to leave for class; he says that he still leaves at 8:25 for an 8:30 class, using Michigan Time to his advantage. That is, however, not without its (relatively mundane) consequences: a forgotten pen or notebook here, grabbing a backpack filled with football equipment instead of books there. Glasgow is proud of the work he has put in academically, and he has never finished a semester with lower than a 3.1 GPA after those first three rough ones.

Graham and Ryan went on vacation together near the end of Ryan’s third semester. During the trip, Ryan had an epiphany that he shared with his father when the brothers returned home. “He had come back and he said, ‘You know, I sort of figured out that I’m not putting in the effort academically that I need to put in and that if I want to take care of my family the way that you and mom have taken care of yours that I better get things in gear and do what I’m supposed to be doing,’” Dr. Glasgow says. “I remember we’re sitting there having lunch and I said, ‘Ryan, this is great! I talk to you three times a week or twice a week for years just to get one moment like this.’ This is exactly what a parent wants to hear. He’s woken up.”

Glasgow has since learned how—and, perhaps most importantly, when—to buckle down and study for exams, though that leaves precious little time for anything else. “My car’s a mess. My room’s a mess. There’s clothes everywhere,” Glasgow says. “Not really super organized. I wouldn’t say polar opposite, but pretty different outside of the building.” Matt Godin has been Glasgow’s housemate for years. “Yeah, he’s a little messy. I wouldn’t say any of us are clean. Drake Harris is probably the only clean one in the house,” Godin says, then pauses to reflect. “He’s probably the dirtiest. I’ll give him that award.”

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Brady Hoke’s firing after the 2014 season left Glasgow’s position group without a coach. They found a new interior line coach in graduate assistant and former Michigan nose tackle Will Carr, a first-team All-American in 1996. The new defensive line coach was a familiar face; Greg Mattison had been Glasgow’s defensive coordinator his entire Michigan career and had filled in as the interior D-line coach when Hoke’s head coaching duties prevented him from doing so.

Glasgow entered fall camp in 2015 as the starting nose tackle, and he finally felt like he was getting the hang of the position thanks to an arduous offseason effort to improve his hands. “Sometimes guys that are strong when they’re younger will just try to muscle somebody,” Mattison says. “As you get older and as you start playing against better players and you’re the starter and you’re expected to be a guy that wins, you find out that you can’t do that without great technique. And so he’s worked very, very hard on the correct footwork and proper hand placement.”

Bryan Mone was Glasgow’s backup, but he suffered a knee injury in the middle of camp. Carr decided that with just Glasgow and Maurice Hurst to work with, he would spend some time every practice fine-tuning their pass-rush. The group would head to a corner of the practice fields behind Glick Field House, drag over two scout-team offensive linemen, and get as many reps as they could in 20 minutes.

Carr’s corner sessions greatly improved Glasgow’s pass-rush abilities. He frequently reminded Glasgow that at Michigan, a nose tackle’s job is to be more than just a space-eater; he also reminded Glasgow that he was wearing Carr’s old number, and as such he had to do both the number and the position justice. “‘There’s been so many good noses in front of you. You don’t want to just be a guy on the list,’” Glasgow recalls Carr telling him. “‘You want to be a guy who sticks out.’ He would always harp on that.”

Glasgow worked to hone his push-pull move, which has become something of a signature pass-rush move for him over the past two seasons. “It’s having confidence that if he does it, he can be successful,” Mattison says. “A lot of times if you teach a guy a technique he’s not strong enough or he doesn’t understand it well enough yet. He now gets it, so he knows if he does do it right, he has a chance to be successful.” Even so, Glasgow likes to pick his spots sparingly. “I watch people on film, D-tackles, who will swim through a double team and I just like—I get freaked out, like what are you doing?” Glasgow says. “You’re supposed to play through the hip, take your guy, take the other guy who’s trying to get up to the backer and do your job for your team…You could go swim and try and make a play you have a 30% chance of making and look like a hero 30% of the time and the other 70% you’re missing a tackle and they’re gashing you up the middle.”

It took three games in 2015 for Glasgow to feel like he was playing at a new level. Instead of making plays every four games, he was making them every game. That was reinforced with a good game the following week against BYU, at which point Glasgow says he finally started to get rolling.

The next big test for not only Glasgow but the line as a unit came in the middle of October against Michigan State. Greg Mattison put together a reel of bad plays from the 2014 Michigan State game to show his group the week of the game. Glasgow says that some people had more plays than others on the reel, and he had quite a few. Mattison played the video for the players and told them that the defensive line would win or lose the game for Michigan, a philosophy the linemen have since adopted for every game. It was likely in this moment that what Glasgow refers to as “Mattison’s Cult” was born. “You go in there and you just remember the year before and you’re like, I got my ass kicked,” Glasgow says. “I got little-boyed by men.” That didn’t happen in 2015, as Glasgow posted a +6.5 grade in this site’s Upon Further Review. Glasgow even made an exceedingly rare positive comment about his play, saying that he thought he played well in the run game—then adding that he didn’t get as much pass rush as he would have liked.

A few weeks later, Michigan traveled to Minnesota to face the Gophers under the lights on Halloween night. An extra-motivated Glasgow had one of the best games of his career, posting a team-high +15.5 grade in this site’s Upon Further Review and blowing the center back on a game-deciding, goal-to-go play from one yard out. He discussed the final two plays of that game with me the following Monday, breaking down his thought process as the opposing linemen shifted their weight and players motioned out of the backfield. Glasgow’s hard work on the practice field was paying off, and now his hours in the film room were doing the same.

“The guy who was playing against Ryan was a freshman and he ended up about three yards behind the line of scrimmage, and his body was parallel to the line of scrimmage,” Dr. Glasgow recalls. “And Ryan said, ‘What did you think of the play, dad?’ I said, ‘Well, I look at this differently, Ryan. I’m a dad.’ He said, ‘Well, what do you mean? I don’t really understand.’ I said, ‘That boy that you were playing against was a freshman, that center.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I said, ‘You do know that he ended up three yards behind the line of scrimmage and parallel to the line of scrimmage.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ He was very proud…And I said ‘That play reminded me of that first play against Notre Dame,’ and he passed out laughing. He said, ‘You know, you’re exactly right. It’s exactly like that!’ I said, ‘That’s right. you were a boy then and now you’re a man.’ There’s a big difference.”

[Byan Fuller]

One week later, Michigan returned home to face lowly Rutgers. Up 28-10 in the middle of the second quarter, Glasgow got off a block and ran down Rutgers’ scrambling quarterback near the sideline. The tackle seemed innocuous, but Glasgow instantly appeared to be in pain. “I pretty much knew immediately that something was very wrong because I tried to push myself up after the play and my left arm immediately collapsed,” Glasgow says. He had an MRI done on Sunday and found out the next day that he had a torn pectoral tendon and would be out for the season. He would have to undergo surgery to repair the injury and was in an immobilizer for six weeks. “I couldn’t even do rehab for six weeks,” Glasgow says. “…You can do nothing. It’s the worst feeling ever. You’re just kind of…here.”

Glasgow was already a fixture in the weight room, but rehabilitation found him spending a good portion of every day with assistant strength coach Mark Naylor. “It was always very much so a what’s-next mentality for him,” Naylor says. “Each week and each month he was taking strides to getting back playing again, and so you never had to rev him up at all or get him out of the dumps like you do occasionally with some people. With him it was like, Okay, this happened, now we’re on to recovering and getting prepared for next season.” Naylor says that no one in the program was ever worried about whether Glasgow would return to full strength; they knew his work ethic, and they could tell from his eagerness to train and forward-looking disposition that he’d quickly return to where he was before the injury.

The injury provided an opportunity to train in a different way. Naylor suggested to Glasgow that they double his lower-body training, and Glasgow was on board from the start. Naylor recalls pitching the idea while Glasgow was still in a sling and Glasgow accepting without hesitation. Glasgow missed all of spring practice in 2016, but he continued to rehabilitate his upper body while working extra on his lower body and was on track to return in time for fall camp more explosive than ever.

Glasgow felt rusty during the first two weeks of fall camp; his mental game was as sharp as it was before the injury, but he had to wait for his body to catch up. By the time he started to feel like he was performing mentally and physically, Bryan Mone was taking his play to a new level. Mone played so well that Mattison penciled him into the starting lineup at nose tackle and moved Glasgow to 3-technique. That was the way they started the season against Hawaii, with Glasgow the “swing player;” when there are three players who have earned significant playing time at two positions, Mattison likes to have one who can play either position in case of injury. Mone tweaked something in his knee early in the Hawaii game, and Glasgow slid back over to nose tackle.

He started every game thereafter at nose and had the best season of his career, recording 39 tackles, four sacks, 9.5 tackles for loss, and the best aggregate UFR grade of his time at Michigan. For the second year in a row, Glasgow shared the Richard Katcher Award for Michigan’s best defensive lineman with Chris Wormley. He was named second-team All-Big Ten by the coaches and media. Earlier this month, ESPN’s Mel Kiper ranked him as the fifth-best draft-eligible nose tackle overall and the top-ranked senior.

His growth on the field was readily apparent, and he was beginning to be rewarded with outside accolades. “As a coach, when a guy steps wrong or his hands aren’t right, usually you say that to him,” Mattison says. “Well, he’s gonna tell you or give you the nod that he knew before that happens. He’s a very, very intelligent, high-character young man. Just works every day as hard as he can.”

“When you’re a coach and you’ve got young boys that oftentimes hang out up at work with dad, sure, you want to steer them toward players you wouldn’t mind your son becoming,” Naylor says. “He’s one of those players.”

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On Friday, Glasgow will strap on the winged helmet for the last time. It won’t be the last time he puts on a football helmet, though; both Naylor and Mattison think he is going to have a long career in the NFL, adding that it didn’t take long watching him in practice before they saw he could one day be something special. (“To me, a lot of people don’t know defensive line, but when they watch a game and see how hard he plays they all wanna know, Who’s that?” Mattison adds.) Glasgow will go through his pregame routine, capped by crushing a small glass vial of ammonium carbonate and water wrapped in cotton. He will then take the smelling salt and hold it in front of his nose, letting the fumes fill his lungs. “Get real awake,” Glasgow says. “Then just go out and play.”