Kyle Sheets’ rise to the NFL is about more than just football
The final day of the 2024 NFL Draft on Apr. 27, 2024, felt like an eternity for Kyle Sheets, who anxiously waited for his exceedingly large dream to come to fruition inside his cousin’s home in Linesville, Pa.
“The whole day was probably one of the most stressful days,” Sheets said.
The NFL draft consists of 257 picks over the span of seven rounds, followed by a wave of free-agent signings for undrafted prospects. Sheets knew his time would be then, roughly seven and a half hours after the fourth round kicked off at noon. So once the New York Jets submitted the draft's final pick, Sheets sat close to his phone, waiting for his life-changing phone call.
It didn’t take long for his phone to light up.
The incoming call? His agent, John Pace, with a contract offer from the New Orleans Saints.
“When I finally got the call, I didn’t know how to feel,” Sheets said. “If I’m being honest, I don’t know if it’s really set in yet.”
The Saints were the first to get a hold of Pace, and despite later suitors — the Chicago Bears, Cincinnati Bengals and Tampa Bay Buccaneers all had interest — it was an easy choice for the former Slippery Rock wide receiver.
“It’s an actual dream come true that I’ve been chasing toward my entire life,” Sheets said. “I’m extremely blessed that the Saints have taken a chance on me and given me a pedestal to go out and show what I can do...I can’t thank them enough.”
Kyle Sheets has a small-school, feel-good story that is not only one worth being told but one worth reverberating for small-school players with similar globe-sized aspirations. He took a remarkable path to get here, beginning in a middle-of-nowhere Springboro, Pa., with a population of less than 1,000.
Sheets’ first glimpse of football was when he and his father, Harold Sheets, would watch the elder’s high school film together when he was a running back at Conneaut Valley High School, which is one of three schools that now make up a larger Conneaut Area Senior High School (CASH), where younger Sheets attended. CASH is roughly 12 miles south of Springboro.
His passion for the game ignited during those film sessions, and his flame only grew larger and larger after each season he continued to play.
Once Sheets got to CASH, he played most of his career at quarterback, specifically his freshman, junior and senior seasons.
“I’m not going to sit here and say I was some very good quarterback,” Sheets laughed. “I was just playing the game and picking matchups.”
The other position he had experience at was wide receiver, which was just his sophomore season and the final game of his senior year. But he favored catching passes rather than throwing them; growing up as a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, he loved watching Santanio Holmes. So as Sheets immersed himself into the vast landscape of college recruitment, he did so at WR.
He flew a bit under the radar during the recruitment process. Slippery Rock was his first offer. “We highly recruited [him],” head coach Shawn Lutz said. “We just saw a long athlete, untapped, with the potential of not even playing the position he was going to play.”
Lutz was very familiar with Sheets even before the recruitment period. Lutz’s son, Logan, who attended Grove City Area High School, faced off against Sheets multiple times in both football and basketball during those years.
“You just got a chance to see him take off and run,” Lutz said. “He was so long, so athletic. His frame was unbelievable. Then you turn over to basketball, and you really got a chance to see him go up and down the basketball court."
A week before signing day, Penn State got in on Sheets. The Nittany Lions offered him a spot as an invited walk-on, and their interest was enough to convince Lutz he lost out on Sheets. Lots of prospects would quickly jump at the lure from the Big Ten powerhouse. Playing football in Beaver Stadium comes with nationally televised games and a program known for producing NFL-level talent. Yet ties to Henry Litwin, a current Slippery Rock WR at the time and Sheets’ former H.S. teammate, ultimately helped Lutz land his guy.
The leap from high school to college football is sizeable, but it was much larger for Sheets due to his rawness.
“When you’re coming out of high school, you just run routes and try to get open,” he said. “The game is a lot faster and a lot more technical when you get up [to college], so my freshman year was a lot of learning, my sophomore year was a lot of learning and my junior year was a lot of learning.”
After essentially being a sponge, those seasons he spent soaking up information fostered a better understanding of the intricacies of the position. And once he put the technicalities and traits together, he broke out grandly.
After a combined 24 catches for 367 yards and three TDs in his first two years, Sheets amassed 54 catches for 887 yards and nine touchdowns as a junior and one-upped that with 76 catches for 1,186 yards and 17 TDs as a senior.
Simply put, he was nothing but dominant in his final two years.
Lutz’s over-the-phone scouting report as to why Sheets couldn’t be stopped:
He can freakin’ fly.
At 6 foot 4, 220 pounds, he can jump extremely high.
His biggest intangible: He can high-point the football (thanks to his basketball background, which Sheets emphatically credited for his skillset at WR).
“The games definitely translate,” Sheets said about his basketball history. “The jump ball is a big thing. You're always going up for a rebound, you want to get that at its highest point.”
Sheets’ basketball background undoubtedly played a factor in his success, but he worked strenuously for it.
In the summer of 2023, he was completing his internship for Slippery Rock, working eight hours a day. After each eight-hour day, he would head straight to voluntary summer football workouts for three more hours. Though they were voluntary, he never missed one.
“I feel like guilty or something if I don’t go to something, but I wanted to be there too,” Sheets said. “It was a lot of work.”
In those years before his ascension, Sheets affixed himself with former Slippery Rock wide receivers Litwin, Jermaine Wynn Jr. and Cinque Sweeting.
“Sitting back and learning from them was definitely like one of the best things that has ever happened to my football career,” Sheets said. “They did nothing but help me.”
All three received the chance to play at the next level in 2022, with Litwin signing with the Chicago Bears as a UDFA, Wynn Jr. signing a free-agent contract with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League (CFL) and Sweeting being drafted by the Vegas Vipers of the Extreme Football League (XFL), which has now merged with the United States Football League (USFL) to create a larger United Football League (UFL). Along with showing Sheets the ropes at Slippery Rock, they also showed him there is a path to professional football out of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC).
Speaking with Sheets, two things are evident: He’s soft-spoken and he’s modest. Following his junior year breakout, Lutz knew even before Sheets that the NFL was realistic. But to make it in the NFL, especially at the WR position, you have to have a certain mindset. For the wide receivers, it’s a bit diva-ish. Sheets is nothing like that; he’s a team-first player. So Lutz tried to instill in Sheets that diva-like mindset NFL wide receivers possess. “You got to have that mindset, like ‘give me the ball’, ‘give me the ball every time we need a big play,’” Lutz told him.
He added, “I saw it in the spring going into his senior year that we could not stop him. He had just had to work on that mindset of being a little bit selfish. He carried that over to the very beginning of the year.”
The thunderclap moment in Sheets' career that announced him as a potential NFL draft prospect came his senior season. In a 42-21 blowout win over Millersville just three weeks into the season, he had 12 catches for 210 yards and three touchdowns, including a 74-yard score.
After a three-touchdown game, a 2023 Consensus All-American (AFCA, AP, D2CCA, Hansen) nod, a 2023 First Team All-Region selection and cementing himself among multiple records during his tenure at The Rock (3rd in career TD catches, 4th in career receiving yards, 7th in career receptions), the NFL no longer felt like a pipe dream.
Sheets acknowledged that he’ll have to start his career on special teams and work his way up, but that’s nothing new to him. Before his stardom with Slippery Rock, he took a somewhat traditional path to success — backup in his first two years, starter the next and then a two-time All-PSAC selection at the end of his career.
For Sheets, this opportunity with the Saints isn’t solely about his football dream reaching its culmination thus far; it’s about him having that aforementioned pedestal to stand on for other kids coming from small schools.
“Obviously, football is something that I love to do,” Sheets said, “but I’ve always done it in hopes of being a role model and being on that pedestal for others to see that, if you really want something and you work for it, anything is possible regardless of where you come from.”