The smile.
The thing you can’t help but notice about Ryan Keiser is his broad smile.
In church last Sunday. Over coffee at Irving’s on College Ave. On the Penn State practice field through the years.
And, undoubtably, this Friday and Saturday at the Baltimore Ravens’ mini-camp.
The smile is his constant. It is perpetual and it is genuine. As is he.
The former Nittany Lion football player who first arrived on campus seven years ago, making the trek from 62 miles down the road from his hometown of Selinsgrove, is now a man these days.
He turns 25 next month. Married for over two years, to his high school sweetheart, McKenzi, his supporter through literally thick and eerily thin. With a constantly slightly-unshaven face, he’s a full 6-foot-1, hovering again around 200 pounds – back in fighting shape.
And it has been a fight, getting his body and soul ready to take his best shot at the NFL. The next step is this weekend.
UPS AND DOWNS
As Keiser has trained daily for that opportunity, adding three dozen pounds of muscle, he’s also worked as a campus minister for State College’s Christ Community Church, meeting with students in the HUB and in Pollock and all over downtown. Keiser has had his ups and downs in his journey, many of them mirroring the Nittany Lion football program. Some of those challenges have been distorted like a funhouse mirror, tougher than anyone could imagine.
“The past few years, I’ve had so many experiences on and off the field through which I’ve learned so much,” he said earlier this week. “There are so many places I’ve grown in, particularly in my faith on God. Off the field, I’ve been through many things that normal students have been through as well. I’ve dealt with situations that have had a big impact on me and that’s helped me relate to the students I work with.
“With football, there was a group of us who went through all that stuff. It was a small group. But we really came together as brothers. We love Penn State, we love this area, we love this campus, the fans, the atmosphere. It was obviously unique and interesting – although not good all the time. It was a crazy situation, but a great experience that God can use to teach us so many things. We were able to push forward and the guys ahead of us and after us have put Penn State football in a good situation right now.”
Then, he smiles.
It’s been his constant. Through good and bad. As a first-team all-state football player at defensive back and wide receiver for Selinsgrove High School. And through a Penn State career that took him through four head coaches and countless defensive coordinators and a bad shoulder injury he played through and a broken hand he missed only one game with and then the punctured bowel that sent him to the hospital for days on end, when some folks thought it was the end.
Since he walked onto Penn State in 2010, you could say that Keiser has been through hell and back. But he certainly wouldn’t. It’s been heaven on earth, despite an injury that almost cost him more than his football career.
A MATTER OF FAITH
“My whole college career, my faith had an impact on my playing ability and who I am as a man,” Keiser says. “Its been a growing process ever since. I feel like I’m a different man than when I got here or two years ago or even a year ago.”
His is a feel-good story, of a former Penn State football star who suffered a truly traumatic injury and last put on pads over 560 days ago – that’s 80 weeks and counting – and has never stopped trying to get back on the field.
His prayers have come true. Literally.
“God’s always taught me to take things one step at a time,” Keiser said on Tuesday. “I’m thankful for this opportunity this weekend. And I’m going to go give it my best shot.”
He paused.
“Whatever situation it is, God can use it,” he added. “If it only goes as far as this weekend, I’m thankful for the opportunity. If it’s more than that, well, that’s what I’m hoping for. God teaches me to dream big. I’m in it in a big way and I’m hoping for that. I really believe that whatever happens, God will be glorified in it.”
Here’s his deal: Keiser is getting a final shot at making football a career. He’ll join 11 recent Ravens’ NFL draft picks, a handful of undrafted free agents and a host of other invited unsigned free agents in a two-day mini-camp this weekend at the Ravens’ Under Armour Performance Center in Owings Mills, Md.
He’ll try to continue his goal of playing professional football for a living. Over five seasons at Penn State, Keiser showed some sustained flashes of football excellence – as a holder, playing on all the special teams, starting at safety, making game-saving interceptions against Indiana and Rutgers and Wisconsin, leading the Nittany Lions as a co-captain in 2014.
“Ryan Keiser is a winner,” Tom Bradley, Penn State’s defensive coordinator during Keiser’s first two seasons (2010-11), said the other day while driving from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., on the Eastern recruiting trail for UCLA. “He’s a great locker room guy, a positive motivator, he does all the right things. We thought he was a steal when we first brought him in.”
Lest you forget, Keiser is the Nittany Lions’ former walk-on who rose to team captain and starting safety whose world should have come tumbling down in the middle of the 2014 football season, when during a midseason practice he fractured a rib and punctured a bowel and was in dire straits for days and worried his friends, family, coaches and teammates nearly to death — and ultimately lost 45 pounds.
His world should have.
But it didn’t. As has been his MO his entire football life, Keiser fought back and came back better than ever.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Bob Shoop, Keiser’s coach at Penn State in 2014. “After he was hurt, he was spooky, scary. He lost so much weight. I was encouraging, but not overly optimistic.”
(Regarding the encouragement: When the 2016 draft day approached, Keiser reached out Shoop via text and Shoop reached out to his contacts, trying to get Keiser one final shot at his final NFL dream. Baltimore called before and after the draft; they wanted Keiser.)
REDEMPTION AND FAITH
All of 2015 was a year of redemption and rebirth for Keiser, as he worked daily to rebuild his body, with the NFL in 2016 always within his sights.
“It’s been a long journey, obviously after I got injured in October 2014. Since then, it’s been a battle,” Keiser said. “I lost about 40-45 pounds. I had to start from there and build that base again. That took awhile, into the next summer. From that point into fall and this spring I was able to build upon it. I’m really back to the best I’ve ever been physically.
“I was very thankful to be able to work at Penn State’s facilities. The football coaching staff and the strength staff have been a huge help. They’ve been there for me the whole time, training me when I needed to and giving me all kinds of advice. Deege (Dwight Galt) and Alvin Futtrell and all those guys were there for me.
“Sometimes when you don’t have a team to work out or train with, and it’s just you, it seems like a really long shot, really far off. So it can be hard to get motivated and I’d wonder, ‘Can this really happen? Are you doing this for anything or are you just here working out for no purpose?’ And sometimes doubts would creep in.”
But Keiser would rely on his faith and remember what sparked his fire to get back into shape, to train again with the NFL – Baltimore this weekend – as his goal.
“It’s been an awesome journey and really an awesome opportunity,” he said. “It really worked out well. When I went into ministry I wasn’t even planning on giving football a shot again until pastor Mitch (Smith), our pastor at C3, said something to me about it. It was at the church. He said, ‘Why don’t you train and see if you can get back to normal and give it a shot?’
“I was like, ‘Wow, you know I could actually train and do ministry at the same time.’ That’s when I tried to give it a try.”
PRO DAY NUMBERS
After sitting out for a year, but training daily and often in solitude, Keiser had a Pro Day at Holuba Hall in March that showed he is a bona fide NFL prospect. He ran a 4.49 in the 40, better than 31 of the 41 defensive backs at the Combine in Indy and the third-fastest safety. His 37-inch vertical jump would’ve ranked him tied for fifth among all safeties at the Combine, while his 133-inch broad jump would’ve bested all the safeties at the Combine and ranked him behind only one defensive back, Jalen Ramsey of Florida State, who went fifth overall in the 2016 NFL Draft.
“The broad jump is the one test you have to really look at,” says Bradley. “That ties in explosion, vertical jump, power. Along with the 40, it tells you what you need to know.”
As Shoop, Keiser’s former Penn State position coach and defensive coordinator, said by telephone from Nashville on Thursday morning, “Ryan is not going to the Ravens’ mini-camp because they are doing him a favor.”
“I think he’ll excel at the mini-camp,” says Shoop, now the D-coordinator at Tennessee. “From a player’s perspective, Ryan understood it all. He never missed a key, he was never out of position. He’s able to process things rapidly, react quickly, communicate well. Ryan orchestrated everything for us. The relationship I had with him was unlike any I’ve ever had with any other player.”
Here’s what you need to know about Keiser the person. Bradley and Shoop both called me before 7:30 in the morning – while already on the road recruiting – because they knew I wanted to hear about Ryan Keiser.
They could talk about Keiser all morning. Which both nearly did.
Said Shoop: “College football needs more people like Ryan Keiser. He stands for everything that is right about the sport. If I ever get the chance, he’ll be one of the first people I call to be on my staff – be it as a coach or in player development or in community relations or working with the spiritual side of the team. I challenge you to find someone at Penn State who has something bad to say about Ryan Keiser.”
Added Bradley: “More than anything else, you would want your son you grow up to be like Ryan Keiser.”
’Nuff said. All of it makes you want to smile.
