DawgTalkers.net Forums The Archives 2017 NFL Season 2017 NFL Draft Browns pick DT Larry Ogunjobi with the 65th pick

I remember seeing his name a couple of times pre-draft. Didn't dive deep though in analyzing him as a player.

You never know what you are gonna get when you draft a d-lineman. Dude is built like an armor truck though, and I'm excited to have him.

Welcome to Cleveland!!!

Read your own post

He was double teamed a lot , for a D linemen, that is an impact. He was on a way overmatched team and the other team game planned to stop him because nobody else on that line concerned them. THAT is an impact.

If Shelton continues to draw double teams, can they double team Ogun? What does that do for Garret or the other DE we drafted last year that I cant remember his name because I am getting old?

I'm not trying to be overly critical, and I'm no scout, but I just expected to see him "flash" a couple/few times. Make a play. Ballpeen mentioned Michael Dean Perry, but I didn't really see that kind of explosion from Ogunjobi. I'm probably wrong; Greg Williams is no fool, and we wouldn't have drafted him if Greg didn't like him.

I understand what you are saying, but sometimes interior Dlineman is jst not a glory position that jumps out at you.

Hes very athletic and for a guy that didnt play football until a soph in HS , and was a out of shape lard azz. He will get stronger, he is still developing that tendon strength. Muscle strength can be developed relatively quickly, but tendon strength takes many years to come along.

The second half of this video is against Kentucky, and he looks very disruptive. I know Toth got mentioned by people.

There are still corners to be had. Someone mentioned Powell. I think he will be a starter at safety. Nothing says that Peppers won't play on the island, He has the ability.

We still have what, 5 picks? I'd suspect we will see a corner, rb, and kicker selected. The other two...whoever is best.

We need a FS more than anything else. 2nd would be CB. If we want to allow Williams to use Peppers like he wants to, you are going to need a FS with incredible range.

We need a corner as well, but if push came to shove, we can get by with the Corners that we have better than we can get by with the FS's that we have.

He's not faster than Des or Cooper, and he is taking one of their roster spots, so how did we get faster on defense?

You say he is an upgrade on Cooper. Watch coopers college tape and whatever you can on this guy and tell us again.

I see a kid who doesn't move his feet well. Very raw with hand usage doesn't disengage well to fight through blocks. he has incredibly strong hands when he gets is hands on you, the play is over.

BTW Mayock needs to have his head checked seriously. He has talked nonsense this entire draft and talking about this kid as a1 tech pass rusher s just stupid. He had 5 sacks in the last 2 years combined and just as few QB Hurries.

Kid is raw and has some potential but there were a boatload of talent on the board.

I personally think he is already better than Dez or Coop on running downs. He is surprisingly fast for his size as well. Also he's played 0,3, and 5, so he adds some versatility.

At worst I think we drafted a 2 down starter with the athletic ability to be much more.

Dane Brugler
@dpbrugler
Cleveland continues to draft players I really like. Ogunjobi is a one-gap, penetrating three-technique. My No. 56 overall player at No. 65.

'Larry Ogunjobi, once overweight with an unhealthy video game obsession, has transformed into an improbable NFL draft pick'

http://www.cleveland.com/browns/index.ss...art_river_index

By Dan Labbe, cleveland.com on April 30, 2017 at 10:00 AM, updated April 30, 2017 at 12:52 PM

BEREA, Ohio -- Browns head coach Hue Jackson was asked to describe his team's third-round pick, defensive lineman Larry Ogunjobi, on Saturday night after the draft wrapped up.

"He is beautiful," Jackson said with a laugh. "He is big. He is strong. He is tough."

Of course, anyone who saw the workout video of Ogunjobi that was making the rounds on social media after the pick didn't need to be told any of that. It's a video of the defensive lineman from UNC-Charlotte hitting the weight room at 1 a.m. days before the draft. Watch the video and you'll see muscles getting worked out that you didn't even know the human body had.

That's a very different version of Ogunjobi than what his mother, Mercy, remembers before her son discovered football. What she remembers is a boy who spent many of his waking hours playing video games and many of his nights struggling to breathe when he was sleeping. Ogunjobi, prior to his sophomore year of high school, had ballooned to 350 pounds.

His parents knew it was a problem, but their concern peaked when they noticed their oldest child was beginning to suffer from sleep apnea.

"He would sleep at night and he would have difficulty breathing, then he would just be like no breaths," she said.

That's when Mercy and her husband, Larry Sr., decided it was time for changes.

'MAN, THIS IS HARD'

Larry Sr. and Mercy came to the United States from Nigeria in 1993, a year before Olumide Larry Ogunjobi was born. Before he started playing football, his most significant experience with the game came through, what else, playing Madden video games.

Ogunjobi recalls playing Halo and Call of Duty, as well, among others on his XBox. He was pretty good at all of them.

"We would buy him games, he would play it one day and say, 'Mom, I beat the game,'" Mercy recalled. "Then we'd buy another one and he'd sit down, eat Strawberry Pop-tarts and just play games all day, all night. He started packing weight, just packing the weight."

"After that," Mercy said, "we thought, we have to do something else, get him out, get him active."

So they did one of the most difficult things for a parent to do, even if it involves something negatively impacting their child. They took away the thing he loved.

"They took away my game system," Ogunjobi said.

"It was really difficult," Mercy said. "He cried. He thought we didn't like him. He thought we were punishing him."

They hired a personal trainer to work with Ogunjobi, but that didn't work out. Then they ran into the father of a friend of Larry's sister, Faith, ten years younger than Larry, when Larry Sr. took them both to a park, in part to get his son out of the house. The man's name was Robert Mitchell and he told Larry's father that he could help his son.

Ogunjobi and Mitchell worked together for about a month, getting Larry down to about 330 pounds, and that's when Mitchell turned to football to do the rest of the work.

"He took me to the high school one day, and I asked him what we were doing there and he said, 'You're going to play football.'" Ogunjobi said. "I said, 'No I'm not.' He said, 'Yes you are,' and I said, 'No, I'm not.' He got the permission slip from the lady at the front desk, and he took it to my mom and my mom signed it and I was on the football field that next Saturday."

It was his sophomore year, and his first impression of playing football was simple.

"My first thought was, 'Man, this is hard,'" Ogunjobi said.

"I couldn't get through the first workout," he said, "and the coaches came up to me the next day and they said, 'Larry, we just want to make sure that you're still here.' I thought, yes I'm still here coach, but in my head I was only there because I had to be."

Except, eventually, it kept getting better and better for him. He earned Most Improved JV Player after that season, a small award but one that he said, "in retrospect, that was the first time in my life where I felt like I earned an award that I actually worked for. That is what kind of set the framework for everything that has happened up to this point."

From there, he saw teammates getting recruited and asked his coaches what he needed to do to get recruited. They said he had to perfect his technique, get faster, get stronger. So he set out to do all of that.

"Every day after practice I would go to the YMCA," he said. "I was still big so I started off running just half a mile and bike five miles. Then it got to a point where I could run a whole mile and bike ten miles. Then to the point where I could run two whole miles without stopping and bike 15 miles, and my body composition started changing."

He dropped all the way down to 237 pounds, losing so much weight that he had to actually bulk back up for his junior and senior seasons, weighing in between 260 and 270 pounds, this time in muscle instead of fat. He was offered by UNC Charlotte prior to his senior season.

'IT IS NOT WHERE YOU GO'

Ogunjobi redshirted during the 2012 season, mainly because the college program he was joining hadn't actually started playing yet. The 49ers inaugural year was in 2013. Ogunjobi was chosen as the first player to wear the honorary No. 49 jersey for the program's first game on August 31, 2013 against Campbell.

Given that, it's a bit surprising that Ogunjobi said that playing in the NFL was something that was always in the back of his mind.

"When I first got recruited to go to Charlotte, their pitch was, 'We are going to play FBS in two years and we are going to move up,'" he said. "That was an opportunity for me that I could move up against the so-called best competition and put myself on the map."

Taking such an unconventional path to the NFL is fitting for Ogunjobi considering what it took to transform his body.

"When I got to Charlotte, I just had this chip on my shoulder that I wanted to be the best and I wanted to prove to everybody that it is not where you go," he said, "it is what you do there. You don't have to be a victim of your situation. You don't have to be put into this box that everybody says that, 'If you go to this school, you won't be able to do these things.'"

Friday night, after five years at the school and finishing as the 49ers all-time leader in tackles, tackles for loss, sacks and quarterback hurries, he became the first member of the UNC Charlotte football program to get drafted into the NFL.

'LIFE IS BIGGER THAN YOU'

Larry's grandfather -- Mercy's mother -- passed away in 2007. He had cancer.

"I actually took both of them (Larry and Faith) to Nigeria when he was sick," Mercy said. "We stayed in Nigeria for three months to take care of my father, to stay with my father during his last days and that really touched (Larry)."

So much so that when they returned to the United States, he said to Mercy, "Mommy, I would like to be a doctor so I can do something about cancer."

Ogunjobi did an internship at the hospital in Greensboro during his senior year in high school and double majored in Computer Science and Biology in college.

Larry said that, were he not going on to the NFL, he would likely go to school to become an oncologist.

"That has always been a big part of my life was trying to figure out how I can be a better person because one thing that my parents had always taught me was that life is bigger than you and you have to treat people as such," he said. "That is one of my big causes."

When Ogunjobi was 16, Mercy gave him a Bible as one of his birthday presents. He attacked it with the same ferocity as everything else when once the video games disappeared.

"Gradually he read the whole Bible," Mercy said, "then he read it over and over and over."

Faith stood behind Mercy while she said this and, almost annoyed at the memory, echoed how often he reread it.

Mercy said her son was always smart, but he was simply spending more time with video games than books.

"When he started playing football, that really structured him, too," she said. "The football really structured him."

Now that he's cleared another hurdle in his journey, Ogunjobi said he thinks it's important for people to see him as an example that "it is not where you start, it is where you finish."

"I would love to go out and talk to kids and let them understand that you don't have to be a victim of their situation that they are currently in and that they can find a way to reach out and really make something special out of themselves because they are," he said. "I would love to do that."

Saturday, Mercy, along with Faith and Larry Sr., got to witness the next step in her son making something special out of himself.

"I'm not going to use the word 'proud,'" Mercy said. "I'm going to say I'm so thankful to God. I'm going to use the word thankful. I'm very thankful to God. I feel so blessed. It could have gone the other way -- diabetic and all the other things that come with that, but now we're here."

-----

How did Ziggy Ansah's tape look the year before he came out? Not saying correlation is causation, just wondering how much upside you can reasonably bank on when you consider how raw he is (just starting in 10th grade and morbidly obese at the start).

Sure did here were my thoughts then:
He backed up the little film I had watched at that point with outstanding combine positional assessments.

I think OG or LO or whatever is gonna challenge for the starting 3-tech spot with Xavier Cooper and spell Shelton at NT/1-tech.

Really like this pick.

Something to bear in mind about the Louisville game. Louisville was by far a better team and Larry was the only player on the 49ers they were worried about. He was routinely double teamed. My impression when I watched that tape was the he was still reasonably effective. Remember, that QB he was trying to catch won the Heisman.

Larry and Myles Garrett staying after practice to get some work in. Gives you a good comparison of the two physically.

Believe I read that Larry was already being penciled in as the 3T starter. Great news if true!

Personally, I prefer that players have to earn their positions rather than being handed the starting job w/out proving themselves. That is one thing I liked about Pet. He made them earn it.

I would be surprised. Have a link?

Oh shoot. I took his word for it.

My apologies to the coaching staff and FO if that statement wasn't true.

http://dawgpounddaily.com/2017/05/07/cleveland-browns-larry-ogunjobi/


You guys are taking this too seriously. He's just a quality kid.. I enjoy any positive news about him.

You ain't seen nothing yet ! lol

That article is speculative and does not say that the Browns have him penciled in as the starter.

I get you like the guy. I understand you wanna support your guy. However, being honest is more important.

Uhmmmm............the dude made up a story.

Larry's arms are probably bigger than my legs, and I could squat 305lbs. 5 times back in high school.

32 years ago.

Come on MAN ! ; He just interpreted a story differently than you .. lol

JC

Jzz, this is one huge man. I couldn't imagine how intimiating he must look up close and face to face. That's a big dude.

I am excited to see all of our draft picks perform but, of them all I am most excited by Larry.

I think Garrett and Njoku may make the biggest impact and I am hopeful we see Kessler most improved but, I am rooting for Larry. Everything about this guy is top notch.

Mmmmm, nope.

Sorry wrong forum

Well said, Eotab. The board can get so unnecessarily nasty sometimes. We're just a bunch of long-suffering fans with opinions.

I don't think anybody's trying to dissuade niner from anything.

So far I'm enjoying niner's posts. I get that he's a fan of Larry - I am too because he's a Brown - but DTers can be tough at times, best the new posters figure that out early, and that not everyone wears the Orange-and-Brown glasses 24/7.

I wasn't trying to be tough on the guy. I just took his word for it when he said that he read that Larry O was penciled in as the starter. I kinda got on the FO and the coaching staff about handing a guy the job. Then, steve brought something up and come to find out it had nothing to do w/the coaching staff or FO. It was just some reporter speculating.

Not trying to pick on the new guy at all. I just like to keep things real. Sorry.

I think you and steve read too much into who was doing the penciling (some Prognosticators) and equating that with handing him the job. I hope they drafted him because they thought he could start. We took him at the top of round 3 in a deep defensive draft.

We have the over 30 guy who can't stay healthy, the as yet underwhelming X. Cooper, and Gabe Wright who has been shuffling back and forth from the practice squad as our potential 3T's on the roster. Who would you "pencil in"?

Make him earn it, but I don't see why he couldn't. I like Bryant, but the injuries are adding up, and he's not getting any younger. Fewer snaps might actually be good for him.

Ogunjobi's run stop numbers were tops in the class. link

I wish you and Grimm would read some WSU Willie's posts towards me and be as vocal about negative posts. LOL........I mean, are you kidding me? The stuff he says to me and that's okay?