After tearing his ACL twice over the span of his senior year of high school and his freshman year of college, Payton Wilson’s rise to the top of college football was a pretty unlikely story. Based on his accomplishments, Wilson was pretty certain he was going to be drafted in the late first or early second round. But when he arrived at the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine, Wilson received a jarring surprise during his medical checkup that put his NFL career at risk.
“When I get in there, the first doctor pulls up the MRI, and he’s like ‘This dude doesn’t have an ACL.’ In my right knee,” Wilson said via The Christian Kuntz podcast on YouTube. “I’m sitting like this, head down, letting them read off this stuff and then I’m like, ‘You got the right file? Are you sure you’re talking about me?’ I said something along those lines.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, this guy doesn’t have an ACL.’ ”
He details how he had MRIs on his knees after both injuries and during the recoveries and how there was never anything unusual with the imaging. He clearly wasn’t having issues on the field as he became college football’s defensive player and linebacker of the year in 2023.
“That was the first time I heard about it, at the Combine,” Wilson said.
I spoke with Wilson at the Senior Bowl a couple months before the Combine, and he talked about how excited he was to get to to Indianapolis and get the medical checks out of the way so he could clear up his injury concerns once and for all. A new routine of body upkeep and nutrition had kept him injury free for his last couple years of college, and he felt ready to take on the rigors of the NFL.
“The first thing when they said that to me, ‘Ah shit, I might not get drafted,'” Wilson said. “When someone tells you you don’t have an ACL you’re like, ‘Oh it’s over.'”
When asked point blank on the podcast if he is playing without an ACL right now, Wilson said, “Yeah, that’s what they say.”
This resulted in Wilson being flown all over the country by various teams intrigued by him as a draft prospect trying to get to the bottom of his medical history. To this day, Wilson doesn’t fully believe the doctors. He says when they test his knees for a stopping point, as they do for players with ACL injuries, his right knee is actually tighter than his left knee. This left doctors “dumbfounded” all over the country, he said.
Not only did he run an absurdly fast 4.43-second 40-yard dash at the Combine.Wilson made sure to point out that his change of direction was elite, too.
“Not to sound like an ass or anything, but my shuttle was a 4.21. Like, my change of direction is perfectly fine,” Wilson said.
He has proven to be fully capable of handling the rigors of an NFL schedule to far. He is eight games in and has played 235 snaps on defense and 141 snaps on special teams with 39 total tackles. In fact, of all the rookies on the roster, Wilson is one of the only ones who hasn’t had injury issues this season.
After that long and stressful process of getting his hopes up only to have them crushed during the Combine medical process, it was a long wait for Wilson to get drafted. The Steelers took him at the very end of the third round with the No. 98 overall pick.
“I’ve always been super secure in the fact that everything happens for a reason,” Wilson said. “The second Pittsburgh called me I was just like ‘I know exactly why what happened, happened.'”
