How a D-III longshot turned into a top prospect

Until last summer, however, Meinerz thought these efforts were preparing him for Whitewater’s 2020 season. Crushed to hear on a Zoom call from Bullis that there would be no Division III football in 2020, two realities occurred to him: 1) The most recent Whitewater tape NFL scouts would see of him was from 2019, when The Gut was out of control; and 2) an all-star game would be his only realistic chance to show them a better version of himself before the draft.

One of the earliest online scouting reports on Meinerz described him as having “a sloppy midsection.” Being nicknamed The Gut had never bothered him, but this was offensive.

“When you think sloppy, you think lazy, and that’s not who I am at all,” Meinerz said. “The adjective bothered me.”

Meinerz had already lost a lot of weight when the damning scouting report first came to his attention. But it was an unnerving reminder that, absent an all-star-game invitation, he might not get a chance to make a different impression. Whitewater conducted a few practices in October, but NFL scouts weren’t allowed to visit college practices due to COVID-19. Knowing this, Meinerz wasn’t even sure it was smart for him to participate. Ultimately, the chance to resume full contact drove his decision to log a couple weeks of practice with no games to prepare for.

“If you get contact-traced, you lose two weeks of training, which I couldn’t afford,” he said. “When I found out they were practicing in helmets, I passed. I only changed my mind when they went into full pads.”

Fall began giving way to winter, with no all-star opportunity in sight.

On Oct. 27, the East-West Shrine Bowl was canceled. On Nov. 13, the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl followed suit.

“When I started seeing the dominos fall, I got a little nervous,” Meinerz said. “I understood why things were canceled, but it was making my chance of getting seen a lot harder.”

Only the Senior Bowl, the most prestigious of the three all-star games, remained. Invitations to it are rarely extended to Division III players, as more highly regarded prospects typically fill out even the very bottom of the roster.

“As a scout, (if) you put even a seventh-round grade on a D-III guy, you’re putting your reputation on the table,” Nagy said. “In 18 years (as an NFL scout), the only D-III guy I ever put a draftable grade on was (Mount Union and longtime NFL wide receiver) Pierre Garcon.”

With his hopes of an all-star invitation dwindling by the day, Meinerz continued training in case of a Senior Bowl miracle. He traveled to Dallas to spend three weeks at Michael Johnson Performance with private offensive line coach Duke Manyweather, who works regularly with both NFL veterans and draft prospects. Soon after, it was off to EXOS with a mindset that a pro day workout, not the Senior Bowl, was probably the only thing left for him to prepare for.

The reality was this: Had Meinerz not gone through 12 months of conditioning to regain control of The Gut, the Senior Bowl call would never have come. Nagy had seen a dominating Division III player but also an out-of-shape one when he evaluated Meinerz’s tape from 2019. However, Meinerz’s agent, Dallas-based Ron Slavin, had made sure Nagy was aware of his client’s conditioning efforts. That culminated with a workout video Nagy received from Meinerz’s November training sessions with Manyweather.

“I saw him flat-foot dunking (a basketball) and there were clips of him repping side by side with (Northwestern tackle) Rashawn Slater, so you could evaluate them together. You could see how much fitter and quicker he looked,” Nagy said. “That made a difference for us. He wouldn’t have received an invite based strictly off his tape. It was a dice roll because you want to invite guys based on tape. But with Quinn, we invited him based more on his workouts.”