Dylan Laube's journey from Long Island to doorstep of NFL

WORCESTER, Mass. — Dylan Laube already had put on a show in front of about 30 NFL scouts at his Pro Day on Thursday afternoon. He’d run just about every route there is (slants, wheels, digs, posts), in just about every direction (in, out, across the middle, deep) from just about every place a player can line up (the backfield, the slot, H-back, out wide and in motion). And he caught every pass within his reach. But as time was running out on the event, he wanted one more. One to really put the Dylan Laube stamp on this entire process.

So the Westhampton-raised Laube signaled to quarterback James Cahoon of Bridgewater State — another of the Pro Day participants, a passer he’d never actually played with in any public event — and gave him the look.

Cahoon understood it immediately. He got everything lined up with the urgency of the closing seconds of a two-minute drill in the Super Bowl, called for the ball to be hiked to him and then threw it as high and far as he could. And at the end of that 60-yard arc was Laube, running a go route down the right sideline, hauling in the pass over his shoulder in the front corner of the end zone.

Touchdown.

“That was one of the routes I really wanted to run,” Laube said after celebrating the catch with a leaping shoulder bump with fellow University of New Hampshire player Heron Maurisseau, high-fives for everyone who came near him and a thunderous spike of the football. “With the time running low, we had to get that one route in.”

It was a punctuation to the on-field portion of Laube’s journey toward the NFL and, in many ways, a continuation of the kind of impression he’s been making on teams for most of the past two months. He showed up in Mobile, Alabama, in late January for the Senior Bowl as a curiosity from an obscure FCS school that has had only two players drafted this century, none since 2013. Then he went to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, where he posted athleticism numbers that rivaled anyone else’s in the country.

“Laube showed he can compete with the best of the best,” Mel Kiper Jr., ESPN’s draft analyst, said of that performance. “He made himself a roster with his workout, likely moving into Round 6 or 7 territory.”

And finally, then, there was this Pro Day performance, highly anticipated by the scouts — who furiously scribbled down every detail they could — and highly anticipated by Laube himself.

“Today was super-special,” he said. “We’re not the high-level guys where we are first-round picks, so we have to show everything we can every single time. We don’t have any time to lose and skip out on certain things.”

'I truly found out that I belong'

Technically Laube is a running back, but his versatility makes him so much more valuable than nearly anyone else coming into the league at that recently undervalued position. It may be why he didn’t bother to take a single handoff at his Pro Day. All he did was run routes and field punts and kickoffs.

He did it all really well. Just as he did when he won the 2017 Long Island Class III championship with Westhampton, set the Long Island scoring record and was co-recipient of the Hansen Award (with current Jets tight end Jeremy Ruckert of Lindenhurst). Just as he did when he led the FCS in all-purpose yards the past two seasons at New Hampshire, a school so off the beaten scouting track that it lacks an indoor facility and had to bring Laube and other players to Holy Cross to piggyback on their pro day.

And just as he did at the Senior Bowl and Combine, when he first truly started to believe what he had been telling himself all these years about being good enough but never really having a chance to prove it.

“You don’t really know until you are there, and that first day at the Senior Bowl, I truly found out that I belong,” he said.

Ricky Santos, his coach at New Hampshire, said that standout experience changed everything.

“Going to the Senior Bowl, the Combine, performing the way he did, I think every week that goes by, he realizes he is an NFL player and it’s not just a dream anymore,” Santos said. “He can just go live that.”

In a league in which they give you nothing — not even an eighth of an inch, as Laube learned when he measured in at the Combine at a stretched-out 5-9-and-seven-eighths — teams suddenly are looking at Laube as the kind of player who might be able to give them a bit of everything. He’s drawn comparisons with Christian McCaffrey and Austin Ekeler these days, Danny Woodhead and Julian Edelman of the recent past.

He’s a fast, shifty, undersized back who can run routes better than many wide receivers, catches everything in his area code, plays special teams as a returner and coverage man, and even used to play lacrosse. Bill Belichick isn’t in the NFL this year, but he might draft him anyway.

'He'll outwork everybody'

So how did this all happen? How did an undersized kid from a tiny East End high school wind up with one scholarship offer from an under-the-radar college and six years later suddenly become one of this draft’s most-talked-about talents?

Go back to his long career (thanks to being redshirted as a freshman and receiving a bonus COVID season of eligibility) at New Hampshire. Go back to Westhampton High School. It’s because he always wants to do more, give more. Those who have been around him throughout the years say they have never met anyone who not only loves playing football but loves getting better at football and finds more joy in all of it than Laube does.

And go back to that last play on Thursday, the deep pass that he didn’t need to boost his portfolio but needed in his heart.

There is always one more route to run. One more person to convince.

“He is without a doubt the best kid I ever coached, mostly because of his work ethic,” retired Westhampton football coach Bill Parry said. “He is one of those kids that was just locked in and always trying to be better. That’s something you can’t teach.”

Added current Westhampton coach Bryan Schaumloffel, who was the offensive coordinator when Laube was playing there: “There is an old adage that when your best player is your hardest worker, you are going to have a pretty good year, and we had a pretty good year. We were 12-0, undefeated Long Island champions. He is the ultimate leader, the ultimate hard worker. He just did everything. A once-in-a-lifetime kid who comes around and you get to coach.”

Santos had a similar experience at New Hampshire.

“He’ll outwork everybody,” he said. “That’s always been his M.O. He’s got a chip on his shoulder. I think he’s going to carry that into his professional career as well.”

Laube got the chance to demonstrate that at the Combine. After he finished up the drills with the other running backs that day in Indianapolis, he was one of three who were asked to continue their workout with the wide receivers. Soon two of them were sent away and Laube stuck around. Then they asked Laube to field punts. He was the only player in that drill.

He not only outperformed many of the other running backs there but managed to outshine them with his personality, too. As the group ran to one end of the field, it was Laube who was so excited to be there that he busted out a DX chop in front of the cameras. The scene quickly went viral.

“I was definitely locked in,” he said of that day, “but I enjoyed every single minute of it. If you saw me on TV, I was smiling the whole time, having fun. I saw all the other running backs were so serious, but I was trying to just enjoy every second of it that I could. It was a dream come true.”

“It’s really refreshing to see him take it all in and still be light and playful and jovial,” Santos said. “That’s his personality. He never took himself too seriously. And it doesn’t seem like he is stressing now.”

Catching the eyes of a Manning

Why should he be? He’s done everything possible to make his case for being an NFL player. In fact, he’s been closer to the NFL over the years than some of the blue-chip prospects who undoubtedly will have their name called ahead of him in this draft.

One of the first people to recognize that Laube had the potential to be more than a running back but a true passing weapon was none other than Eli Manning. Ever since the lockout in 2011, when Manning and his family rented a house in the Hamptons, the Giants quarterback would spend his summer vacations there right before reporting to training camp in July. And every year he would reach out to the Westhampton High football program and ask them to send him a few varsity players he could throw to during his morning workouts on the school’s turf field.

Manning told Newsday that he remembers Laube, remembers being “impressed” by him and remembers suggesting that he run routes out of the slot rather than the backfield, where he’d always lined up previously. It wasn’t always perfect — after one dropped pass, Manning jokingly suggested that Laube should play defense because he was “so good at knocking down passes” — but it got better and much more comfortable. Manning was honing skills for his own career; little did he know he was sowing them for a future one at the same time.

“Catching throws from him gave me, a small-town kid, so much confidence,” Laube said. “I was able to catch every ball and he was complimenting me on every route. He was such a great guy. Eli definitely did a hell of a job helping me out.”

And then in 2018, a few months after winning that Long Island championship with the Hurricanes, Laube was part of a Westhampton contingent — along with Parry and teammate Nolan Quinlan (who himself is a draft-eligible tight end out of Louisiana-Monroe this spring) — that helped the Jets announce their sixth-round pick.

Folorunso Fatukasi, a nose tackle from UConn, was the name they read. Fatukasi never did much with the Jets, but he is still in the league and just signed a free-agent deal with the Texans this month. That means there is a chance he and Laube could be teammates in a few weeks.

“He’s got to call the pick if that happens,” Laube said excitedly of Fatukasi and the possibility of the Texans drafting him. “That would be a cool full-circle thing.”

Rooting for hometown kid

The biggest circle that is about to become full for Laube, though, and certainly the more likely one, is the one that began in Westhampton.

For this small beachy resort town so far removed from the lights of the big city and the NFL that Laube doesn’t even qualify for a local exemption to visit with the Giants or Jets without counting against their allotment of 30 pre-draft meetings — a player has to have grown up within 50 miles of an organization to qualify for that, and there are about 86 miles between Westhampton and East Rutherford in New Jersey — nearly all of Westhampton feels as if it has been on this journey along with Laube all along.

“I teach at the school, and almost every single day for the past couple of weeks, the teachers sit in the hallway before school starts and we kind of give Dylan updates,” Schaumloffel said. “Everybody asks me, ‘What have you heard? What is he doing? Where is he now?’ He is one of our greatest sons here at Westhampton Beach and we look forward to seeing what he does.”

They talk almost constantly about what it will be like watching Laube play on Sundays this fall, the surreal feeling they will have when he lines up with or against future Hall of Famers at some of the most iconic stadiums in the world in front of millions of television viewers.

“I feel that,” Laube said of the love he gets from his hometown . . . and tries to return, whether it is by exchanging weekly texts with his high school social studies teacher, Terry Moran, or by inviting Parry to the Combine with him. “I have so many people involved in this process, especially coming from that small Westhampton town, and there are only a few of us [who get this far]. It will be super-cool and super-special to be that guy where everyone can be like: ‘Hey, he’s in the NFL now. And he’s from here.’ ”

Westhampton may be traveling this journey vicariously with Laube as he jets around the country — besides the big on-field events, he already has had on-site meetings with the Saints in New Orleans, has meetings scheduled with the Bears and Bills in the coming weeks, and is meeting over Zoom with many other teams, including Kansas City — but pretty soon they won’t have to go anywhere. He is coming back to them.

Laube could have spent this year’s draft weekend in any number of places. His parents live mostly in Florida these days and he has close ties with the Durham area in New Hampshire after more than a half-decade calling that home. But he’s been dreaming of hearing his name called by the NFL ever since he was a little kid in Westhampton, so that’s where he intends to be when it finally does happen.

“That’s where I started, so that’s where I want to go,” he said. “I told my parents I gotta have it back home. That’s where all my friends are at, where all my coaches are at, where I started everything.”

The details are still being worked out. Right now they are envisioning a small — very small — gathering during the actual draft (“Because I don’t know what is going to happen,” Laube said, “I’m going to be pretty locked in”) and then a huge bash Saturday night, by which time he almost certainly will  have been selected by a team or agreed to a contract as a free agent.

“We’re going to have a great time,” Laube said.

And after that, he’ll go right back to doing what he does best. What he has been doing for most of the past decade. What he did on Thursday.

That’s playing football. Loving football. And proving to others what he has seemingly known all along, that despite his smallish stature and the tiny schools where he played, he undoubtedly belongs in the big-time NFL.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.