The making of a 5-star: How Miami commit Leonard Taylor became best DT in the country
Leonard Taylor was ready to quit.
He was 8 years old and he got hit really hard, and, besides, he was going to be a basketball player anyway. He was only trying out football because everyone — and, most importantly, his mother — kept telling him he should try it. Even at 8, he was so big and his mother saw a future where he was something like the 6-4 teenage mountain he is now. Fine, he thought. He’d try it, but he didn’t have to like it. He went to play for the South Kendall Gators.
It was his first time playing and in one of those first games, South Kendall headed up to Dania Beach to play the top team in the league. Taylor stopped paying attention for a few seconds — he was 8; it happens — and an opponent knocked him off his feet as a play finished. That was it. Taylor stormed to the sideline, ripped off his helmet, tore off his shoulder pads and plopped down on the bench. He had tried. Basketball it was.
“Leonard, what are you doing? You’ve got to get in there,” Gators coach Mike Williams pleaded with him. Taylor didn’t budge.
“No, coach. I don’t want to play no more,” he told him.
Chelita Smith watched this all from the bleachers. She saw Williams couldn’t persuade him, so she headed down to work her magic.
“You’re not quitting. I’m not raising no quitters,” Taylor’s mother told her son. “Boy, you better get out there and you better hit him before they hit you.”
“From now on,” Taylor said earlier this month, “I hit them before they hit me.”
This is where it started for Taylor, the 6-4, 290-pound defensive tackle, who will sign his national letter of intent with the Miami Hurricanes on Wednesday as the centerpiece of their highly touted Class of 2021. This was the start of the attitude and confidence that has led him to one of the most dominant runs by a defensive tackle in the history of South Florida high school football.
After he burst on to college coaches’ radars as a sophomore at Miami Southridge, he transferred to Miami Palmetto and was a first-team all-county selection by the Miami Herald in 2019. This year, he helped carry Palmetto reach the Class 8A semifinals with 51 tackles, 23 tackles for loss, five sacks, three forced fumbles, six passes defended, an interception and a blocked kick in seven games.
Ask Panthers coaches to pick his favorite play and invariably he’ll think of something from the most recent game and everyone has a different. As a junior, Taylor twice had interceptions where he batted a pass at least 10 feet into the air at the line of scrimmage and tracked it into his hands, including one against Coral Gables when he chased it 10 yards into the backfield and dragged defenders 20 yards into the end zone.
This year, he had one play in the first round of the playoffs against Orlando Dr. Phillips where he literally knocked a fullback into the air as he blew up a play. On Dec. 4, he almost singlehandedly carried Palmetto to its first state semifinal. He had the game-clinching forced fumble, a tackle for loss where he intentionally let the quarterback pitch the ball so he could drop the running back for a few extra yards and an interception on a shovel pass to set up the Panthers’ only touchdown in Vero Beach.
“I didn’t realize that he had did what he did until I got the bus to head home,” said quarterbacks coach Sheldon Smith, who also coached Taylor in middle school at the Richmond Perrine Optimist Club. “I looked at the film and I’m like, this kid just took the shovel pass. His instincts are out of this world.
“He’s what we call a game-changer and usually game-changers are offensive players. This kid is in the line of the Aaron Donalds of the world.”
The tree trunks
Smith might be the coach who can take credit for first discovery of the five-star prospect.
His cousin lived in the same subdivision as Taylor and his family, so he spent a lot of time near Taylor’s home, getting in afternoon jogs around the neighborhood. On his route was a house with a basketball hoop out front and always a handful of boys playing on it. The ringleaders for these neighborhood games were three boys who lived there and Smith couldn’t help but become fascinated by one of them. Taylor was the oldest and this 8-year-old was big — like, noticeably big, and not just really tall or chubby.
“I’m like, Jesus Christ, this kid is huge!” Smith said. “He had always had like tree trunks for legs.”
Eventually, as Taylor’s mother recalls, Smith decided he had to talk to the kid about playing football.
Taylor’s mother came out of the house to see who her son was talking to.
“You just don’t know what you’ve got,” coaches used to always tell her, but she swears she did.
She is originally from South Florida and lived there early in her life until she followed some family out to California. She had her first child when she was 19 and then her second about two years later. She had to figure out parenting on the fly.
Nine years later, Taylor was born in 2002. His father was a high school quarterback and a star baseball player, but those genes came from Smith’s side of the family and a few uncles who had been linemen back in their day.
In 2005, Smith and her sons picked up, and moved back home to Miami, where Smith’s mother had relocated. They settled down with her in Richmond Heights and still live in the neighborhood. There was always a basketball hoop in front of the house, so Taylor and his two younger brothers fell in love with the sport. Before long, it became clear he was outgrowing his point guard dreams.
“I used to tell him, ‘Boy, you ain’t no basketball player,’” Smith said. “’You’re too big for basketball. You’re a football player.’”
At 8, he finally gave football a shot, first playing two years for the South Kendall Gators and he almost quit midway through his third or fourth game.
“My mom talked some sense into me,” Taylor said. “Ever since that talk, I stuck with it and football’s been progressing ever since. My whole career started blasting off.”
With South Kendall, coaches could see all the traits Taylor has used to become the No. 1 defensive tackle in the 2021 recruiting class, according to the 247Sports.com composite rankings. He was always one of the four or five biggest kids on the field, and had a quick twitch and fluidity coaches can’t teach. Above all, he was an extraordinarily fast learner.
Football at that age is all about fundamentals. Coaches would try to teach all the linemen one move — a swim move — and hope they’d get the hang of it throughout the season. Taylor mastered it in a matter of weeks.
“He would make a play,” Williams said, “where we’d just say, ‘Wow, he got it. Did you see what Leonard just did’?!”
The game-changer
A few years passed, and Taylor landed with Smith and the Richmond Perrine Giants to play out his middle school years.
“As soon as he put those pads on, it was obvious,” Smith said. “He did a swim move, he tackled my quarterback and my running back at the same time. ... When you can do that without being taught, the sky’s the limit.”
Everywhere he has gone since, first impressions have usually been enough. The next youth team he played for — in an unlimited weight class right before high school — was so wowed by his blend of size and athleticism, coaches wound up playing him at running back. He mostly played junior varsity at Homestead South Dade as a freshman, then transferred to Southridge in the summer before his sophomore year.
Philip Simpson, who’s now the coach at Homestead and was the Spartans’ defensive coordinator at the time, heard some rumblings about the massive incoming transfer, but everyone told him Taylor was a basketball player first. Taylor made the hardwood his priority all the way until scholarship offers started coming in as a sophomore.
Simpson first met him in the gymnasium at the school as he was getting ready for offseason workouts, and Taylor, already pushing 240 pounds, was throwing down dunks with those tree-trunk calves Simpson couldn’t help but notice.
“I’m like, ‘So you can just never touch a basketball again and add some weight,’” Simpson said, “’and get drafted in the first round.’”
Their first on-field workout together only strengthened his conviction.
In his first game, Taylor came off the bench against American. He missed a lot of training camp to visit his father in California, so Simpson told him he wasn’t going to start at first.
Taylor, always easygoing, was cool with it. He didn’t push back. He just waited for his chance to get on to the field and, once he did, he had three sacks in the first five plays, Simpson recalled.
Five weeks later, Southridge played Palmetto and Taylor was a one-man wrecking crew. In the first half, he knocked star running back Ralph Williams out of the game. In the third quarter, he did it to Neil Nunn, now a defensive back for the Syracuse Orange, when he sniffed out a tunnel screen and clobbered the star athlete.
“He concussed two of our best players, knocked them out of the game,” Manasco said. “He was annihilating kids in the backfield.”
A few weeks later, the Hurricanes became the first team to offer him a scholarship. Safeties coach Ephraim Banda had been monitoring him since he was at South Dade and he saw the rare quick-twitch ability to make him think he was watching a future top-10 talent.
“It brought me to attention at first. They offered me, so they think they’ve got potential to play college ball. I fell off with them because of their record back then,” Taylor said, “then I recently just came back to them.”
The mama’s boy
With a Miami hat perched atop his head, Taylor explained in July why he had decided to stick with the Hurricanes.
“Being down the street from my mom,” Taylor began, “was a big part.”
His mother, seated directly to his left on a CBSSports.com set, pumped her fist as he donned a Miami visor and beamed while her son told the nation he was staying in South Florida.
“He’s a mama’s boy,” Smith said. “Let me just say: He’s a mama’s boy.”
For a long time, the Florida Gators were the favorite to land the elite defensive lineman before the Hurricanes made the final push to keep him home this year as the COVID-19 pandemic raged and led to an ongoing recruiting dead period.
When he sits down at Evelyn Greer Park on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. to sign his national letter of intent with Miami, his mother will be at his side, too.
All she wanted was for him to find some sport, some activity to make his own and to occupy his time. It could’ve been football, basketball, karate — he tried that, too. Whatever.
“It’s hard out here for boys, young black men,” Smith said. “I always wanted to make sure that they stayed grounded and made something productive with their lives.”
If it wasn’t for her, Taylor might have given up before any college coach had even heard of him. If it wasn’t for her, the best defensive tackle in the country might have never been.
“She’s the motivation,” Taylor said. “She’s the reason why I keep playing today, just to see her smile because I’m doing good with my life. I ain’t doing nothing bad.”
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 12:07 PM.
