How Did Michael Hoecht Get Here?

The story of just another Canadian prospect from a last-place Ivy League program who now shares the defensive line with Aaron Donald.

Technically, it was a dining room. But between the scuffed walls and tacky, nicked floorboards, the space was better suited to serve as a makeshift gym than it was to accommodate a dinner party—and during Michael Hoecht’s last semester of college, it was the only option he had.

Every building on Brown University’s Providence campus had been shut down in March 2020 in response to rapidly growing concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Students who could go home haphazardly packed up their dorms or deserted their off-campus rentals. A Canadian transplant whose closest family was in Toronto 500 miles away, Hoecht (pronounced “Hoyt”) was one of the few who stuck around.

The virtual NFL draft was slated for April 23, and the defensive tackle was still trying to get on scouts’ radars. An agent told him the year before that he had a shot at playing professionally, but an Ivy League program coming off three consecutive last-place finishes doesn’t draw much attention from the NFL.

So, without access to Brown’s athletic facilities, Hoecht and one of his college teammates converted the room off their kitchen into a gym that looked more like the Flintstones’ fitness center than a place to prepare for the highest level of professional football.

The two squatted backpacks full of rocks, lifted borrowed weights and curled kegs drained from prepandemic frat parties. When a pro day scheduled to take place at nearby Bryant University got canceled, Hoecht threw together a version that he says was “as close to the real thing” as he could manage. He had friends film him running through defensive line drills and combine tests. The 300-pounder even ran routes to show he had some experience playing tight end. Then he edited it together in iMovie and sent it out to all 32 teams.

By the end of the spring, a possible career on Wall Street had been put on hold. Hoecht was headed cross-country to become one of the NFL’s most unlikely stories.

Michael Allio/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

The hand-timed 4.6 40-yard dash, part of that faux Pro Day, had caught the attention of a couple of talking heads, including NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport. But Rams defensive line coach Eric Henderson says he discovered Hoecht by combing through hours of Ivy League film, eventually watching every snap Hoecht played his senior year.

“I saw a bunch of things in Mike that I was like, ‘I wonder if this is too good to be true,’” he says. “I felt like he was a diamond-in-the-rough type of player, that once you get him into the organization that everyone would love him, and he would be able to do almost anything you asked him to do. He’s been fulfilling that role to the utmost right now.”

Henderson calls him “a jewel from Brown University.” He says it with a smile, in a way that tells you he knows he’s got something rare. There are only 19 players currently in the NFL who attended Ivy League universities; Hoecht is the lone one from Brown. For comparison, Alabama has 74 former players on NFL rosters; it’s something Hoecht says he notices when watching his current teammates find their college buddies after games.

But Henderson wasn’t comparing colleges or conferences when he went digging for defensive linemen to develop, he just trusted his eyes. A few hours after the Giants made the final pick of the 2020 draft, the Rams scooped Hoecht up. One week later, Hoecht was the 10th pick, of the Ottawa Redblacks, in the Canadian Football League draft, but Ottawa wouldn’t get its man. Hoecht was off to Los Angeles.

Henderson says it was Hoecht’s ability to rush the passer, his “elite” first step, his size, speed and athleticism that made him take a chance on the captain of an FCS team that went 2–8 the season before the draft. But he also devotes most of his praise reiterating one specific quality that comes up often when discussing Hoecht: his seemingly boundless energy.

“On the field, he’s nonstop. He has an unlimited motor. This guy, he doesn’t get tired,” Henderson says, adding that the game against the Giants in Week 6—when Hoecht played a career-high 27 defensive snaps—was the first time he’d ever seen Hoecht get winded in the two years they’ve worked together.

Hoecht was a standout in the Rams' preseason finale :: C. Morgan Engel/USA TODAY Sports

Rams defensive end Jonah Williams, also a part of the Rams’ 2020 class of undrafted signees, pokes fun at Hoecht’s tendency to walk “with a whole bunch of pep in his step” no matter the time of day or destination. Meanwhile, teammates from Brown were stumped in coming up with anything their two-year captain wasn’t good at.

“He is somebody who does everything at 100%. By everything, I mean everything,” says Emerson Logie, a fellow Brown football player who lived with Hoecht for three years in college.

Over one holiday, Hoecht stayed in Rhode Island because the trip to Toronto was a bit too far for the short break. Rather than lounge around the dorm, he “mastered like four or five card magic tricks and had become decently suitable at the guitar,” Logie remembers.

Ask Hoecht about his hidden talents and he’ll shrug them off as the remnants of discarded childhood hobbies or the result of binging YouTube tutorials, but the list of extracurriculars from his college days tells a different story.

When he wasn’t at practice running conditioning alongside skill position players half his size, he’d organize tutoring sessions after class to teach most of the football team calculus. On weekends he’d often end up behind the drum set in the basement of the house he shared with five teammates for an impromptu one-man show, and the summer before his senior year he completed an internship with HPS Investment Partners, LLC in New York City.

Instead of working in New York’s finance world, he ended up in L.A. He spent his rookie season on the practice squad where he says he watched Aaron Donald and learned “a standard and a work ethic that you may not get other places.”

It was exactly what Henderson intended. He wanted Hoecht to “absorb everything that AD does,” because he “actually has the athletic ability to do a lot of the stuff that guys of that caliber can do when you talk about Aaron Donald. But he just has to understand how to apply those tools.”

John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

Hoecht is picking up whatever the coaches throw down. He recorded his first NFL sack in the preseason finale, stripping Broncos quarterback Drew Lock and recovering the fumble to set up a short field goal at the end of the first half. During the regular season, he’s been a special teams regular and topped double-digit defensive snaps in four games. There’s just one thing Henderson harps on when coaching Hoecht up: “Don’t make this s--- harder than what it needs to be.

“I constantly have to remind him that football in the NFL is not math at Brown University,” he says with a laugh. “He came in as a young guy, and he overanalyzed Every. Single. Thing. That’s what makes him funny. That’s what makes his personality different in the room, and that’s why guys like him.

“Once he continues to understand the game more, you’ll see who Mike Hoecht can really be. And I think he’s going to shock a lot of people.”

Hoecht still has to tell himself to “play fast and play loose,” to trust his instincts and preparation, but he also makes an effort to slow down for a moment every time he’s in SoFi Stadium. The noise of 70,000 fans is deafening compared to the small band and smattering of mostly parents that dot the bleachers at Brown Stadium on Saturdays. But it’s not something Hoecht tries to block out.

“I would just look around and just take in how big of a stadium this really is and how important this is to a lot of people in the city of Los Angeles,” he says. “It puts things in perspective, and it keeps you coming back every single day.”