Kwity Paye saw his dream realized Thursday night.
A three-star recruit and the No. 35 weak-side defensive end in the 2017 recruiting class, Paye out-performed the rankings and ended up as a two-time All-Big Ten standout at Michigan. Four years after signing with the Wolverines, Paye was the second edge defender off the board in the 2021 NFL Draft and the No. 21 overall pick in the first round to the Indianapolis Colts.
No, he's not done working. He still has a lot to prove as a professional football player, and his best football could very well be ahead of him.
His mother, Agnes, on the other hand, doesn't have anything left to prove.
"She's done working," Paye said of his mother while being interviewed by ESPN just after being picked. "She's retired."
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Agnes worked three jobs at times to support Paye and his older brother, Komotay Koffie, while raising them in Providence, Rhode Island. Before that, she escaped war-torn Liberia and birthed Kwity in a refugee camp in Liberia, before they were able to come to the United States.
"Means everything," a grateful Paye said of allowing his mother to retire. "That was my goal my whole life growing up, just seeing how hard she worked. That's what made me work harder, so being able to tell her she's done means a lot."
While Paye's incredible story stole the show this week — and rightfully so — he's also an outstanding football player at 6-4, 272 pounds. The combination of two very important traits was why the Colts decided to nab Paye.
"It's easy to draft talent. That's not hard to do," General Manager Chris Ballard said. "But to draft talent with character, that's difficult. That doesn't always come together. And we've been really fortunate around here to be able to do it as part of who we are and what we look for, and our scouts do a tremendous job vetting each and every player and we have a very strict criteria of what we're looking for.
"Look, I’ve made some pretty easy picks, where you just knew, you pulled the card, and it was an easy pull. And pulling the card of Kwity Paye was very easy. Stands for everything we want to stand for.
"What his backstory tells you is this kid, he's got some survival skills and when it gets hard in this league, he's going to be able to handle it. This is a hard league. It's hard and you're going to fail. Players are going to fail. You're going to have some bad moments and you gotta have something in side of you that allows you to push through it."
And that's exactly the kind of player Paye is, he says. His relentless pursuit of the football stood out on tape to scouts and front offices alike, and it wasn't by accident.
"[I'm] just [always] chasing the ball," Paye said. "Every time I get a chance to tackle I just go out there and do it."
That is precisely why Ballard and the Colts believed that taking Paye outweighed any other option on the table.
"We had a trade offer," Ballard revealed. "It wasn't enough to pass the player we were going to take. It just wasn't enough value for us to say let's move and pass a player that we think very highly of that fits our culture and fits what we want to do.
"When you get [a player] that's got a unique skillset with character, man, that's a beautiful thing."
Now, Paye is ready to establish himself all over again for his new organization in a new league, happy to be taken by Indianapolis.
"It was a good feeling," Paye said of the moment of being picked. "Last night [Wednesday] I was a little anxious, a little excited. But I woke up this morning and I was cool. Then going throughout the draft, I was just waiting for the call. I was blessed to be picked by the Colts."
Another journey is just beginning.
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