Dwayne Ledford watched and wondered during his first spring practice in 2019. Louisville’s offensive line coach wasn’t sure how Mekhi Becton, a 6-foot-7 behemoth of a man weighing more than 360 pounds, would move in the Cardinals’ newly-implemented wide-zone blocking scheme.
“Is he going to be athletic enough to where he can cut off the backside [defender]?” Ledford thought. “Is he going to be able to climb up to the second level to block those defenders? And how well is he going to be at the point of attack?”
All of his worries were squashed over the course of one practice. Ledford walked up to Cardinals head coach Scott Satterfield after watching Becton throughout the day and delivered a very succinct assessment.
“We don’t have anything to worry about,” Ledford told Satterfield. “This kid is special.”
Becton had the agility to move with grace and block with great ferocity despite his massive frame. There were some things to clean up, but Ledford knew he had a gem in Becton.
That combination of size and athleticism is rare in a man as big as Becton, but it didn’t manifest overnight. When Satterfield’s coaching staff came to Louisville in December 2018 after Bobby Petrino’s firing, new strength and conditioning coach Mike Sirignano found a team reeling after losing their head coach.
“It was 90-plus players pretty emotionally broken,” Sirignano told JetsWire, “which meant they were physically broken. So there was a lot of work to do.”
The staff set out to rebuild the team from within. That meant new workouts, new diets, new recovery protocols and a new mentality. Becton, who reportedly weighed upwards of 389 pounds when the new staff came aboard, was among the first to buy into the new regime.
“So we put a plan together for Mekhi,” Sirignano said. “You know, for a guy that’s 6-foot-7, 300-and-whatever pounds, you know, that’s a little different than everyone else in the room. So you got to modify some things.”
First came nutrition, which team dietitian Emily Artner said Becton began working on himself in 2018 when he and Cardinals long snapper Mitch Hall reached out to Artner about improving their diets. Artner worked with Becton on a points-based system to encourage weight loss without sacrificing muscle mass. That meant a 5,000-6,000 calories-per-day plan focusing on vegetables and protein.
“So my approach is not to give a standardized meal plan of, ‘Hey, breakfast, lunch and dinner you have to eat these exact things,’” Artner told JetsWire. “And so we kind of have a spreadsheet that I use with a lot and that’s what really Mekhi got started.”
Becton picked the meals, recorded everything in the spreadsheet, sent pictures to Artner and his coaches and, in the process, learned how to create a meal plan on his own without feeling restricted by an intense diet. His favorites included a breakfast of egg white omelets, vegetables, fruits and a pancake, while his dinner and lunch go-toes were salmon or steak with sauteed spinach and mushrooms.
There’s always a stigma with big-bodied linemen that they’ll just as easily put weight back on after losing it. But not Becton. He never deviated from the plan, according to Artner and Sirignano, and always made sure he was on the right track, especially when he saw himself lose weight but put on lots of muscle.
Becton fully bought into the nutritional side of training by then and carried that into the rest of his work. He listened intently to Ledford’s coaching on offensive line technique – namely focusing on finishing blocks all the way through the whistle – and all the workouts Sirignano’s strength and conditioning staff put him through to improve his athleticism and explosiveness.
Louisville’s philosophy in the weight room is all about bridging the gap between the gym and the field, according to Sirignano, meaning they try to focus less on heavy lifting and more on powerful movements. They did almost all their workouts on their feet instead of sitting down, which included jumps, cleans, cuts and Olympic lifts to mimic the force players apply to the ground.
Those types of moments can complicate things for a 360-pound human such as Becton, though. Even though he proved incredibly athletic for his frame, Becton was still exerting more than 1,000 pounds of force when he ran. That puts a lot of pressure on your body and leads to lots of wear and tear and ultimately injury if not monitored. Luckily for Becton, he missed only one game during his career at Louisville with an ankle injury, and a lot of that can be attributed to the work of Matt Summers’ athletic training team.
“We were able to be creative with him,” Summers said about Becton’s training. “It was truly a team approach and I think for him specifically, it was about monitoring his load but still getting great output from a conditioning standpoint.”
That meant reducing the force Becton exerted with different types of conditioning like underwater treadmills and the incorporation of exercises centered around strengthening the ankle and the shoulder – two areas of the body Summers said are highly-susceptible to injuries in young offensive linemen.
“He bought into that,” Summer said. “He had a great trust, I think, in what we’re trying to do and had no issues with that for him.”
Ledford, Sirignano, Artner and Summers were all pieces of the puzzle that helped turn Becton into a 364-pound lineman with 17 percent body fat who could run a 5.11 40-yard dash. It was a lot of work, but Becton never shied away from doing anything and everything to become one of the best and strongest linemen in the 2020 draft.
“I completely admired the way that he completely engulfed himself and doing whatever it was that I asked him to do this year for his game to improve to be one of the better tackles out there,” Ledford said of Becton’s transformation. “I couldn’t be more proud of the work that he went out there and put in.”
Now, Becton will be tasked with a new challenge: blocking for Sam Darnold and Le’Veon Bell. He’s got the athleticism and the raw ability required. All he needs to do is put it together and build on all his learnings from Louisville.
Ledford doesn’t envision that being a problem for Becton, though.
“Mekhi is really just now starting to scratch the surface on how good he can be,” Ledford said. “I think that his best days are still ahead of him.”