WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — The highlight play of Byron Young’s 2025 season came without a sack dance.
It was Week 2, and the Los Angeles Rams led the Tennessee Titans by four points in the fourth quarter. Young threw his speed into the chest of a backup right tackle, tossed him aside, and then did the same to Titans quarterback Cam Ward, except he also swiped at the ball.
As Nate Landman was running to the end zone with a celebratory parade of Rams behind him, Young stared at the turf and spoke to himself.
“You really had a strip-sack to help out your team,” he recalls saying. “You’re really a difference maker. If you really want to be, you’ll be a difference maker.”
.@byron_97 breaks down the tape on his forced fumble. 👀🎞️ pic.twitter.com/vFH0J8Jm4A
— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) September 17, 2025
He adds the “if you want to be” because that’s the fuel behind the story of a high school graduate who worked at Dollar General for two years and became one of the best pass rushers in the NFL. And that’s where he’s trending, currently ranking fourth in the league in sacks and being named the first Defensive Player of the Month this season.
He’s just six years removed from being an associate manager at Dollar General.
“I always say,” Young said, “that I’m not supposed to be here.”
Young remembers the Friday nights at Dollar General, when he waited at the register as the line grew longer and testier.
Occasionally, people would scream or steal.
“Everyone’s trying to do their slot machines and lottery, and you’ve got people mad,” Young recalled. “I’m just standing there and not caring, but you’ve got people mad. And I’m the only person there on a Friday.”
Young began working at a Dollar General in Columbus, Georgia, after his high school football career ended in Georgetown, South Carolina, a town of 8,000 people known as “low country” for its rural style and thick accents. He didn’t have the grades to go to college or a single football offer, so he moved with his brother to Columbus and took a job to save money.
He spent three years there, working his way up to an associate manager position. One day, while living together, his brother found a listing for walk-on tryouts at Georgia Military College. Young, who was then about 210 pounds, showed up and immediately had second thoughts.
“There was like 150 guys,” Young said. “Why are they going to choose me?”
But he went through the NFL combine-style workout anyway. Out of 150 students, Georgia Military chose just a handful for the team, and Young was one of them.
“The biggest thing I could remember,” Georgia Military coach Rob Manchester said, “is he could run.”
The speed was hard to fathom, and it would later test at 4.43 seconds in the 40-yard dash at the NFL Scouting Combine, faster than all but one defensive end in the 2023 NFL Draft.
Manchester, then the defensive coordinator, threw him right on the field. And as a true freshman, Young burst onto the scene with seven sacks and 11 tackles for loss.
He gave up working at Dollar General to meet the demands of football, classwork and military training that filled his days from 6 a.m. until a 10 p.m. curfew. That included two stints of marching formation in his military uniform. He was paying to be there without a fall job, which meant missing two phone bills and relying on WiFi to talk to anyone.
The barracks he shared with three suitemates offered a bunk bed above a desk with a computer and little else. No TV. No game system. No couch.
He stayed in those barracks on weekends when teammates went out to party. He didn’t have the money, and the only way to make this work was to earn a scholarship to a Division I school. That meant not letting his grades hold him back again.
“For a lot of guys, it was hard because they wanted to do stuff,” Young said. “For me, I was so dedicated. I wanted to transfer so bad and go D-I that I was willing to sacrifice.”
Coming off his seven-sack freshman season and his first year of training like a football player in three years, Young was ready for a sophomore leap. But in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 canceled the Georgia Military football season.
Young was staring down a third year off from football in four years. He’d just turned 22, already older than Myles Garrett was when he became the No. 1 pick of the Cleveland Browns in 2017.
But the coach who picked him out of that 150-player group at a tryout suddenly had time on his hands without a season to prepare for. He started sending out the tape from their spring practices to Division I coaches he knew and daring them to watch Young.
“He was just killing people,” Manchester said.
One coach at the University of Tennessee came back with an offer. Others arrived, but Young respected the loyalty and committed to the Volunteers.
A few months later, Manchester entered a Circle K near Georgia Military’s campus and saw Young working the register. He needed money to be able to take his brother’s 2003 Buick and move to Tennessee.
When Young arrived to the football facility at Tennessee, he met a familiar face. His defensive line coach, Rodney Garner, had just arrived after being fired at Auburn, where he pushed harder than any coach to recruit Young there.
“It all worked out anyway for us to be together,” Garner said.
Their first practice started Garner’s 25th consecutive season coaching defensive lines in the Southeastern Conference. It was Young’s first day in the SEC, in his second football camp in five years and two seasons after his last.
Garner rode Young so hard that day, he spent his breaks gasping for air and asking himself a question:
Can you do this?
“It made me question everything,” Young said. “He just had my head all twisted up.”
But the alternative to this scholarship was dropping out of college, going back to customer service and looking in the mirror to tell that kid who spent his weekends in the barracks of a military school that he quit on his dreams.
Garner knew that path since he was close with Georgia Military’s coaches. And because he knew their program, he knew the discipline Young had come from. He also knew his family, having coached his cousins at the University of Georgia. And because he knew them, he knew what was in the bloodlines.
He also knew, with one football season in four years and now playing in the best conference in the sport, the climb would be steep. So Garner coached the only way he knows how, with all gas and no brakes, a style that has spawned viral YouTube videos of him.
“He’s going to get on you,” Young said. “You’re either going to take it or you’re not.”
Garner saw something in the face he screamed into. He loved Young’s response and how he never talked back, something he learned from his parents at home, then from managers at Dollar General, and finally from Georgia Military sergeants half his size.
“If you’re somebody who is over me, I will give you respect,” Young said. “No matter what it is.”
Because he was willing to meet the demands, his time out of football turned into a blessing in disguise.
“He didn’t have bad habits,” Garner said. “He had no habits.”
Byron Young had 12.5 sacks and 23.5 tackles for loss in two seasons at Tennessee. (Gary Cosby Jr. / USA Today)
So Garner yelled more, Young pushed more and a breakout happened. That fall, Young racked up 5.5 sacks and 11.5 tackles for loss in his first season at Tennessee. He capped it off with a play in the Music City Bowl that Rams safety Jaylen McCollough will never forget.
“We called a weak-side fire zone, where he was the flats defender,” said McCollough, who was a star safety on Tennessee’s defense with Young. “He was on their No. 1. He picked it off and ran 20-something yards. That was the moment I knew he was special. Just seeing his pass-rushing moves and get-off, his freakish athleticism and then to see him catch an interception on the numbers from the line of scrimmage, it was crazy.”
After his second season at Tennessee, in which he was named first-team All-SEC with seven sacks and 12 tackles for loss, Young submitted his name in the NFL Draft. He was already 25 and needed to maximize his time.
But some NFL coaches told Young they took him off their draft boards because he was too old.
“That wasn’t a good feeling,” Young said, “to not feel wanted after you already worked so hard.”
The Rams are a team that looks beyond the conventional to find value in their Day 2 and 3 picks. And it has a general manager, Les Snead, who played for Garner at Auburn in the early 1990s.
Garner promised Snead that Young would be a better pro than he was a college player. So Snead took him in the third round of the 2023 draft.
Now 6-foot-2, 260 pounds, Young got to the Rams and had the same overwhelming process he experienced at Georgia Military and Tennessee. And this time, he was on the opposite coast of his parents, his 12 siblings and the small rural town he grew up in.
“In rookie camp, I was struggling,” Young said. “In OTAs, I was struggling. When we got into camp, I was struggling.”
The Rams are constantly reminding their players that they belong. It’s the thread that connects Snead’s out-of-the-box draft strategy with a coach in Sean McVay who breathes positivity as if it’s the only air around.
Even when he’s fuming after a loss, McVay will frame each one as an exciting opportunity for growth. For players, he lives to be the light to chase their self-doubt away.
“Your scars either strengthen you,” McVay said, “or make you weaker.”
And so when Young’s first game came, and he blitzed around the edge of the Seattle Seahawks’ right tackle for a fourth-quarter sack of Geno Smith, his veteran teammates ran to him to celebrate the first of what would be an eight-sack rookie season.
Last year, he had 7.5 sacks in the regular season and another 1.5 in the playoffs in his first year playing opposite Jared Verse, who the Rams selected in the first round in 2024. Now in their second year together, Verse often collapses pockets with his power so Young can race from a stand-up linebacker position and get the sack with his speed.
This week, Young is lamenting that he hasn’t had a sack since before the team’s bye.
“That same mindset when he had to ‘Get it out of the mud’ is the same mindset he’s had ever since he’s been a Ram,” safety Quentin Lake said. “That same thing of, ‘I have to prove myself. I have to keep going and keep improving,’ we’re really seeing a live version of that right now.”
Young has never forgotten his customer service days or the patience and leadership they built in him. His Facebook and LinkedIn accounts still list Dollar General as his employer. This year, he partnered with the store to provide school supplies and donations to local kids.
Thank you for making this possible!🙏🏾 https://t.co/PuMDalGkSv
— B.Y. (@byron_97) August 17, 2025
The Rams have a defense constructed of draft-and-develop underdogs. They are the lowest-paid defense in the league this season, yet they rank No. 2 in the NFL in points allowed per game.
Young is the tackle-whipping, edge-bending, run-stopping embodiment of who they want to be.
“His story was already written,” McCollough said, “before anybody had a say on who he could be or what he could become.”
That’s why, when Young goes shopping now, he doesn’t worry about standing in a long line. He spots the stressed-out kid behind the counter running the store by himself and wonders if he, too, ever dreams about becoming someone else someday.
