Last year, Ailym Ford had to go against everything he knew.
His whole life had been built on a philosophy of working harder than everyone else. It wasn’t just a cliché for him, though – he had always backed it up with his actions, and that continued after he became part of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football program.
In 2019, his freshman season and also the first with Rusty Wright as head coach of the Mocs, Ford made a hit on a kickoff return – running backs coach Ricky Spradling called it “the hit heard around the world” – that basically stopped practice.
“I remember everybody looked over,” Spradling recalled, “and that’s kind of when we had a good feeling that number 32 was going to be pretty good.”
Speaking of clichés, one could say Ford is “built different,” but Wright disputes that notion.