The defensive tackle is one of the most intriguing prospects in this year’s draft. But the attributes that make him stand out could also be his downfall

Desmond Watson is pro football’s next very big thing: a 6ft 6in, 464lb defensive tackle who is poised to become the heaviest player ever selected at the NFL draft, which takes place later this month. “He’s a unicorn,” his coach at Florida, Billy Napier, said last month. “You’ll go the rest of your career, and you’ll never be around a guy that’s that stature.

A native of Plant City, Florida, the state’s strawberry capital, Watson was the Gators’ big man on campus, a larger-than-life folk hero to match the school’s 7ft 9in basketball prospect. When Watson arrived at college, he already weighed 440lb – or about as much as a standup piano. Watson’s legend grew once he cracked the team’s starting lineup the following year. During a 2022 game against South Carolina, Watson left 89,000 fans gasping after he split a double team and ripped the ball away from his opponent in a hit reminiscent of Jadeveon Clowney’s helmet-popping hit against Michigan in the 2013 Outback Bowl. (It’s a wonder Spencer Rattler, the Gamecocks’ 6ft 1in, 218lb quarterback, managed to tackle Watson to the ground afterwards.) At last year’s Gasperilla Bowl, Watson’s college swan song, the Gators handed the ball off to him to get a first down late in the game. “I can do it all,” he said afterward.

A riff on the university setting of A Different World, the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU is expanding online

In 1987, the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World made its US TV debut and followed the elder child, Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet), as she studied at her parents’ alma mater. The fictional historically Black college (or HBCU), Hillman, would go on to become a byword for Black excellence. “The influence of kids wanting to go to school, period, I think is very powerful,” one of the stars of the series, Jasmine Guy, said while touring HBCU campuses with her former castmates in 2024, 35 years after the sitcom ended. “Because they could see themselves there.”

Hillman College is credited with driving record levels of enrollment at actual HBCUs in the 1980s and 90s, and remains a source of inspiration for Black creatives to this day. The actor-screenwriter Lena Waithe had the fabled campus in mind when she launched her production company, Hillman Grad. “I want to call it something that is close to my heart, and that is the world of A Different World and what that show represented for me and so many other people,” she said.