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Driven to succeed: Cowboys rookie Tyler Smith’s tenacity forged by obstacles on NFL road

Raised by single mother in Fort Worth, the talented offensive lineman knows this is just the beginning.

FORT WORTH — One of the first memories Tyler Smith formed was his mother’s red Dodge Stratus engulfed in flames. Fortunately, no one was injured in the blaze. The next family vehicle was a ragged yet reliable minivan affectionately nicknamed “The Green Machine.” Smith doesn’t lament the busted AC or rear seating that was partially missing; the van got the job done.

But what happened with a different family car, essentially stolen and held for ransom, ignited something in the Cowboys first-round draft pick. His mother planned on giving him that Honda Accord once he could drive.

It drove him instead.

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Smith, a Fort Worth native and North Crowley graduate, practiced with his hometown Cowboys for the first time this month. There are two sides to the 6-4, 325-pound offensive lineman. One is a quick-witted man of principle who learned from his mother’s diligent example. The other is largely why he is here.

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More than most, Smith flips a switch on the football field.

Last week, North Crowley offensive coordinator Terrance Orr stood in a campus hallway and marveled at the fierce physicality with which Smith so naturally plays. Orr held his cell phone and chuckled at video highlights of Smith in high school, No. 56 trucking one defender and pancake-blocking another.

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He likened Smith to a fellow homegrown athlete, DeSoto’s Errol Spence Jr., the unified welterweight boxing champion.

“He is going to keep on jabbing, no matter how tired he gets,” Orr said. “He is going to keep going. I think eventually, guys will throw in the towel. They may survive the first quarter, the second quarter, but third quarter, fourth quarter, it’s a wrap.”

Smith, the youngest of 48 offensive linemen selected during last month’s NFL draft, turned 21 on April 3.

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He is too driven to stop now.

“This is just the beginning,” Smith said. “I want to show [the Cowboys] they didn’t make a mistake on me. This is my home city, so there are way more strings attached here. I’m representing my city. I’m representing that name on the back of my jersey. That’s a lot of what it comes down to: What are you about? How do you conduct yourself? My upbringing, nothing less than my best effort is going to be suitable.”

Dallas Cowboys' first-round pick Tyler Smith, 21, and his mother Patricia Smith pose for a...
Dallas Cowboys' first-round pick Tyler Smith, 21, and his mother Patricia Smith pose for a portrait at their home on Monday, May 9, 2022 in Fort Worth. Smith played football at North Crowley High School in Fort Worth. (Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)

Paved the road

They were watching her.

Patricia Smith raised two sons, Tyler and 18-year-old brother Isaac, as a single mother. She not only verbalized life lessons but gave daily demonstrations. All that reading, writing and studying to earn her teaching certification and master’s degree in education. How she worked several years as a middle school social studies teacher and then directly for the Fort Worth Independent School District, where she coordinates curriculum today.

Patricia picked up extra work as necessary, be it at Sears or Office Depot. She drove Tyler and Isaac to early-morning workouts and attended their sporting events when possible.

As a family, they didn’t have everything, but they had enough.

They always had enough.

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Financial stress loosened some over time, as Patricia advanced in her career. She usually owned multiple cars at once. Tyler identified a turning point in 2015 when he asked for the Madden NFL 16 video game. The answer, much to his surprise, was yes.

“I watched her work,” Tyler said. “That’s all it was. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t like we were pulling these heists or we were cheating anybody. I watched my mom work, just to keep us where we needed to be. I saw it for what it was: If you don’t quit and you have a good work ethic, it’s very possible to achieve everything you want to achieve in life.”

Patricia Smith wore multiple hats.

When the boys were little — “emphasis on little,” she said with a laugh — she play-wrestled with them in the way an archetypal father might. She was both their strongest advocate and sternest disciplinarian. A 14-year-old Tyler knew the latter, once playing coy when Mom came home to find the Vizio television not working. Tyler inadvertently cracked the screen while tossing a football.

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No, no, no. Tyler is not the only Smith who knows when it’s time to get serious.

He watched and learned from the best.

The North Crowley football team comes together after lifting weights on Monday, May 9, 2022,...
The North Crowley football team comes together after lifting weights on Monday, May 9, 2022, at North Crowley High School in Fort Worth, Texas. Dallas Cowboys' first-round pick Tyler Smith played at North Crowley. (Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)

Pride of North Crowley

An 18-volt cordless drill, tape measure and color-coded binders are among the items sitting atop Ray Gates’ desk in the athletics fieldhouse. Unopened cardboard boxes of shoulder-pad racks — assembly required — rest on the floor down the hall. An offensive coordinator from a Division I school waits outside his doorway.

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The school’s new football head coach, hired in March, has many tasks to complete.

Honoring Tyler, a man he has never met, is high on it.

Tyler Smith is one of four North Crowley graduates to reach the NFL since the school opened in 1998. When the Cowboys drafted him 24th overall out of Tulsa, he became the high school’s first, first-round pick in any sport. The hope from campus coaches and administrators is this precedent can inspire current and future students.

Gates plans to build what he calls a “legacy wall” inside the fieldhouse near the football stadium. Images of all four NFL players from Crowley will be commemorated.

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“For me, I think what it does,” Gates said, “is our kids that grow up in this community, our kids that walk these hallways, our kids that have been in this fieldhouse and underneath the umbrella of this program now have someone that’s relatively close to their age that they can put their hands on and say, ‘This guy did the same things I’ve done. He walked the same hallways that I walked.’”

Gates credits the Panthers’ previous coaching staffs for starting that tradition.

No doubt, Smith’s high school years were formative.

North Crowley is where he reluctantly accepted a position switch that then-coach Eugene Rogers presciently pushed for, moving him from defensive tackle to full-time offensive tackle as a junior after a sophomore trial run. It is where Smith met chemistry teacher and offensive line coach Brandon Harston, someone Smith cherishes as a strong example of the several coaches whose mentorship and father-like influence were a welcome addition to his life.

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And North Crowley is where an injured and overlooked Smith intensified his approach.

Blount’s disease, a lower-leg growth disorder, caused him to be bowlegged. At age 16, days after his junior season ended, Smith finally underwent surgery to rectify his left knee. He was still in bed, recovering at home, when a tow truck mistakenly towed Patricia Smith’s black 2005 Honda Accord, Tyler and Patricia both said.

Repossessing the vehicle meant paying a few hundred dollars that Patricia could not responsibly spare. She had just paid the monthly rent and utilities, and she was working a second job at Office Depot to help cover the cost of Tyler’s medical bills.

Each day that passed, the cost to reclaim the car increased.

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“I just couldn’t do it,” Patricia said. “I hated that it ended that way, but just for survival, it was like, ‘That car or pay bills?’ And I thought it was more important to make sure he got the rehab that he needed, that he got the post-treatment he needed than to do that.”

The decision was an eye-opening experience for Tyler. He saw his mother do all the right things. She coordinated medical appointments while juggling multiple jobs. Both cars she owned were fully paid for, and now, one was gone.

“It just seemed like we were kind of getting walked on,” Tyler said. “We were getting dog walked. … From that point on, I was full-on. I attacked my rehab. I attacked football. Track season, I did all the stuff I knew I needed to do to enhance and make sure I had the opportunity to go to college.

“Because I knew at that point, if we went to college, it wouldn’t be because we had the money to put me through college. It would be because I either got a scholarship or I was going to take out a loan, and I wasn’t going to take out a loan.”

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The scholarship outlook proved bleak.

The knee surgery scared away top football programs in Texas and elsewhere. Tyler’s pass-protection technique was also quite raw and understandably so, considering how new he was to the offensive line. He switched from left tackle as a junior to mostly left guard as a senior; he is expected to start at left guard as a Cowboys rookie.

Smith initially committed to Abilene Christian. Tulsa then offered him a scholarship at the higher Division I subdivision level, an offer too attractive to decline. Smith made a point to be accountable, directly informing Abilene Christian’s then-offensive line coach Mario Jeberaeel of his Tulsa decision and expressing appreciation for his belief in him.

Little came easy for Smith, but he kept working. He leaned on his coaches and teachers.

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This was the example Smith set at North Crowley, about a 30-minute drive from AT&T Stadium in Arlington.

He did it. So can someone else.

Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith impressed his Tulsa coaches with his loyalty to the...
Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith impressed his Tulsa coaches with his loyalty to the program. (Courtesy / University of Tulsa)

Rising star

The secret was out.

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The more Smith started at left tackle for Tulsa, the more coaches at power programs in Texas and elsewhere changed their tune. They now observed what Tulsa noticed back in Fort Worth. And they wanted in.

Smith became more heavily recruited in college than he ever was at North Crowley. Schools expressed their interest through back channels in hopes to lure him on campus through the transfer portal. Outside interest reached a boil before he declared for the draft.

“There were schools — I’m not going to name names because I don’t want to disparage anybody,” Smith said. “But they were offering me money in the six figures to come to those schools, arguably the same schools that passed me up and thought I wasn’t good enough. It was interesting to me because I didn’t hear about it until later, but I knew the opportunity was there after my [2020] redshirt freshman year.”

Character is not only tested in times of adversity. It is also measured in how someone encounters success. Smith refused to turn his back on Tulsa and head coach Philip Montgomery, whose compassion and overall treatment toward him Smith appreciated and still, to this day, considers unique.

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Smith could have opted to stay in college for another year.

The extra time would have afforded Smith the chance to further hone his technique. When accounting for refinements in his pass protection and hand placement, it is entirely plausible Dallas selected with the No. 24 draft pick in 2022 a player who would have been a top-10 or even top-five choice in 2023.

“A year from now, I think he’s the No. 1 tackle in the country,” Montgomery said. “That’s my belief and from talking to other people in y’all’s league and ours. That’s where I think he would have been a year from now after just cleaning up some really small types of details. He’s going to be that type of guy, so I think the Cowboys got a steal from that part of it.”

At Tulsa, Smith was his good-natured self away from the field, keeping the locker room loose with situational humor, making quips, doing on-point impressions of position coaches. That was in private company. On the field, he built a reputation as a freight train in the run game.

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He plowed through two defensive backs when pulling from left tackle in the closing minutes at SMU last season. At Cincinnati during the 2020 American Conference Championship game, a Bearcats defender dislodged Smith’s helmet late in the second quarter. On the very next snap, Smith indiscriminately took it out on a different Bearcats player, slamming him to the ground and standing over him like Muhammad Ali did Sonny Liston.

Of course, other schools were interested.

Smith was not.

“I think it just shows the true character of him and who he is as a man, who he was raised to be by his mother,” Montgomery said. “Just a young man who understood that we started this journey together, and we were going to finish this journey together. His loyalty, the way he cares about this program and his teammates in the time that he has spent here, it means so much to us, to me.”

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Smith’s career now moves at the speed of a sports car up the Dallas North Tollway. Before the NFL combine in late February, he impressed Florida-based trainer Pete Bommarito, who after 20 years in the business called Smith’s freaky mixture of size, athleticism, strength and coachability “shocking.”

A strong performance at the NFL combine followed. He then completed an exhaustive tour of NFL facility visits and private workouts, impressing Cowboys offensive line coach Joe Philbin on the latter.

The ride continues.

“In no way, shape, form or fashion have I arrived,” Smith said. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime. God has been good to me. Just look at where I came from to where I am now. I think about it during the day. I sit there in shock. But at the same time, I understand I put in all the work for everything that is coming now, but there is more work to be put in.”

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Smith is not afraid to get serious, flip the switch, and devote what is required.

He was raised for this.

A photo of Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith as a youth football player in 2013. Smith...
A photo of Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith as a youth football player in 2013. Smith played football at North Crowley High School in Fort Worth. (Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)
Dallas Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith, 21, poses for a portrait at his mother's home...
Dallas Cowboys first-round pick Tyler Smith, 21, poses for a portrait at his mother's home in Fort Worth on May 9, 2022.(Rebecca Slezak / Staff Photographer)
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