SHAVON REVEL JR. had finished a 10-hour overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse in Kernersville, North Carolina, scanning boxes and loading trucks. He could barely keep his eyes open.
"I was tired, and I mean tired as hell," Revel said.
But rather than head home for eight hours of shut-eye, Revel took a quick nap in his father's car while waiting for his dad's shift at Amazon to end. They then made the two and a half hour drive to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, with hopes of keeping Revel's football dream alive.
Poor grades and a string of injuries in high school had left Revel needing a Hail Mary, as he had spent the past two years in junior college in Louisburg, North Carolina, playing in just two games. Shavon Revel Sr., who goes by Keith, was convinced his son, with his size, speed and drive, just needed a chance.
That chance came June 6, 2021, at the ECU prospect camp. On about an hour's sleep, Revel blew everybody away with a 4.4 time in the 40-yard dash, an 11-foot broad jump and a 39-inch vertical leap. Combine those marks with a 6-foot-2, 190-pound frame and an arm length of 32 5/8 inches (his wingspan placed him in the 87th percentile among all players at this year's NFL combine), and it's easy to see why Revel's fortunes were about to change.
"We didn't know much about him, really nothing, but were like, 'Holy smokes!' when we saw him run and work out in some of the position drills," said ECU coach Blake Harrell, who was then the Pirates' defensive coordinator. "You just don't see that kind of speed, with his cutting ability, at his size and his length."
ECU offered Revel a scholarship on the spot, but with one condition. He had to improve his grades to become eligible.
"That's all I needed to hear," Revel said.
The bleary-eyed trip had paid off.
"The drive back [from ECU] was a lot more exciting than the drive there," Revel Sr. said. "We were exhausted."
With a path set out to play Division I college and, perhaps, in the NFL, Revel was determined to deliver. There would be more adversity, including a knee injury that cost him most of the 2024 season, but now he's one of the most intriguing cornerback prospects in the upcoming draft. ESPN's Jordan Reid lists him as the No. 4 cornerback in the class, and an NFL college personnel director told ESPN, "He's a guy you set your schedule to."
"There's a whole lot more out there that people haven't seen from me, and they're going to," Revel said.
Wherever he ends up, it will be a long way from Louisburg College and the Amazon warehouse.
"I had terrible grades, and it started during my first couple of years of high school," Revel said. "It was too much football and not enough of everything else in the classroom. I take responsibility."
Revel Sr., who runs a 7-on-7 team in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, knew his son could play at a high level, but wouldn't get noticed without college game tape to show coaches.
So Revel Sr. signed his son up for the ECU camp, which was designed primarily for high school players.
After Revel's eye-opening performance, there was no need for the ECU coaches to even have a discussion. They wanted Revel, but he needed a 2.5 GPA with an associate degree from Louisburg to be eligible.
"They took a chance on somebody who had a 2.0," Revel said. "It wasn't like a lot of schools were lining up to offer somebody a scholarship that had a 2.0 in junior college.
"I never forgot that."
Revel's father had also signed his son up for an NC State camp later that week, but they instead headed back to Winston-Salem and to the Amazon warehouse grind for a few more weeks.
With the ECU offer as incentive, Revel made good on his word and improved his grades enough to be eligible.
"There was no more bull----, none of that," Revel said. "ECU opened up a window for me. I was going to get my grades right. I wasn't going to look back."
The ECU coaches knew they had a hidden gem and kept close tabs on Revel. Steve Ellis, who is now at Louisville, was ECU's cornerbacks coach at the time and made regular trips to Louisburg to check on Revel's progress.
Word quickly spread about Revel's impressive showing at the ECU camp, including interest from North Carolina and Kentucky.
"The calls were starting to come in, but Shavon was set on doing what he needed to do to get to ECU," Louisburg defensive coordinator Jonathan Hodges said. "That's just him. He'd already been through a lot and didn't waver. He knew what he wanted."
That resolve has sustained Revel since he was a kid playing what he and his brothers called "throw up" football anywhere they could find a makeshift field and religiously running up the steep concrete hill, night and day, in front of his mother's mobile home.
"That's the way I came up," Revel said. "You don't make excuses. You don't blame what's happened to you in life. You go get it. You take it. No one's going to feel sorry for you."
Even when the blows keep coming.
During his sophomore year in high school, Revel was involved in a serious car accident when his father blacked out behind the wheel after being overcome by a violent coughing fit, crashing the car into a cement wall. Two of Revel's brothers were also in the car. Everybody survived, but Shavon suffered a fractured skull, requiring surgery, and a broken nose. His sophomore season was over, and it took him half a year to rehabilitate to where he could play football again. Then his junior season was cut short when he broke his collarbone.
In 2022, his first season at ECU, he ran into more injury problems when he hurt his hand during preseason camp. He showed promise on special teams that year, but the only defensive snaps he played were in the Birmingham Bowl against Coastal Carolina.
"We probably should have played him more, but you could tell he was coming," Harrell said. "Anything you asked him to do, he did 100 percent. It was never like playing special teams was beneath him."
Then in 2023, Revel had his breakthrough.
BY THE SUMMER of 2023, Revel had grown bigger and stronger -- he had gained about 20 pounds after weighing barely 170 at the end of high school -- and by the midway point of that season, NFL scouts were already on to him.
He had all the measurables the pros love in press cornerbacks -- and the production; he led the Pirates with 12 pass breakups, blocked two kicks and finished with 54 total tackles. According to Pro Football Focus, Revel forced incompletions on 26% of his targets in coverage, which ranked right behind Toledo's Quinyon Mitchell, who was taken 22nd overall by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 2024 draft.
Revel said a major factor in his improvement was the arrival of cornerbacks coach Jules Montinar, who is now at Oklahoma State.
"Coach [Montinar] taught me the position of cornerback. He showed me how to play it, walked me through every little detail," Revel said. "Everything I didn't have, he fixed. "
To Montinar, Revel was an ideal student.
"He was only scratching the surface," Montinar said. "The thing that I loved about him was he embraced every minute of it during the good times and the bad times. He accepted being coached. We went 2-10, but he played his ass off, was physical, blocked kicks, broke up passes, you name it.
"We knew he had all the tools. But you got to remember that was really his first full season at cornerback. He'd played mostly quarterback, receiver and safety in high school and played a total of two real games in two years at junior college. That's amazing."
Equally amazing was that Revel, in the world of the transfer portal and lucrative NIL payouts, was still with ECU when the 2024 season began. Montinar had already warned Revel and his father that their cellphones would be buzzing, and with the Pirates having their first bye week five games into the 2023 season, the calls began pouring in.
"It was just the start," Revel Sr. said. "You name it, and they were calling, almost like they were getting in line for when the portal opened in December. And all of it was illegal, every bit of it. Sometimes it was maybe a three-way call between different coaches, and one time it was a defensive coordinator telling us he could get us $600,000."
Revel didn't enter the portal in December, but that didn't keep him from listening. He had six-figure offers from some of the biggest brands in college football, including recent College Football Playoff teams from the SEC and Big Ten.
Revel held firm. The winter transfer portal came and went, and he was still a Pirate.
"We knew he left a lot of money on the table," ECU athletic director Jon Gilbert said. "We did what we could to help him, but it was pennies on the dollar to what he could have gotten elsewhere.
"What I always admired about him is that he never came and tried to leverage us. I think he knew we couldn't pay anywhere close to what he was being offered, but he never went down that road. The other thing is that he really wanted to graduate."
Montinar knew the Pirates would also have to weather the spring transfer portal in 2024, and by that time, all 32 NFL teams had either come to see Revel or were scheduled to see him personally.
"I saw him twice and was hoping to see him a third time," the NFL college personnel director said. "He was tall and long, got in and out of breaks, wasn't afraid to put his head down and tackle. And the fact that he stayed loyal to ECU said a lot about his character."
The temptation for Revel during the spring portal window was excruciating.
"I wanted him to make his own decision," Revel Sr. said. "I also wanted him to know that was a lot of money to turn down and wanted him to seriously consider it. As a father, you want to see your children get what they've got coming to them."
It was a decision that kept Revel up at night as the days counted down until the portal window closed last April.
"I would be like, 'Damn, that's a lot of money.' I was fighting with myself," Revel said. "But I kept going back to ECU believing in me in the first place. Those other schools offering me all that money weren't there when I needed somebody to give me a chance.
"I was going to be true to myself. They weren't going to buy me."
That became clear again when another challenge came Revel's way.
"Now that it's football 24/7, Shavon is going to thrive," Montinar said. "And going through everything he's been through, there's nothing that's going to faze him."
Revel has followed a cornerback's creed going back to his days of loading boxes at that Amazon warehouse in the wee hours of the morning.
"You got to have a short memory if you're going to play cornerback," Revel said. "You give up a catch, and it's on to the next play. You ain't got time to be hanging your head. That's just the way you've got to think when you're out there on an island in coverage.
"And it's the same way in life."
