If you stand 10 feet from Quinyon Mitchell while he’s in a full sprint, you can actually hear how fast he is. If you stand 10 feet away and ask him a question, you might not hear his reply.
A cornerback of world-class speed, Mitchell plays football with power and force — pretty much the opposite of his personality. The No. 11 prospect on Dane Brugler’s updated top-100 board for the 2024 NFL Draft, Mitchell has topped 23 miles per hour on the GPS, has 4.3 speed and has defended more passes (44) over the last two years than any defensive back in college football. He’s also careful about his language in front of children, polite to strangers, loyal to the people he loves and completely aware of everything around him.
He showed up on Earth with the physical stuff. The rest of it? That came from his two guardian angels.
Mitchell grew up in tiny Williston, Fla., a town of fewer than 3,000, a half-hour south of Gainesville near the Nature Coast. He has five siblings, including three younger sisters. He calls his mother, Mashona Solomon, his “rock.” He calls his grandmother Marilyn Johnson his “best friend.”
Mashona had Quinyon at a young age. For the first nine years of his life, he lived at his grandma’s house.
And come to think of it, she might’ve helped with some of the speed stuff, too.
“He loved to run so much. Sometimes, he and I would race,” Johnson recalls with a laugh. “He always won.”
Johnson had just three rules for Quinyon, the last of them golden: Be honest, be respectful and treat others the way you’d want to be treated. These are the tenets Mitchell lives by today. When he turned down high-major scholarship offers out of high school to stick with the mid-major coach who truly first believed in him, he thought of his grandma’s rules. When those same schools tried to coax his transfer with name, image and likeness money three years later, he had the same thought.
As a football player, Mitchell is confident, consistent and at times a dominant weapon — a defender with enough speed, length and balance to take away the opposition’s top weapon in just about any circumstance. He also holds the on-field awareness of a much older player, alternating between poise and intensity quietly and immediately. Like flipping on a light switch.
We are all a product of our environments. Quinyon Mitchell, arguably the top defender in the 2024 NFL Draft, comes from a unique one. Which makes sense, because there’s very little normal about him.
GO FURTHER
Quinyon Mitchell, the 2024 NFL Draft’s quiet star, was built for this moment