In Turk Wharton, the Carolina Panthers have an underdog story for the ages
It’s 2020, and training camp is almost done, and there’s this undrafted rookie defensive lineman making it hard on the Kansas City Chiefs.
The defensive lineman is Turk Wharton. He’s 21, 6-foot-1, 290 pounds. He grew up local, a product of St. Louis public schools, and then went to Division II Missouri University of Science and Technology for four years. He’s tough, smart, fast, attentive. His legs are tree trunks and his hands are boulders and his technique is advanced.
He’s one of the best players in Chiefs camp.
But, in this strange year, that might not be enough.
“Before training camp even started,” said Brandt Tilis, who was then with the Chiefs’ front office, “we said to ourselves: ‘OK, if any of these free agents really show out well in camp, we can probably get them on the practice squad.’ They weren’t likely to be claimed off waivers because nobody knows if they exist.”
It’s brutal, but true. The reasoning, without getting too much in the NFL-roster-rule weeds, is simple.
Every year, teams sign undrafted free agents to fill out their 90-player training camp rosters. That 90 gets trimmed to 53 by the start of the season. The 37 who are cut are then available to get picked up by any other team. In a normal year, many of those 37 are sought after, particularly the rookies.
After all, teams across the league might’ve seen these undrafted rookies make a play or two during the preseason and figure they could be a good depth piece at a pretty cheap price. Word might’ve spread about them in joint practices, too. The point is, in a normal year, these released rookies would get their chance. And then if they don’t get picked up by another team, there’s the high possibility that they return to the team they went through training camp with, just on the practice squad.
Again, this is in a normal year.
But this wasn’t a normal year. It was 2020. COVID-19 limited all sorts of visibility for these rookies. Preseason games and joint practices were canceled. The Chiefs knew the likelihood was minuscule that one of their undrafted rookies would get snatched up by another team; retaining anyone they wanted but didn’t have room for on the 53-man roster was more possible this year than perhaps ever before. It was more prudent, too. It should’ve been an easy decision.
Still, this guy Turk Wharton ...
“He was just clearly one of our best players,” Tilis said, recounting that 2020 offseason. Tilis is now the executive vice president of football operations for the Carolina Panthers. “We couldn’t have any semblance of credibility with our team if Turk didn’t make our 53.”
So Wharton did. In the NFL ecosystem, the decision was a big story. The decision proved to be a good one, too. Wharton would spend the next five years with the Chiefs. He won three Super Bowls. He complemented one of the best defensive linemen in the game in Chris Jones. He followed up a breakout year in 2021 with a torn ACL in 2022 — only to come back quickly and strongly in 2023.
The 2024 season was the defensive tackle’s best yet: 37 tackles, 8.5 sacks, one forced fumble. It was enough to give him a payday with the Carolina Panthers this free agency period — a three-year, $45 million contract — which was accompanied by a Patrick Mahomes tweet of approval.
But Wharton isn’t just an unlikely training camp story. He weathered storms at pretty much every turn of his football life: his late recruitment out of high school, his decision to stay four years at a D2 college, blossoming through the COVID pre-draft-process concrete. He’s an underdog story for the ages.
“They said they’ll find you anywhere, and that’s the truth,” Wharton told The Charlotte Observer. “I think now that I look at it, I definitely belong.”
Forgive him for taking five years to come to this conclusion.
“Sometimes, that’s just the story, you know?”
How Tershawn Wharton became Turk
It’s 2011, and it’s the peak of summer, and a gaggle of seventh grade boys are tired from running around all day. They’ve filed into their friend’s mother’s house in University City, Missouri, waiting on some turkey sandwiches, when the mom cracks a joke.
“’‘You got these big ol’ turkey legs,’” Wharton recalled her saying. “And all my guys start laughing and stuff and say, ‘Shoot, we might as well call him Turk.’”
This is part of the story of how Tershawn became Turk.
The other part:
“They always say I’m built like a gorilla,” Wharton said. He laughed. “And in Tarzan, there’s a girl gorilla named Turk. ... Turk was a joke. And so I liked it. But then it’s a girl gorilla, so as a kid you’re like, ‘What y’all trying to say?’
“But his mom, she’s just a sweet lady. So I was like, ‘We gon’ roll with it. We gon’ roll with it.’ Little did I know it would stick with me the rest of my life.”
It stuck with him throughout his entire football life, surely. His coaches and teammates at Maplewood High School called him Turk. Then, because Maplewood didn’t have a football team his senior year because of a lack of participation, Wharton went to University City High, where he visited a ton as a kid because his great-grandmother lived there. All of his new classmates remembered him as Turk.
By the time Todd Drury, then the head coach at Missouri S&T, got his eyes on him, not many people knew of Turk. At least, not in the college football realm. He was “a machine of production” at University City High. He was lower-body heavy. Strong. But he didn’t have FBS size. Not for a defensive end, which is where he was playing — and certainly not for an interior defensive lineman, which is where his qualities were best aligned.
“He was 6-foot-1, 217 pounds, or something like that,” Drury said when Wharton came in. But it didn’t take long for that to change. Wharton gained 30 pounds his freshman year in the weight room. He busted out of his cleats during his first fall camp. That growth continued. He’d leave Missouri S&T at 280.
He got better as he grew, too. He kept his motor, his unrelenting energy. That could be seen in the warmups, with his shirt off three hours before a game, dancing to Key Glock, all the way through four quarters of football. After his sophomore season where he notched 13.5 sacks, Wharton walked into Drury’s office and expressed that he wanted to play at the highest level. Drury had a message for the player who he knew would one day be his star.
“At that point, it was before all of the transfer rules, so if you transferred up, you had to sit out, which he could’ve done,” Drury said. “We just had a real conversation about it. And I told him, ‘Hey, I’ll do everything I can. Give you every opportunity to be seen. To develop you. And all those things. ...
“Thankfully, at that time, we were playing some pretty good football defensively. And the FCS schools in our state weren’t all the way rolling yet. So the conversation I had with him was, ‘Hey, if you wanna go to Mizzou, I’ll help you. But I think if you’re going to go to an FCS, you can get to the same spot from here.’”
Turk believed him.
And believed in himself.
Making the Kansas City Chiefs
Soon, it wouldn’t be hard to believe in Turk. As a junior and senior at Missouri S&T, he became unstoppable. Opponents double-teamed him, game-planned around him. No dice.
One time as a junior, Turk tackled the running back and the quarterback and forced a fumble in the same play. One time as a senior, he scooped up a fumble and took it 80 yards for a score; no receiver or running back or quarterback was able to catch him. The first sack of his NFL career, Wharton got ahold of the New York Jets’ Sam Darnold and lifted him up in the air; Drury thought Wharton was going to suplex Darnold like he had to so many other opposing college quarterbacks. (He didn’t, but he was close.)
Word got around. Things moved into place. The Chiefs, the local franchise, got a jump on him first. Cassidy Kaminsky was the scout who passed along his tape. Andy Ball was Missouri S&T’s offensive coordinator then, and his father, Randy Ball, was in Kansas City’s pro personnel department.
Drury said that if Wharton’s pro day didn’t get canceled, there’s a high possibility he got drafted, just because he would’ve run really well and impressed with his strength. But come the conclusion of Day 3 of the draft, calls started flooding in asking him to sign with teams across the league as a free agent. The Chiefs prevailed.
And despite it being 2020 — and all the aforementioned odds against him — the situation was perfect. Chris Jones had just signed a massive deal, and the Chiefs needed some young role players along the defensive line. Wharton was just that. And he made the team.
“The odds of him making the NFL were slim,” Chiefs head coach Andy Reid said of Wharton earlier this year. “But because of his work ethic and his athletic ability, (he made it). He’d been a running back, but he outgrew that into a nose guard or a defensive tackle. A very active player. A great, great kid.”
‘Shoot, he be pushing me!’’
It’s 2025, and it’s mental health awareness month, and Wharton has just finished up a session of yoga. Goat yoga, at that. He’s cuddling with a kid goat in front of a few cameras: “We’re going to name him Bryce. Like No. 9.”
The rest of his teammates didn’t do much yoga. They were more so interested in avoiding the goat feces. But Wharton was locked in on the instructor. He does yoga every day, and this replaced his session.
He does this because as defensive linemen, Wharton says, “you don’t really isolate muscles. And pilates and yoga, they isolate your muscles a lot. When I was coming back from my ACL, they would drill my VMO (vastus medialis oblique muscle in the quadriceps). And just make sure that thing fired for me. Yoga is flexibility, and the lady I was working with (in Kansas City), she might make you hold positions and things, and she paid attention to what I did in football: what my moves were, and she just incorporated that into our practice. And that just helped me.”
As for how he started?
“Right after my first year, I talked to Chris Jones, and he was like, ‘Bro, do yoga, pilates and boxing,’” Wharton said. “And I haven’t stopped since.”
Jones offered other advice, too: “Stay young.”
But Wharton is an old soul. He’s comfortable being the one giving advice. Now it’s him who’s leading. Now it’s him on his second contract. Now it’s him using his words when talking to the undrafted guys — “you’re trying out for all 32 teams, not just this one” — and it’s him who’s using his actions to get through to the heralded stars.
“Shoot, he be pushing me!” Bobby Brown III said. The big-time defensive lineman was asked how much Wharton impacted the young players in minicamp, but Brown, entering his fifth year in the league, wanted to make it clear that his teammate was pushing everyone. “I try to go against Turk not only because he’s smaller than me and he’s going to make me have to run faster, but because I know he’s going to push himself. So I gotta push myself.”
In other words, he’s playing like he’s still the underdog.
That’s all Turk knows how to do.
“Every year that I’ve been in the league, I go up to those undrafted guys and let them know, ‘There are more undrafted guys in the league than drafted guys,’” Wharton said. “You just walk around with a different hunger. You walk around with a chip on your shoulder. And you come out every day and prove it. ...
“So yeah, I always reach out to those guys. I shake their hand. Because it’s hard, you know what I mean? Everybody wants to hear their name called in that draft. And when it’s not, it hurts. But there’s another chance, another opportunity. And you need to seize every opportunity you get in life.”
Forgive him for this hope-springs-eternal worldview.
It’s just how his story has gone.
This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
