There may not be another athlete anywhere with a story like Aristotle Taylor's and he can't help but laugh at just how crazy it is that he will be a Stanford Cardinal in a couple months.

"Surreal, that's how I would describe it because I would be looking at some different schools without football," he said. "I'm going to maybe the best university in the world now."

Named Aristotle by his father in hopes he'd be a philosopher, his path to football defies logic. For years he declined hopeful invitations from coaches at his high school to join their teams, especially from the head football coach, Adam Korzeniewski.

He attends Brother Rice High School in Michigan, which is an all-boys Roman Catholic school with a rich history of athletic success. (DJ LeMahieu, Yankees, and TJ Lang, a former NFL All-Pro guard, are two of the more recent examples.)

He grew to be 6-8 and there aren't many high schoolers that height who don't play some kind of sport.

Well, he sorta did. Taylor became an "e-athlete" and in this case that means he worked to become very, very good at Fortnite — a wildly popular game played by millions of people with tournaments that can involve hundreds of thousands.

Beginning about halfway through his sophomore year he dedicated a mind boggling number of hours to the game. He estimates that he played six to eight hours a day Monday through Friday and up to 12 hours on the weekends.

The payoff was that he achieved what he described as "semi-professional" status and was capable of finishing in the top 200 in tournaments that drew hundreds of thousands of competitors.

But Taylor wasn't the stereotype gamer teenager that some readers might visualize at this point. He was not a zombie in front of a screen. On the contrary, he remained a top student at Brother Rice (it's not easy for a walk-on to be admitted to Stanford) and he wasn't afraid to ask himself if what he was doing was the right choice.

That self-awareness helped him decide to move on from Fortnite last year.

"I didn't see the return on investment benefitting me, so I wanted to take my energy and put it in other places," he said.

There were two major factors in that decision. One, Fortnite had changed since he started playing it and when the game felt less appealing to him he started looking around to do other things. Second, he wanted to grow in new ways and as part of that effort he wanted to repay the kindness of Korzeniewski.

"He really always believed in me," Taylor said. "He had been on me every single year and the cool thing is it wasn't always about football. He would come to me and talk with me about my life. I thought that was unusual for the varsity football coach to talk to me about more than football. That left a good impression about the kind of man he is.

"As the years went on I thought I could do him justice and at least be part of his program somehow and become a manager. They were on me all year, every year."

Taylor did not realize it at the time, but his plan to be a manager was set up to change when the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions went into effect last March. That happened just a couple weeks after he started seriously lifting weights for the first time.

"I took that as a period where I could better myself and transform myself into someone people wouldn't recognize," he said.

The result was remarkable physical growth and a willingness to try out for the team.

Brother Rice's season opener was postponed from mid-August to Sept. 19 and Taylor joined the team about Sept. 1. He had gained about 30 pounds since he started lifting and the raw athlete had eight sacks in eight games.

After his season Hudl video went out calls started coming in from football coaches.

Air Force, Vanderbilt and Eastern Michigan offered scholarships. Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia and Cornell offered and so did several FCS programs. Stanford, Michigan, and Notre Dame told Taylor he had a preferred walk-on spot.

He committed to Stanford Feb. 25 — about a year after he set himself on a path to change his body and play football for the first time.

There are a lot of athletic firsts that Taylor has yet to check off and he is the ultimate wild card on a football roster.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready for that challenge and I want that challenge. I don't think you can grow as a human being without those vigorous challenges. The main thing I'm focusing on is being ready so I don't have to get ready."

"I'm just trying to be the best person I can possibly be. I'm not the type of person who can sit in class and not do anything, not pay attention and not do well on tests. IO'm critical on myself to do as well as I possibly can. This is foundation time. This is the time to build a foundation that I can build a successful life on it."