INDIANAPOLIS — It was one slice, and it was part of a marketing deal with Autotrader, and it wasn’t like Aidan Hutchinson didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed up to do a Barstool pizza review. And if you check the tape, the 6' 6" 265-pound top-five lock played it off like that, giving Big Mama’s and Papa’s in West Hollywood, Calif. a polite 6.7, while rattling off his favorite Ann Arbor pizza spots to Dave Portnoy.
But deep down? He regretted it the minute the tomato sauce hit his tongue.
“Because it was in the middle of training, I was like, ” Hutchinson said, standing in a hallway where he’d just finished working on starts for the next day’s 40-yard dash. “So I had that piece of pizza, and it always just sits in the back of my mind. And if I'm ever feeling bad, with my body or something, I'm like, .”
What’s more, once he got back to the Sports Academy, an hour north in Thousand Oaks, he felt compelled to tell everyone, if for nothing else than to get it off his chest.
“He came back and he's like, ,” said Taylor Ramsey, a director at the facility. “Dude ate one slice of pizza, and he's pissed at himself—for one slice of pizza.”
This is how Hutchinson became, by many accounts, the best player in the 2022 draft, and how he arrived here in Indianapolis as the safest bet any team can make in this year’s class. A year ago, the Michigan star was injured and seen as a sort of try-hard edge rusher destined to go somewhere late in the first round. And because few saw him as special, it was easy to wonder why he didn’t just cash in by going pro then.
Since then, he’s become something else entirely. Now, he’s the type of player an NFL team can build a defense around, one who could go No. 1 overall, and one who very likely won’t fall past the second pick, which happens to be in the possession of his hometown Lions.
Any time a guy can shift perception the way Hutchinson did the last 12 months, it’s surprising. But that he’s pulled it off really isn’t even mildly so to Hutchinson himself, because he had in his head how he’d make this story come to life all along. And here in Indy, with a class that lacks some sizzle, that story is one that’s absolutely worth telling.
As it would be, really, in any year, because who Hutchinson is explains everything about how this happened. The piece of pizza illustrated it for me, and, for the record, yes, he was just playing it cool with how he scored it.
“It was fricking delicious,” he said, laughing. “I haven't had a piece of pizza in forever.”
