LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Clev Lubin has spent most of his life being told to be reasonable.
It hasn't taken.
Reasonable people don't leave West Point for junior college. Reasonable people don't look at a recruiting list full of shrugs and see an NFL career. Reasonable people don't go from Army to Iowa Western to Coastal Carolina and somehow arrive in Louisville as the next step on the way to Sunday afternoons.
Clev Lubin has never had much use for reasonable people.
"I've always thought highly of myself," he said.
Somebody had to.
Lubin is Louisville's 6-foot-3-inch, 260-pound defensive end, an All-ACC player who had 8.5 sacks last season and could have entered the NFL Draft.
He came back instead.
This is a man who apparently doesn't believe in taking the shortest route anywhere.
It started at home.
Lubin was the youngest in a family with four older brothers, which is one way to learn humility. Or homicide.
His oldest brother, Homer, used to take him to workouts. One day, Homer worked him so hard Clev announced he was finished.
"It was just like, damn, like, he's killing me," Lubin said. "I told him I'm not coming anymore."
Homer reacted with the tenderness for which older brothers have been celebrated throughout history.
"Oh, you're soft," Lubin remembers him saying. "You suck. You're never gonna do anything. You're just lazy."
Homer also told him pain was weakness leaving the body.
"I finished the workout — don't get me wrong," Clev is quick to say. And he remembered the message.
"The mind's powerful," Lubin said. "You treat yourself with those kind of words, it goes far."
It was, Lubin remembered, a moment "that's kind of shaped who I've become as a player."
A moment that has traveled with him from New York to Iowa to South Carolina to Louisville.
There are interstate highways with less mileage.
Lubin's parents came to this country from Haiti. His father drove a truck. His mother became a nurse, working in hospitals and with hospice patients.
They raised a large family — seven kids, altogether — with strict discipline. His mother, who arrived here at age 16 and worked her way from public high schools through nursing school, had one particular instruction for Clev.
Be a leader.
"Have people look up to you," she told him, "and not always looking up to other people."
Eric Crawford reads his WDRB.com column about Louisville linebacker Clev Lubin
This was ambitious advice for the youngest boy in the house.
Clev spent his childhood looking up at everybody. His brothers were older. His cousins were older. And they kept beating him at things. Clev did not accept defeat gracefully.
Basketball. Tag. Uno. Especially Uno.
"We'd be playing Uno, I'm throwing the cards, whatever it was," Lubin said. "I hate losing."
The family discovered that beating Clev was entertaining.
"It was always rough on me when they beat me because they knew I was a crybaby about it," he said.
He smiled.
"But it worked out."
This is what is known in football as player development.
But discipline wasn't the only thing he picked up at home. An uncle named Yves taught him a different lesson: how to walk into a room and own it without trying very hard. Yves had a habit of making people smile just by showing up.
Clev noticed. Clev borrowed it. When he walks into a room, smiles often follow. Unless you're a quarterback.
Lubin became the Gatorade Player of the Year in New York as a high school senior running back.
Recruiters responded by mostly leaving him alone. He played at a public school in Suffern instead of one of the better-known private school programs, and the big-time offers never materialized.
Army did.
West Point was about 30 minutes from his home. Lubin said he hadn't really known it was there. The United States Military Academy isn't ordinarily the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. Somehow, it did.
At West Point, they moved the running back to defensive end. They put him through "Beast" cadet basic training. Twice. He was named the top cadet candidate during the abbreviated version at the prep school. He still remembers the hard work, crawling through the dirt.
"It sucked," he said.
West Point probably does not put this on the recruiting brochure.
But Lubin learned some things there. He learned discipline. He learned perseverance. He learned pass-rush technique. He learned leadership. And eventually he learned that he didn't want to be at West Point.
He wasn't happy. Academics weren't going well. There was one complication, though. Football was.
During spring practice, Lubin began working against Army's first-team offense. The former running back discovered that he might be pretty good at chasing quarterbacks.
"I could really do this at a high level," he thought.
That's when he made up his mind to leave.
Try selling this one to your parents.
Your son is enrolled at the United States Military Academy. He calls home. He has news. He's leaving. For Iowa Western Community College.
This is not generally the direction people have in mind when they use the phrase, "moving up in the world."
Lubin's parents were upset.
"Definitely upset," Lubin said.
They knew what West Point was. They weren't entirely sure what junior college was. They did know that their son wanted to trade one for the other. Long conversations ensued. In the end, Lubin stated it flatly.
"You gotta believe in me," he told them.
It wasn't an argument supported by much documentary evidence.
Lubin had no Power Four offer waiting. No guarantee. No shortcut back. Just an idea of what he thought he could become.
"It was a grown-man choice for me," he said. "... There was no Plan B."
Goodness knows, Plan A already had enough connecting flights of its own.
At Iowa Western, Lubin became a first-team JUCO All-American and helped win a national championship. He had 23.5 tackles for loss and 11.5 sacks. Surely, he thought, this would get the big programs interested.
It didn't.
Coastal Carolina called. Lubin went.
He didn't start. Then he got hurt. This is roughly the point in the movie when the inspirational music is supposed to begin. Lubin apparently couldn't hear it. He just kept working.
Eventually he won the job and finished the season with 9.5 sacks.
Then Louisville called. Now we're getting somewhere. Lubin came to the ACC last season and had 8.5 sacks and 13.5 tackles for loss. He was voted third-team All-ACC.
The kid who couldn't attract major programs out of high school had become one of the better defensive ends in a major conference.
He was surprised by none of this.
"Ive had to go to so many different places to really gain the opportunity that I felt like I've always had," Lubin said.
There is the story in one sentence. The rest of the football world kept changing its evaluation of Clev Lubin. But Clev Lubin never changed his evaluation of Clev Lubin.
"Until I'm done playing, I'm gonna think I'm the best player in the world," he said. "Until somebody proves me different."
He could have tried the NFL after last season.
Instead, he returned to Louisville. He wants to win the ACC. He wants to reach the College Football Playoff. He wants to prove to NFL teams that he can rush the passer, play the run, drop into coverage and lead a locker room.
In other words, modesty still has not broken out.
This is probably good news for Louisville. Lubin wants the Cardinals' defense to be "the reason we win games." Not a reason. The reason.
You can accuse the man of many things. A shortage of ambition isn't one.
The NFL is close enough now that people ask whether Lubin feels pressure.
Pressure?
For a guy who left West Point for Iowa Western, NFL scouts are a relaxing afternoon.
"The opportunity's in front of me," Lubin said. "I've asked for it. This is what I've worked for. This is what I've wanted."
Of course it is.
He wanted it when recruiters didn't. When the Power Four didn't. When his parents looked at West Point, looked at junior college and quite reasonably wondered what their son was thinking. He wanted it when he was Homer's little brother trying to survive a workout.
Homer told him he was soft. His mother told him to become someone people looked up to.
It would appear Mom won that argument.
Now Lubin says there are only two steps left.
"I've got to make it to the NFL," he said, "and then I've got to play a long career."
Just two steps.
For Clev Lubin, that's practically a shortcut.
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