“He literally made all 11 other players miss,” Clendening said. “You could count them: one, two, three – here comes another. That’s when we kind of went, ‘Wow, he’s turning a corner.’”
Kone lacked the academic qualifications for D-I interest out of high school, which sent him to Iowa Central in Fort Dodge, with a population of roughly 25,000. There he built up his grades and football résumé, earning second-team all-conference honors in back-to-back seasons. His passion for the game was tested, and he passed.
“Do you really love football?” Kone said. “If you guys have ever been around a juco campus or seen one of those games, you’ll understand that. It’s not a place where you want to mess around and have fun. You want to get in there and get to work. You’ll stay and blossom into something from that.”
During Kone’s eight-game stop at Indiana State, a D-I FCS program, Western Michigan coach Lance Taylor saw a long-limbed, 6-1 cornerback with hard-to-find instincts for breaking up passes.
“He was one of the first, if not the first, recruits who committed when I took the job [in 2023],” Taylor recalled. “When he came on his visit … I said, ‘Man, you look like those guys I’ve been around at the NFL level.’ … Very athletic, long [arms], good cover skills.”
Kone needed time to adjust to the complexities of Western Michigan’s defense, Taylor recalled, but once he did, his growth accelerated. During his first four starts at the end of the 2023 season, Kone had a game-sealing interception against rival Central Michigan.
