Nothing works. He gropes, lunges and flails. He feels either a step too fast or a step too slow. George Fant, rookie starting left tackle for the Seattle Seahawks, is new to professional football and new, in many ways, to the very game of football.

He has two jobs: opening holes for running backs and making sure Russell Wilson, the centerpiece of Seattle's championship dreams now and in the near future, emerges unscathed from the penultimate game of the 2016 regular season. It's late December. Seattle. The playoffs loom, and Fant isn't performing well. Chandler Jones, Arizona's anvil of an outside linebacker, speeds around him or motors through, despite Fant's stature (6-foot-5) and heft (296 pounds), fast feet and arms that are as long as fire hoses.

At halftime, he sits at a cubicle in the Seahawks' locker room, head down. Pete Carroll appears, squats in front of him and levels his gaze into Fant's eyes.

"George, just be you. Just get back to being you." Seattle head coach Pete Carroll's advice to Fant after a rough first half

Fant is incredibly important to Carroll. No player better represents the gamble the Seahawks have taken at the very heart of their team, sinking resources elsewhere while hoping to mold inexpensive, raw talent into an offensive line that can dictate tempo and allow Wilson to work his magic.

"George," Carroll says, "just be you. Just get back to being you."

But getting back to being you is hard when you're still trying to figure out who you are.

Fant is only 24. He's out there in front of God and everybody, learning how to play football, and he's doing it as a starter for a team that, despite its inconsistencies, harbors Super Bowl aspirations. When Seattle signed him as a free agent, he was a basketball star who hadn't played many meaningful snaps for a football team since the eighth grade.

Nor is he surrounded by a deep well of players to learn from. The average age of Seattle's offensive line is 24. It is an eight-man unit, half of them castoffs or young veterans still trying to make names for themselves, and half of them rookies. Fant wasn't drafted, and he is so singularly inexperienced that in Kansas City, during the first series of his first preseason game, his mind went blank. He says he threw what little he knew "out the window" and simply charged forward, an amped-up bull in a white jersey, hitting what he could.

None of this should surprise you. It's Seattle, where Carroll and his fellow coaches do things differently. It's in vogue for NFL teams these days to spend big on marquee, All-Pro offensive linemen -- think Cowboys or Raiders. But the Seahawks have just posted another 10-win season with the league's lowest-paid offensive line, a unit held together with chicken wire and hope.

If a football team is only as good as its weakest component, this does not augur well for the playoffs. All season, the offensive line has struggled to protect Wilson. He has been pressured on 37 percent of his dropbacks, worst in the league. He has been sacked on 6.6 percent of them, the fourth worst. The toll is clear. Since hurting his knee in Week 3, Wilson has lost some of the speed and poise that have made him elite.

For the Seahawks, who play host to Detroit in a wild-card game Saturday night, to have a deep run in the playoffs, the offensive line must improve. A lot will depend on Fant, who will be trying to guard Wilson's blind side.

For most of his life, George Fant wanted nothing to do with football.

He grew up shuttling between his mother's home in Cincinnati and his father's 200-acre farm on the outskirts of Smiths Grove, Kentucky, where he planted tobacco and rose before dawn to feed the hogs and cows. He was one of the biggest kids around, so he was expected to strap on a helmet and play the game. But when junior high was over, he'd had enough.

At Western Kentucky, George Fant starred at power forward, winning the Most Outstanding Player award in the Sun Belt Conference tournament and leading his team to the NCAA tournament. AP Photo/Orlin Wagner

He didn't follow football, college or pro. Football seemed more dangerous than it was worth.

"Guys getting hit so incredibly hard," he says with a wide-eyed earnestness that makes him seem more like a popular sixth-grade teacher than a pro athlete. "Guys getting hit everywhere -- the head, the kneecap. People would try to get me to play, but I told myself, 'I am not going to do that. No way.'"

Instead, he played basketball. A gifted athlete, he was ranked by one poll among the top 150 high school players in the country. He received a scholarship from Western Kentucky University, where he became an instant favorite. As a freshman, he flashed nonstop energy, became a power forward, won the Most Outstanding Player award in the Sun Belt Conference tournament and led his team to the NCAA tournament.

When his college basketball career ended in 2015, the pro game in Europe would have been the next step, but he married his high school sweetheart and soon a baby was on the way. Playing in Poland held little appeal.

He heard, however, that some NFL teams were sizing him up.

Maybe he could be a tight end in the mold of 14-time Pro Bowler Tony Gonzalez or teammate Jimmy Graham, both basketball players who became NFL stars. But Gonzalez and Graham had at least shown talent on the field as well as on the court, so Fant used his fifth year of athletic eligibility to suit up with the football team. His goal was simple: learn to block, catch and tackle.

"He looked like a big, tall first-grader out there." Former Western Kentucky strength and conditioning coach Justin Lovett

Despite his talent and diligence, he left the bench for only a few plays.

"He looked like a big, tall first-grader out there," says Justin Lovett, a Western Kentucky strength coach who's since moved to Purdue. "All of his first-step quickness and natural ability was pretty much being neutralized by the mental processing involved with just learning every aspect of the game."

Still, Fant's coaches raved to NFL scouts about his eagerness to learn. As he put on weight, from 250 pounds to 296, he kept his speed. And when pro day came, he posted numbers nothing short of astonishing. He ran 40 yards in 4.83 seconds, leaped 37 inches and stretched each arm two inches short of a yard.

A Seattle scout was watching. He sent glowing, full-length reports to the team's Renton, Washington, headquarters, and the Seahawks staff cobbled together a video of Fant's plays.

"What we saw was an athlete, a great athlete," says Trent Kirchner, co-director of player personnel.

One day last spring, Kirchner heard Carroll talk about a shortage of tackles in the upcoming draft.

"I said to Pete, 'There's this guy out there, and you need to watch the tape,'" Kirchner said. "So we sat down, and we watched what we had, something like 28 plays, his entire college career. And Pete and [general manager] John Schneider were like, 'Whoa! Holy smokes!' But he'd worked out as an offensive lineman, a defensive lineman, a tight end. So the big question we all had was this: 'What is he?'"

The Seahawks pushed to sign Fant as a free agent. They would try to fit him in where they had the largest need: the offensive line, among the worst in the league during the previous season.

Fant, right, is part of an OL with an average age of 24. Half are castoffs or young veterans still trying to make names for themselves, and half are rookies. As a result, QB Russell Wilson, center, is constantly on the run. Joe Nicholson/USA TODAY Sports

When Fant arrived at rookie minicamp, he had no idea what position he'd play.

"I signed my contract, and on paper it said 'tight end,'" he recalls. "But then they take me to the offensive line room, and there I am, looking at the wall where they had a depth chart ... and they had me as the first left tackle [among rookies].

"I had never taken a rep at left tackle in my life."

Tom Cable, the offensive line coach, says, "Those first few days, he was lost. Just getting into stance the way we needed him to be, that was new. To most people with a background in football, that's basic. George was pretty much starting from scratch." But Cable is known for taking chances. "The way we looked at things around here, we were actually pretty excited by the possibilities."

Not only were the Seahawks' coaches impressed by Fant's athleticism and the speed he had developed on the basketball court, but they also liked how he played through pain when he got his knee rolled during an early practice. And they appreciated his focus, sharpened by the need to provide for his wife and baby.

"I had never taken a rep at left tackle in my life." George Fant

He was raw, but they figured raw can be good: No wear and tear from years of pounding, and no bad habits.

Even then, Fant might have gone his entire rookie year as an apprentice -- a few plays here or there after games were already decided -- but he was thrust into action when starter Bradley Sowell sprained his knee during an Oct. 23 road game against Arizona.

"I was nervous, man," he says, his voice rising. "Oh, I was nervous.

"But I thought of my family and what can come from this. At that point, the adrenaline was just pumping. I got out there, and the first snap was a pass play, and I can remember it was Chandler Jones. This was the first time I played him, so I didn't know what to expect, and he ran straight at me, and my hands didn't go up. I was too nervous to remember to put my hands up. Man, the nerves didn't let me do it. And he grabbed me by my shoulder pads and yanked me forward and flung me around and ran straight past me.

"[Jones] didn't make the play, but wow!"

Sowell was out for several weeks, and Fant took over at left tackle. Because he hadn't followed football, he didn't know the reputations of the players he faced, so he wasn't intimidated. He showed off his speed and power. In a road win over New England, he played almost flawlessly. In other games, though, his performance varied from average to awful.

Things were too new, too fast, too violent. One ranking placed him among the worst 10 offensive linemen in the league. Nonetheless, Cable and Carroll kept him at left tackle.

"Everything says this guy is going to be a starter for seven to 10 years," Kirchner says. "Is his upside All-Pro? I think it could be. People look at him now and say, 'No way.' There are teams that would not pull the trigger and would never play him. That's not us. Now we just have to be patient. He has now played 20 times more snaps than he had in his entire lifetime. And he is doing it in the NFL.

"We have faith in what we put into this."

Ah, Seattle, a team that lives on a certain kind of faith -- the faith that its out-of-the box ways will usually work.

Under Carroll, the Seahawks have turned a Penn State tight end into a starting right tackle (Garry Gilliam) and a North Carolina State defensive lineman into a starting guard (J.R. Sweezy, now in Tampa Bay). The Seahawks have thrown a pass from the 1-yard line in the closing seconds of the Super Bowl, seen it intercepted and are still arguing about it among themselves two years later. In Seattle, very little follows the usual, buttoned-up NFL practices.

Seattle is a team that signed Matt Flynn, a free-agent quarterback, to a $26 million contract, then drafted Wilson weeks later, made him the starter and dumped Flynn to Oakland the next spring.

It is also a team that won the Super Bowl in February 2014 with the league's highest-paid offensive line, then decided to reward its star defenders handsomely, along with Wilson and receivers, but skimp on centers, tackles and guards. After all, there's only so much money to go around, even when Paul Allen is the owner.

But seeing Wilson constantly scramble for his life tends to call Carroll's gamble into question. If Seattle's playoff run is abbreviated because of Fant and his linemates, he'll hear about it.

Fant, right, has shown flashes of speed and power, but as a rule his performances have varied from average to awful. Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports

This year, the outlay for the Seahawks' offensive line is roughly $6 million, lowest in the NFL. By contrast, Dallas will spend about $44 million next season on the beefeaters who open holes for Ezekiel Elliott and keep Dak Prescott from being crushed.

Do you get what you pay for?

Carroll doesn't necessarily think so.

"We've got a young group now, and these guys are going to grow up with us, and we're really excited about that," he says. "It's not about spending money; it's about getting guys in the right spots and doing what you can do."

"We've got a young group now, and these guys are going to grow up with us, and we're really excited about that." Pete Carroll

Carroll can come off as unduly optimistic. A carnival barker. But he wins just about as often as any coach ever has. More often than not, he pushes the right buttons.

That "just be you" talk to Fant at halftime against the Cardinals?

It sank in and became part of a mantra. Fant returned to the field with a different mindset. He wasn't perfect in the second half, but he neutralized Jones. The Seahawks scored 28 points and came close to pulling off a stunning comeback.

The following week, during the regular-season finale against the 49ers, Fant performed nearly as well: no penalties, no major errors, an aggressive, mostly clean game. He often found himself matched against DeForest Buckner, San Francisco's imposing rookie first-round draft pick. Buckner came away with one solo tackle and no sacks.

"Whatever it takes, whatever it takes," Fant keeps telling himself. "Just be you."