ANN ARBOR -- Graham Glasgow is sitting on his couch telling me about his secret double life. While playing 2,472 of the Detroit Lions’ last 2,473 offensive snaps, he’s managed to find the time to enroll in an online MBA program through Indiana University.

Why is an NFL starter who has already banked more than $3 million in career earnings, will make another $2.025 million this year and is due for a raise when his rookie contract expires after the season -- why is that guy enrolled in an online MBA program?

“My mom is making me,” he quips.

Sounds good. Only problem: First, he had to turn on his computer.

“I didn’t even have Word downloaded,” Glasgow said. "I hadn’t opened my computer in two-and-a-half years. It was running on, like, the oldest iOS. I don’t even remember what it was. We had to call Apple to figure out what it was.

“Basically, they were like, ‘Sir, you are five major updates behind. We’re surprised your computer turned on.’”

I’m scared to ask, but any reporter worth his salt can’t be afraid to pose the tough questions.

How’s your typing?

The answer is more frightening than anyone could have imagined. Glasgow has somehow learned to type with one hand, but still hunts and pecks with the other.

“Oh, that’s what you call it?" he says. "I just call it search and destroy.”

This is Graham Glasgow, the Lions’ off-beat, do-everything, expertly mustachioed offensive lineman. Since joining Detroit as a third-round pick in 2016, Glasgow has started more games than any other offensive lineman for this team, and done it while playing multiple positions. He beat out a first-round pick for the left guard job as a rookie, then became a full-time center last year before moving to right guard this offseason.

Then when Frank Ragnow sprained his ankle in the third week of preseason, Glasgow slid back to center seamlessly. He could start at either position when Detroit opens the season on Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals (4:25 p.m., Fox).

“He’s as tough as a $2 steak,” says his old college coach, Jim Harbaugh. “So it really doesn’t surprise me.”

There might not be a better metaphor for Glasgow, who has eschewed the lifestyle of the rich and the famous. While many NFL players are rolling in luxury cars, Glasgow drove a 2012 Honda Pilot that he borrowed from his mother for years. He finally broke down and bought a new one this year when the Pilot was stolen and later T-boned in an accident.

While some NFL players are living in big fancy houses, Glasgow is still kicking it in a three-bedroom condo back in his college town with his fiancee, Ally, and their dog Gordy. It’s nice, too. The brick exterior is a great touch. The trees keep it quiet. It’s green and there are gardens and everything. The living room has almost nothing on the walls. The lighting is terrible. He’s turned the downstairs bedroom into a sort of man cave, with two TVs mounted on one wall and a bunch of stylized movie posters on the other. “Shawshank Redemption,” “Gladiator,” “Django Unchained,” “The Goonies,” “Superbad,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Wolf of Wall Street." You know, the usuals.

It’s nice. Just maybe not the opulence one might expect from a fourth-year NFL starter.

“I like to joke that I’m a Kirkland-brand athlete,” Glasgow says. "We did actually reach out to them for a sponsorship. They said they’d give us, like, $200. I was like, ‘I don’t think that that’s worth it.’ Like, what would that do? Cover a membership and $40 worth of fettuccine alfredo?”

He did try renting a house in Birmingham once, a posh suburb about a half-hour north of Detroit. Of course, Graham Glasgow being Graham Glasgow, he also enlisted two roommates to help defray the costs: Taylor Decker and Joe Dahl, the other offensive linemen who joined him in Detroit’s 2016 draft class.

“We lived in a tiny little turtle house,” Glasgow says. “It looked like a turtle. And the rent there was, like, $5,000 a month for a three-bedroom."

Glasgow, Decker and Dahl used to carpool to work as rookies. It was quite the sight, seeing 938 pounds of offensive lineman -- and three-fifths of this year’s projected starting lineup -- pull into a parking lot full of luxury cars in a Pilot that Glasgow borrowed from his mother.

“We’d be leaving the facility after practice or whatever, and I remember seeing them in that thing,” quarterback Matthew Stafford says. “I think that tells you all you need to know.”

The commute lasted one year. Then Glasgow grew tired of Birmingham and moved back to Ann Arbor.

“It was a little too chichi for Graham,” Ally says with a laugh.

Ally appears to be very much cut from the same acerbic cloth. She’s working from across the living room of their condo, pausing for occasional breaks to bust Glasgow’s chops. She tells a great story about the time he came home and said he had a surprise for her.

Big jewelry? Expensive clothing? A trip to some far-flung island?

Then Graham holds it up: A poncho made out of a sleeping bag.

“She’s always cold, and she’s always sitting down at the computer," Glasgow says matter-of-factly. "So I was like, it won’t get in the way of her typing, you know? And it’s made of sleeping bag. Sleeping bags are always so warm.”

Glasgow is about as throwback as they come, right down to the mustache that looks like it time traveled from the ’80s. He just doesn’t need much. And that’s a big reason why he’s still here, still living the simple life in the shadow of the Big House, even as his import to the Detroit Lions grows.

He’s come a long way since he first arrived in Ann Arbor in 2011 as a zero-star recruit out of Aurora, Ill. He didn’t even have a recruiting page until after his senior season. And he gets it, too. He played his high school ball at an all-boys military academy called Marmion Academy. He was still playing left tackle out of a right tackle’s stance as late as his junior year. So, yeah. He gets it.

Lions offensive lineman Graham Glasgow, pictured while at the University of Michigan.

We’re walking toward Schembechler Hall now. It’s one of the most hallowed halls in football, producing 129 NFL draft picks since it opened its doors in 1990. Glasgow is telling me how a no-star recruit winds up at a place like this at all. He actually planned to walk on at Ohio State because he loved Jim Tressel, but then Tressel was forced to resign about two weeks before he left for campus. Glasgow’s father made a call to an operations guy at Michigan asking whether his son could enroll late and try out as a walk on.

Three weeks later, Glasgow moved to Ann Arbor. He didn’t know the players, he didn’t know the coaches. He didn’t know he was in for one of the longest, hardest years of his life.

“I like to say I paid a lot of money to come here and get my ass beat every day,” Glasgow says. "Jerry Montgomery, who was the D-line coach back then, he wouldn’t even call me by my name. He would just call me by the number I had to wear that week. He told me my name was earned. He would call all the other offensive linemen by their names because they were scholarship guys, but I was just a number.”

Glasgow was beat up bad that year. He was listed as the backup to Taylor Lewan at left tackle, but says he was the last guy coaches would put into a game. Al Borges, the offensive coordinator back then, once told him in a meeting in his office that he thought Glasgow would never play a down at Michigan.

He says he’s convinced coaches would tip the defense to what plays were coming.

“It felt like you were being led to a slaughter,” Glasgow said. “It felt like you were a wooden beam just going through a buzz saw. The majority of the guys on that defensive line were fourth- and fifth-year seniors. I remember one time I was supposed to kick out Craig Roh on a trap play or something. I pull, and was running down the line, and he knew it was coming. He put his foot in the ground, put his helmet right in my sternum, and I lost my breath for like 2 minutes. I could not breathe.

"I thought I broke my sternum on the scout team. I was like, ‘I’m going to die, right here.’”

Glasgow eventually hurt his knee in a practice that year, underwent surgery for a torn meniscus -- his father performed the procedure -- and spent most of 2012 rehabbing. With a star-studded recruiting class arriving that year on the offensive line -- guys like Kyle Kalis and Erik Magnuson were both top-10 at their position according to 247Sports -- Glasgow slipped even further on the depth chart.

His brother, Ryan, walked onto the team that year. Ryan was a defensive tackle, and coaches loved to pit the walk-on brothers against each other in practice.

“It was really like just a battle of two guys who really sucked,” Graham said. “But we were brothers, so it didn’t really matter what we were doing. It was just like, ‘All right, let’s let them go one-on-one. These kids suck, but they’re brothers.’ We were both just so bad with our hands, and that’s something I still struggle with to this day. So we would end up just head butting the (crap) out of each other.”

Former Michigan coach Brady Hoke said he always liked Glasgow’s toughness and IQ, but never really thought he had a future on the field until he saw some of those brotherly blood baths in practice. He saw uncommon toughness, a guy who wouldn’t quit despite going up against scholarship players three and four years older than him.

A year later, now a redshirt sophomore, Glasgow started every game in 2013 -- nine times at center and another four times at left guard. The walk-on’s future looked bright. And then there was the arrest.

The police report isn’t pretty. It was St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 2014. Glasgow, then 21, was driving a white Chevrolet Suburban down State Street in Ann Arbor. There was a volleyball player sitting on someone’s lap in the passenger seat, hanging out the window yelling at people as they cruised by campus. There were another five people in the back seat, more in the third row, and two others who were hiding under the seats in the back.

The rear tailgate was down, and stuff was rolling out the back of the car as they drove past a police officer named Pat Maguire. They were pulled over. The car reeked of booze. Glasgow told Maguire he’d had five “Natty Lights” -- collegespeak for Natural Light beer -- and was issued a breathalyzer. He blew a .11 and was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was taken to the police station, where he blew a .13.

The Lions selected Graham Glasgow in the third round of the 2016 draft. He's only missed one snap the last two seasons.

We’re standing at the spot where Glasgow was pulled over, on William Street between State and Maynard. He turns around and points to where he was going -- New York Pizza Department. It’s just a few yards away.

“I have just the best luck,” Glasgow says.

Glasgow was sentenced to probation, and Hoke suspended him for the season opener.

“It was a wake-up call,” Hoke said. “It was a, what-do-we-do-now?”

That’s exactly how Glasgow took it. He’d always been good in school and his football career was on the rise, but he never took anything that seriously. Faced with the prospects of losing it all, it was indeed a wake-up call. He played better than ever that following season, in 2014, and for the first time Hoke saw a player who had real NFL potential.

Glasgow says he didn’t have a drop of alcohol -- until the following St. Patrick’s Day weekend. There was a party, and he slipped up. He had a few. He says he just got caught up in the moment, and woke up overcome with regret.

Since he was still on probation, he had to log into the justice department’s online portal to see if he was up for a random test that morning. Everyone in the system was assigned a color. You see your color, you drop.

Glasgow was praying he didn’t see aqua.

It was aqua.

“I thought that was it," Glasgow said. “I thought I was going to go to jail. I really did. I did not think I was coming home."

Glasgow woke up a roommate and told him to go to the police station in case he needed to be bailed out. He went to the justice department for his test and admitted he had been drinking. He blew a .086.

He managed to avoid prison time, instead facing more probation, alcohol counseling, random tests and mandated attendance at a MADD impact victim panel. Of course, he also had to deal with Jim Harbaugh.

Harbaugh had just been hired to replace Hoke at Michigan a few months before the incident. He didn’t even know Glasgow was on probation until he was notified of the violation. Now he had to figure out what to do with his most promising offensive lineman, whose career was on the brink.

“My first reaction was, this guy’s not going to be around,” Harbaugh said. “He’s going to be gone. If this guy violates it another time, he’s going to jail. I remember having the conversation with him. I remember telling him, ‘There’s nothing I can do to you that’s going to be bigger than that. Either you’re going to quit the juvenile logic and childish behavior and do right, or you’re going to jail.’ That’s pretty much the landscape as I saw it.”

Harbaugh and Glasgow’s father came up with a novel idea. They had Glasgow’s grandmother, Carmella, move in with him to keep him out of trouble.

Detroit Lions offensive lineman Graham Glasgow orders lunch while at Neopapalis, his favorite restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor, on Friday, June 7, 2019. (Mike Mulholland | MLive.com)

They rented an apartment about a block from where Glasgow was arrested. We’re in that building now, eating lunch downstairs in a pizza and sandwich shop called NeoPapalis. Glasgow is a regular here. He normally goes off-menu for a sandwich that features a pound of rosemary chicken. Today, he opts for pizza.

“I try to keep it tight,” he says. “That’s why instead of ordering a sandwich and a pizza, I just order the contents of a sandwich on top of a pizza.”

We talk about what it was like for the best offensive lineman on a Michigan team with title aspirations to go from living with five guys in a college house to shacking up with his 81-year-old grandmother. It involved a lot of church and reality TV.

“We only had one TV, so I watched a lot of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ that year," Glasgow said. "It was the season Rumer Willis won. Really captivating stuff.”

Glasgow is full of wit and charm, and you’re never far from a joke with him. But on his brushes with the law, he grows serious. He admits he was already starting to grow tired of the partying in college anyway. He wanted more purpose in his life, and knew he was one strike from getting the boot. He was really understanding how much he wanted to play football, and the stain it would be for him and his family if he were kicked out.

Looking back on it, Glasgow knows he made mistakes but is also happy they happened because it forced him to straighten out his life.

“I came here just wanting to earn a scholarship,” Glasgow said. “That’s all it was in the beginning. The NFL wasn’t even a possibility for me, in my head anyway. But then once I played in my third year, my roommate at the time was like, ‘Dude, you played really good last year. You could go to the NFL.’ I was like, ‘No way, dude.’ But him just mentioning it, I started thinking about it, and then after my fourth year especially. Then I got in trouble with probation, and now I have character issues up the ass. You wouldn’t assume that if you talked to me, but on paper it looked really bad.

“I’ve actually seen that police officer. I don’t have a grudge against that guy or anything. Officer Maguire is fine in my book. Whenever I saw him out after that or whatever, basically he’s like, ‘I was only doing my job,’ and I just told him I understand. I get it. I don’t take it personally. At first I wasn’t too happy, but I totally get it. I don’t blame anyone else or anything else for anything. I feel like that’s a bad way to learn from your mistakes, is to blame other people for them."

After this story ran, Officer Maguire tweeted: “Of all the students and student-athletes I’ve met in Ann Arbor, (Glasgow) was always one of the nicest and most down to earth whenever I bumped into him. He’s probably not my biggest fan, but it’s great to see how successful he’s been.”

Now look at him. The freshman walk-on who once paid a lot of money to get his ass beat is now one of the most bankable offensive linemen in Detroit. His playing style mirrors his personality -- not flashy whatsoever. But he’s a rock, missing just one snap the last two years combined. For an offensive line that has dealt with injuries at every other position since 2016, his reliability stands out. His availability and versatility to play across the interior has helped hold that thing together. Now with Ragnow overcoming an ankle injury heading into Sunday’s opener, Glasgow continues to be an indispensable chess piece up front.

We take a drive. He grips the steering wheel with his big, meaty hands. I notice some of his fingers are crooked. He says he dislocated one in the “trouble with the snap” game against Michigan State. (“That was a sad day, but whatever.”) He dislocated another about 2 minutes before a kickoff against Rutgers. (He played anyway.) He dislocated yet another in a pre-draft workout with the Ravens, then popped it back into place and finished the workout. (“I was like, ‘I’ll keep going if you want me to. I just need to tape it.’”) One of his thumbs pops out of place almost every day.

He talks about the turf toe he suffered in the third preseason game of his rookie year. That, he says, is the most pain he’s ever experienced on a football field. Then that pain was compounded when he sprained his ankle in a Week 11 game against Jacksonville.

The following week, he split time with first-round pick Laken Tomlinson at left guard against Minnesota. The week after that, he played every snap against New Orleans. And he’s still missed just one snap since.

“If I can move," he said, "I’m going to play.”

We’re outside the Big House now. We’re on top of a hill, the Ann Arbor skyline at our feet. Glasgow can see his old dorm in South Quad from here. He can see the building where he lived with his grandmother. He can see Schembechler Hall. He points to an old college house. He tells the story about riding to Benny’s Diner with All-American Taylor Lewan on a tandem bicycle. Or as they called it, a “twosie.”

There are almost a decade of memories on that horizon. He’s been coming to this spot for years. He took Ally here on some of their first dates, and took her here again when he wanted to propose last year. Gordy came too. They got coffee and Glasgow was nervous. At last, he popped the question.

“Well hey, you know what? Will you marry me?'” he said.

“Well, yes,” she replied. “And by the way, I could see the ring in your pocket.”

Just another day in the life of Graham Glasgow.