No one questions Slye's leg strength. The 23-year-old can boom it. Accuracy is why he's had such a winding road to the pros. But Slye believes he's learned from that past and issues that began after he teamed with a new long snapper and holder his junior and senior seasons.

"I tried to scoot myself up a little bit so I could be quicker to the ball. But it ended up messing up my form," Slye said. "I was jamming myself up, and that's why a lot of balls missed right. Then when I tried to slide myself back to get my hips through, [the process] would be slow.

"It's like if you're golfing and you're too close to the ball, you jam yourself up and you're going to leave it right. If you pull yourself too far away from the ball and start swinging around your body, you're going to pull it left."

So to correct course, Slye now starts his run-up about a quarter of a yard further than he did in his final seasons at Virginia Tech. It may not sound like much, but it's enough that he can be quick to the ball while also getting his hips through properly.

"It's a combination of confidence, trust in my operation and all the work I put in the past year. It's finally come out," Slye said.

But if you read the stories coming out of Slye's debut in Chicago last month, you know he doesn't believe he's doing this himself. He feels he's alongside his brother, AJ, who passed away in 2014 after a fight with leukemia. Before that, Joey Slye described the two as "best friends" who were bonded by a love of sports.

"We talked about trying to be on ESPN when we were little. Every day we'd wake up and watch ESPN again and again and again," Slye said. "We'd wake up at like 6, leave for school at like 8, so we'd watch two complete run-throughs of the same thing. We'd watch it all the time and we always wanted to get on there.