Back in 2015, Grady Jarrett wasn't the household name he is now. He was an undersized defensive lineman from Clemson. He was productive at the college level, but would that productivity translate to the pros? This was the question surrounding Jarrett at the time.

Undersized and undervalued, Jarrett was a young man who went to the NFL Combine and only had one team – the Cleveland Browns – that wanted to meet with him.

"You had guys who had these long meeting sheets, like 20 or 30 teams, all these teams wanted to talk to them," Jarrett recalled 10 years later. "I didn't."

And yet, he still hoped. Outward expectations fueled that hope, because all the draft experts agreed: There was no way Jarrett would fall past the second round. He'd surely be drafted by the end of the second day.

And yet, he wasn't.

As picks came and went, frustration grew in his heart. With no call from a team, Jarrett began pacing.

When he did, something dark and ominous caught his eye. Elisha saw it, too.

"We saw smoke, black smoke coming from upstairs," she said. "… One of the rooms upstairs was engulfed in flames."

Draft woes forgotten, the Jarretts sprang into survival mode. Friends and family, who filled the house to watch the day's events, needed to evacuate quickly. Sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer with each second. The house emptied, with mother and son the last to leave.

It wasn't easy to take those final steps out of the house, though.

Standing in the garage of her home, Elisha's feet were cemented to the ground. This couldn't be happening, she thought.

"Not today, any day but today," she said audibly, to no one in particular.

Always the protector, Jarrett came to find her.

"He literally picked me up and took me back out," she recalled. "... I'm literally now walking, pacing the property. I'm like, 'My house is on fire.' At the time, I said, 'I've been here 20 years, it's where I raised my children. My house is on fire.' It just became so real."

The fire department doused the flames, and broke the news to the family about the extent of the damage.

"Half the house was completely destroyed," Jarrett said. "And it would have been the whole house had not one single door been closed, because of air flow, according to the firemen on the scene."

Draped in smoke-ridden clothes and shock, the family placed lawn chairs at the property's gated entrance. Who knows how long they sat there, watching as smoke continued to clear, silence ebbing and flowing. All Elisha remembers is when she finally looked at the time, it was 4:30 in the morning. They needed sleep. They needed to recover. And, as the matriarch, Elisha needed to be the light for her son in a dark moment.

He had still yet to be drafted.

Waking up the next morning, Elisha put pen to paper and wrote a note to her son. As the family turned the TV back on to watch the third day of the draft, she slipped the note into his pocket.

"I told him, 'Don't read it yet,'" she said.

The note momentarily forgotten, the draft rolled on.

When the Falcons were on the clock with the No. 107 overall pick in the fourth round, the family held their breath. As time ticked by without a call and Justin Hardy's name was eventually announced as the Falcons' pick, the exhale that left the group was heavy.

It was that moment when Jarrett himself, always put together, always strong, splintered.

"At this point, he was crazy vulnerable because we were all around him," Elisha said. "He is a very private person, especially when he is emotional. But he was literally spread eagle, laid out in the middle of the floor, tears rolling down his eyes. And of course, my heart is breaking."

Feeling the motherly instinct take over to comfort her son, Elisha leaned down to Jarrett's level.

In a soft but strong voice, she made a proclamation.

"Listen, we only need an opportunity," Elisha said to Jarrett. "First round, third round, fifth round, seventh round, no round. We only need an opportunity. Let's not even think about rounds. … You have the heart of the biggest lion. You will be OK."

Of course, she said with a small smile a decade later, "he wasn't trying to hear that at the time."

Though he wasn't wanting to hear those words of encouragement, the words helped heal his resolve nonetheless. Wiping away the tears, Jarrett picked himself up off the floor and walked to the kitchen table.

"He had literally just been drying his eyes when his phone rang," Elisha said.

Elisha knew right away this was the call the family had been waiting for. She knew, because she knows her son. He has a tell, she explained. When he's anxious or in his head about something, he rubs the side of his head. Always has.

From his early years as a toddler, to his adolescent years as a state champion wrestler in Conyers, Georgia, to the man, father and cornerstone of an organization Jarrett has become, it's still his tell.

So, when his hand went up to his head, she knew it was the call. It was then that a different type of silence descended upon the family.

The night before, they sat in the shocked silence of despair, looking helplessly at the burning home in front of them. In the present, silence took hold again as Jarrett reached for his phone. This silence was different than before. This silence was one of anticipation and hope.

Jarrett hung up the phone. And the silence stretched until Jarrett broke it with four words that cemented the next 10 years.

"We're going to Atlanta," he said.

Cheers and gasps erupted around him.

"The reality of saying that we're going to Atlanta hadn't really sunk in," Elisha said of the moment, "but then a few minutes later, it's like, 'Wait. We're staying home.'"

After the assault of congratulatory hugs, Elisha finally made her way over to her son. She asked him to look at the note she wrote him when the day began.

On the note, she'd written a phrase: "Pick 107, Falcons."

Jarrett may have ultimately been selected by the Falcons with their next pick, No. 137 to start the fifth round, but the premise of the note remains the same: There's something to be said about a mother's intuition.

And with Jarrett officially a Falcon, the weekend came to a close.

Looking back, it was a weekend no one saw coming. It was a weekend no one wanted, either. But it was a weekend that set up a restoration, one for a player and a family.

There was work to be done at home.

"To totally get back? It took almost two years," Jarrett said of the aftermath of the fire. "… A lot of the money from my rookie (deal) went to restoring the house."

And there was work to be done on the field.

"The first thing I remember about our young draft pick d-lineman that nobody had these expectations for except for himself," head coach Raheem Morris said, "is I remember thinking, '... I can only imagine what he's going to become.'"

A decade later, the name Grady Jarrett means something in Atlanta.

Through the ashes, a legend arose, which is why Jarrett is at peace with his story's painful start.

"Looking back on it?" he said. "Shoot, I wouldn't change it 10 times over because God restored 20 times over."