Former baby model Ryan Van Demark may land new gig as Buffalo Bills swing tackle

ORCHARD PARK - Most people can instantly recall the first job they held. Maybe it was clerk at a grocery store, food preparer at McDonald's, or painting houses in the summer.

Buffalo Bills offensive tackle Ryan Van Demark has no recollection at all of what he did to earn his first paycheck. Oh, he knows what the job was; he just couldn’t tell you a thing about it.

“Baby model,” Van Demark said the other day with a smile. “My mom took me and my brother into (New York City from their home in Wayne, New Jersey) like every other weekend and then we would do baby model pictures and it was cool. Obviously I don’t remember it, but my mom’s got all the pictures framed from like Ralph Lauren, Toys ‘R Us, all that stuff.”

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Hey, sometimes it really does pay to be a cute little kid.

And sometimes it pays to be blessed with determination and grit which is what Van Demark has needed on his football journey which, at this moment, has him in position to possibly win a backup offensive tackle job on a Super Bowl contender.

“Vandy has really grown in the system and really kind of shown his athletic ability and his ability to kind of play outside there and hold up,” offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey said.

Dorsey said that following the first preseason game against the Colts when Van Demark got playing time at left tackle ahead of veteran David Quessenberry. Since then, things have really gotten interesting because the Bills lost two offensive tackles - Brandon Shell retired and Tommy Doyle blew out his knee in the second preseason game against the Steelers.

Van Demark played 31 snaps in Pittsburgh, graded out very well, and now he might be the frontrunner ahead of Quessenberry and Richard Gouraige to win the swing tackle job.

“It opens up an opportunity for me and an opportunity for some of the other guys here, too,’ Van Demark said. “So just going out and try to be the best version of myself. Really not focusing on all the things that are happening around me and just focusing on myself and what I can do better.”

At Wayne Valley High School, Van Demark was known more for his volleyball prowess as he helped lead the team to the 2016 New Jersey state championship. He was actually leaning toward playing volleyball in college, but as a senior he finally became a full-time starter on the offensive line and that’s when he decided football was going to be his pursuit.

The problem was that no scholarship offers came for a 245-pound offensive lineman, so he made the decision to attend prep school for a year in an effort to bulk up and improve as a player.

He managed to get to 255 pounds and UConn threw him a bone, which was great. What wasn’t great is that UConn was one of the worst college football teams in FBS the entire time Van Demark was there. He played four seasons from 2017-21 (all of 2020 was wiped out by the pandemic) and the Huskies’ record was 7-41 including a pair of 1-11 nightmares.

“It was tough,” he admitted. “You look at the scoreboard after the first quarter and it’s 14 or 21 to zip. When something like that is going on, you really got to focus on ‘am I doing my job? Am I doing my 1/11th?’ and then taking it from there.”

Van Demark admitted that becoming an NFL player was a ridiculous thing to think about early in his UConn days, but as time went on and he was gaining weight and muscle through a specialized nutrition program (he put on about 55 pounds in college to get to 307 where he remains today) he began to realize it was a goal he could attain.

“It’s kind of like that underdog story, no one believing in you and just working and I worked up to a starting role and I ended up starting a lot of games at UConn,” Van Demark said. “In the midst of my junior year I was like, ‘Holy (crap), I can probably do this. I’ve got the size, the height and I can put on the weight. Let’s run with it and let’s go.’ So that’s where it kind of took off for me and my mindset changed.”

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He went undrafted in 2022 but the Colts signed him as a free agent. And then in an interesting twist, Van Demark was cut after training camp, the same time the Bills released their 2022 rookie sixth-round pick, offensive tackle Luke Tenuta. Tenuta ended up signing with the Colts, and Van Demark was signed to the Bills practice squad where he remained all of last year.

Now, Van Demark has a chance to make a career as a professional athlete, just as his father Jeff did in the 1980s as a professional basketball player in Europe.

Jeff Van Demark scored 1,104 points in his career at Lehigh, ranking in the top 30 all-time, then tried out for the NBA’s Washington Bullets in 1980.

“They said, ‘We’ll have a spot for you next year, go to Europe and come back,’” Ryan said. “He went to Europe and never looked back. He loved it.”

Jeff Van Demark played in France, Switzerland, Colombia, and Germany, “Like all over Europe, and he loved it,” Ryan said. “He has great friends from Switzerland that come to visit every year and we hang out with them. It was an awesome experience for him. He always talks about it.”

Which is exactly what Ryan would like to be doing a decade down the road after what he hopes is a successful NFL career.

Sal Maiorana can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @salmaiorana and on Threads @salmaiorana1. To subscribe to Sal's newsletter, Bills Blast, which will come out every Friday during training camp, please follow this link: https://profile.democratandchronicle.com/newsletters/bills-blast

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Former baby model Ryan Van Demark may land gig as Bills swing tackle