RENTON, Wash. -- Western Kentucky basketball coaches started receiving calls inquiring about George Fant in the spring of 2015.

NFL teams wanted to know more about Fant, the Hilltoppers' power forward who was coming off a senior season in which he averaged 13.8 points and 8.4 rebounds per game.

"A couple teams had contacted my coaches, and I threw [their numbers] away," Fant said. "I was like, 'I'm playing basketball. I ain't playing no football.'"

After resisting at first, Fant talked to some of his friends on the football team and decided to give it a shot even though he had not played the sport since junior high.

Roughly a year later, he's the starting left tackle for the Seattle Seahawks.

"We knew a coach on the staff who vouched for him and that kind of stuff," Pete Carroll said. "It was kind of a shot in the dark, to tell you the truth, but there was enough there because other people were interested in him, too. We were very fortunate to get him."

Fant stayed at Western Kentucky for a fifth year and joined the football team for the fall of 2015. In previous years, coaches such as Bobby Petrino had tried to get him to play, but he wasn't interested. He saw himself as a 6-foot-6 power forward, not a football player.

After Fant's basketball eligibility was over, though, he weighed his options. He could try playing hoops professionally overseas or give football a real shot.

"People were making fun of me because I didn't play," Fant said of his one year playing football. "But the whole time I was just watching and learning everything, every position -- offense, defense. I played like four or five different positions at Western, so I was just watching and learning everything."

The Seahawks pride themselves on searching far and wide for talent. Assistant head coach/offensive line coach Tom Cable credited co-director of player personnel Trent Kirchner for identifying Fant as a project with upside.

But this was a unique situation. Fant had pretty much no tape except for his workouts. He weighed 275 pounds at the end of his only football season and used a heavy diet of Cincinnati's Skyline Chili to add 20 more pounds before his pro day.

Fant signed with the Seahawks as an undrafted free agent in the spring and made the 53-man roster out of training camp.

When left tackle Bradley Sowell went down with a knee injury in Week 6, Fant got his chance. He has started the past three games, and even though Sowell is now healthy, Cable said Wednesday that Fant is staying put. Sowell and Garry Gilliam will compete for the starting right tackle job.

Fant, who says he now weighs 305 pounds, has made plenty of mistakes, but he has not been a liability. Because of his upside, the coaches are comfortable allowing him to learn on the fly with hopes that he'll be playing at a high level down the stretch.

"He'll ask questions every single day to his coaches, to his teammates, trying to learn and trying to grow that way," Cable said. "Very diligent in his work, and it's paying off."

Carroll said that Fant made it through the entire game last Sunday against the New England Patriots without a missed assignment. There were errors in technique and execution, for sure, but the fact that Fant seems to be grasping the mental aspect of the position has the coaches encouraged. And because he has pretty much zero experience, Fant doesn't have bad habits he's trying to break.

"It's difficult, but I think it's great," Cable said. "For him, it's a failure, and then you learn so much. His learning is different form a guy like Germain [Ifedi]. Germain has some background and can see it, and once you break it down for him, he'll fix it. This guy [Fant], it takes a couple times, and then once he gets it, he's got it, and once he's got it, he owns it. I think that's the beauty of having a guy with no bad habits."

Fant said the basketball background has helped him.

"If I'm playing defense, you've got to counter to their counter," he said. "The spin move, I move with it. Just things like that."

During the pre-draft process, Cable watched Fant's basketball tape. He looked at how Fant competed for rebounds and seemed to like contact.

"Trent brings a name to you, he's really good at what he does, and so you pay attention to that, and you start digging in," Cable said. "Those things carry over to football. It's just a different sport."

There's a long way to go, but in a league where so many teams are looking for offensive tackle help, Seattle believes it might have something in Fant.

And what the coaches continue to harp on is his willingness to learn and his ability to fix mistakes. Cable said it took him only three or four practices to know that Fant had the right mental makeup.

"You know, this is a hard game," Cable said. "You're going to have failures right away, especially when you have a limited background. Can you handle those struggles? Can you recover? Then at the end of the day, is he really athletic enough and strong enough? Is there enough of his makeup that he can keep coming back, wanting to get better?

"If he can do that, [he's] got a chance."