One of the best days in Jeremiah Oatsvall's football career came when he learned why Power Five colleges were not interested in him as a college quarterback.
Up until then nothing made sense.
Oatsvall was a record-setting, duel-threat quarterback who amassed an astonishing 8,756 total yards and scored 56 touchdowns while leading Brentwood Academy to two state championship titles in the state's toughest classification. But for some reason none of the big-time college recruiters, who were blowing up some of this teammate's phones, were calling Oatsvall.
Finally, while he was at a University of Tennessee football camp, Oatsvall's father Scott pulled a coach aside and asked why his son, a two-time Mr. Football semifinalist, wasn't being recruited.—
The answer was simple. At barely a generous 6-foot-1, Jeremiah lacked the height most Power Five programs look for in a quarterback.
Rather than becoming bitter or dejected by this news, Jeremiah breathed a sigh of relief. At least now he knew.
There wasn't anything Oatsvall could do to make himself taller but he could prove he wasn't short on desire or determination. And that's what he did going on to enjoy the same type of success at smaller schools like Austin Peay and Tennessee Tech that he had in high school.
"I'm not going to lie about my recruiting; you're seeing some skill position players you played with and a lot of the guys up front getting some bigger looks," Jeremiah said. "And you think, 'Is it me? Am I missing something, is there something I'm not doing?' Then that coach told my dad if I was 6-3 or 6-4 I'd be able to go anywhere I wanted and at that point I knew it was something I couldn't control.
"All I could do was control my effort and my attitude and have the best career possible."
Having that perspective allowed Jeremiah to reinvent himself throughout his college career and has even kept him in football today. He was hired recently as the offensive coordinator at Lawson High School, which opens in the fall in Bellevue.
Jeremiah could have gone to a bigger school if he had been willing to change positions. Vanderbilt wanted him to play safety and Ole Miss wanted him to play a different skill position.
But Jeremiah refused to give up his dream of being a college quarterback and went to Austin Peay, which as he puts it, "was the laughing stock of football at the time."
After becoming the starting quarterback as a freshman, Jeremiah led the Governors, who were coming off 29 straight losses, to an 8-4 record. He was the Ohio Valley Conference freshman of the year and made the all-conference second team after throwing for 1,148 yards and seven touchdowns and rushing for a 453 yards and six touchdowns.
"Somebody asked me during my recruiting process would you rather go to a big-time school and be a small fish in a big pond or would you want to go and change a program and big a big fish in a small pond," Oatsvall said. "That always stuck with me and I was like, 'I want to go somewhere where I can really make an impact.'"
After suffering a foot injury in 2019 Oatsvall transferred to Memphis, where he never got on the field, for one season before finishing his career at Tennessee Tech last fall.
He took over immediately as the starter as a graduate student and finished fourth in the OVC in total yards with 2,935 (2,271 passing, 431 rushing) after helping the Golden Eagles overcome a slow start and win three of their last four games.
Today the once-frustrated quarterback is fulfilled with his past and eagerly looking forward to his future.
Oatsvall won't have to worry about making any changes at Lawson where he will be under coach Brian Lilly, who was the defensive coordinator at Brentwood Academy when Oatsvall was there. He will start with a clean slate for a program that inherits the Hillwood football team that is transitioning to the new James Lawson High School set to open for the 2023-24 school year.
"Coach Lilly called me after he got the job and said, 'This is an offense you're going to be able to put you're own stamp on. This is going to be all you,'" Oatsvall said. "I'll go in and see what type of players we have, what their strengths are, and then mold the offense around them. The good thing about me being in so many different systems is that I have a lot of knowledge and can make that type of adjustment instead of trying to make the players fit into one style of play."
