The first ever College Football Playoff game made a dreamer out of Thomas Odukoya. Now, the Eastern Michigan tight end is on the verge of turning his fantasy into reality.
A budding football star at the time, the 17-year-old Odukoya watched Oregon beat Florida State in the 2015 Rose Bowl with five of his buddies on an illegal stream at his home in Almere, Netherlands.
The friends, all players on the Flevo Phantoms, a club football team just outside Amsterdam, gathered around the TV in Odukoya’s living room, marveling at the pageantry and level of play.
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Oregon, led by Marcus Mariota, trounced Jameis Winston and undefeated Florida State, and Odukoya, a defensive end for the Phantoms, remembers going especially wild over one play.
Winston lost a fumble as he tried to scramble away from a third-quarter sack, and as Oregon’s Tony Washington returned it for a touchdown, Odukoya told his friends: I want to do that.
“That’s why I definitely don’t take this whole journey that I got for granted,” Odukoya told the Free Press on Saturday. “All those guys obviously dreamt of playing college football and playing in the NFL, all the guys that I grew up playing with. Everybody wants to be in a stadium filled with thousands of people instead of a small, grass field in the Netherlands. Not everybody got that opportunity, unfortunately, but we were all talking about, like, ‘Man, wouldn’t that be dope if we got there,’ and this and that, play for Oregon, which was like a dream school at the time obviously with their jerseys and stuff like that.
“A year later, I made that opportunity for myself to come over here.”
Odukoya spent a year scrounging around for college football opportunities. He put together a YouTube video of his highlights, joined a Facebook group dedicated to helping international players land college scholarships, and after learning he had to go the junior college route because he did not take the ACT or SAT tests, secured a spot at West Hills College in Coalinga, California, with the help of another Netherlands native who had played at the school.
Coaches at West Hills converted Odukoya to tight end on his first day of practice, and after a standout season at West Hills, an injury-shortened one at Garden City Community College and four years at Eastern Michigan, Odukoya will join more than a dozen other expected prospects Monday at the Detroit Lions’ local day workout.
Odukoya said he has talked to Lions scouts several times over the past 12 months, when they visited EMU last season, at the Hula Bowl college all-star game, and at his Eastern Michigan pro day and one held for international prospects at Arizona State last month.
On Monday, he will take part in field work and position meetings. He said he’s looking forward to meeting Lions coach Dan Campbell. Potential first-round picks Aidan Hutchinson and Dax Hill of Michigan and Ahmad Gardner of Cincinnati are among others scheduled for local day visits.
“I forgot what he said in that first press conference about kneecaps, but I definitely see myself as a kneecap guy, too, how I play the game and how I approach the game,” Odukoya said. “So I’m excited for Monday. It’s another great opportunity to show my skill set.”
A late-round or priority free agent draft prospect, Odukoya never played football and never saw it on TV except for “once or twice on a TV show or in a movie” until a high school friend convinced him to attend a Phantoms practice as a 16-year-old.
A youth soccer player who gave up the sport before high school, Odukoya said he fell immediately in love with football because of the physical nature of the game.
“Just like the sheer violence of the game and just the physicality of it, really, that’s something that really resonating with me and I really enjoyed playing it,” Odukoya said. “Running down on kickoff and blowing somebody up, that just got me so hyped.”
Odukoya played three seasons of nine-on-nine football in two years with the Phantoms, primarily as a defensive end and offensive lineman. (Teams use three linemen in the nine-on-nine game.)
He enjoyed football so much that he sometimes watched college games on his laptop in the back of his high school classrooms, but he had no illusions about the level of competition he faced while playing in a league where opponents sometimes forfeited games in the second half because of injuries.
“When I went to junior college, I didn’t really know exactly what was going to happen,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was going to be good enough, if I was going to make it. Maybe after two weeks I would have been like, ‘This is not for me. Mom, book me the first flight back home, please.’ Or maybe after a semester, or maybe after two years at a junior college, I wouldn’t get recruited. At the time, I didn’t really know.”
Odukoya left West Hills after an all-conference season and a change in coaching staffs, then broke his foot in his second game at Garden City.
That made for a trying fall of 2017 — “I’m in the middle of Kansas in a super small town, I can’t play football, the one thing I love so much that I came here for, so now I’m just rehabbing, just waiting, hoping that I still get a D-I opportunity and that definitely tests your mental toughness and tests how much you love the game, facing that adversity,” he said — but Odukoya never considered returning home.
He signed with EMU in 2018, started four games at tight end that season, and has progressed steadily as a player since.
After 21 catches in four seasons at EMU, Odukoya said NFL scouts have told him he has shown better receiving skills than they expected this spring.
Ultimately, his blocking and special teams ability could give him a chance to make an NFL roster, in which case Odukoya will be one step closer to living out his dream.
“To be in this spot right now with this opportunity in front of me, it’s been nothing short of amazing,” he said. “It’s definitely been a crazy ride. It’s had its ups and downs, but if you would have asked me this five years ago I would have probably told you, ‘No,’ like, ‘No way.’ Or six years ago when I started. But here I am and just making the most of the opportunity that I have.”
Local day participants
Here is a partial list of prospects expected to take part in Lions local day:
Aidan Hutchinson, Michigan; Ahmad Gardner, Cincinnati; Dax Hill, Michigan; Andrew Steuber, Michigan; Hassan Haskins, Michigan; Brad Hawkins, Michigan; Chris Hinton, Michigan; Chad Gailliard, Saginaw Valley State; Zein Obeid, Ferris State; Thomas Odukoya, Eastern Michigan; A.J. Thomas, Western Michigan; JT Tyler, Princeton; Jake Julien, Eastern Michigan (will visit Wednesday).
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.