'The most pure athlete I've ever seen': The unlikely story of Tennessee's Emmanuel Okoye

The numbers said it all for a relatively unknown prospect. Emmanuel Okoye, the four-star athlete who grew up in Nigeria and played in the NFL Academy in London, posted a 45.5-inch vertical jump with an 11-foot-3 broad jump, all at 6-foot-5, 230 pounds. 

“Emmanuel is one of the most pure athletes I’ve ever seen in my life,” Tennessee redshirt senior tight end Jacob Warren said last week at SEC Media Days in Nashville.

Okoye, who only started playing football in 2021 after being plucked off a basketball court and invited to Osi Umenyior’s ‘The Uprise’, a football talent evaluation camp held in Nigeria, was listed as a tight end on Tennessee’s roster when it was updated earlier this month.

He was initially part of the 2024 recruiting cycle, but reclassified to 2023 and signed with Tennessee in May, ranked No. 258 overall in the On3 rankings and No. 18 overall among athletes.

“Being completely real,” Warren said, “the way (Okoye) runs, the way he jumps, cuts and move, everything about him is super athletic, super twitchy. A guy that hasn’t been playing football for a long time so needs to kind of develop in the way of — in football there’s kind of a different language you talk.

“He doesn’t quite understand maybe yet, but we’re trying to bring him along, teach him that this is exactly what this means. When he does this, you do this. Different things like that that he needs to develop a little bit more for him to be right before you want him.”

“I didn’t really expect to see that he was that fast, that quick, that agile, that fluid, that strong”

Okoye grew up playing soccer and basketball in Nigeria. His first talent evaluation, according to an ESPN report from May, came from a video posted on social media in the summer of 2021, showing Okoye dunking while playing basketball. 

ESPN reported that Olutobi Adepitan, who alongside his brother founded Educational Basketball, one of the top Nigerian programs, was the one who saw Okoye on video. 

“Based on what I saw from the video,” Adepitan told ESPN, “I didn’t really expect to see that he was that fast, that quick, that agile, that fluid, that strong. When he walked in, though, he had a great physique. He was tall and you could see that he was well-built, but it’s another thing to see it all unfold in person.”

Okoye’s recruitment quickly picked up momentum after he went from Umenyiora’s camp to an NFL Africa talent identification camp in Nigeria and then to the NFL Academy in London. The NFL opened the academy in 2019 as an initiative to discover elite talents and create a pathway from overseas to play football in America.

“The Academy is one of the biggest leaps I’ve taken,” Okoye told Volquest in May. “It changed my life as it’s the first place I got to see what football is like. First people I met in a football environment and my first football coaches. It was the best experience and it set me up for the next level. I’m really grateful for them.”

“The spirit that he has from Africa won’t allow him to back down”

During a whirlwind recruitment, Okoye visited Tennessee, Vanderbilt, USC and Texas Tech. His list of offers also included Georgia, Ole Miss and Nebraska, among others.

“I’m a Christian and I’m a great believer in God,” Okoye said after committing to the Vols. “Going into my choice I had to pray to God for him to help me with the right choice. I had peace in my mind choosing Tennessee. That’s one of the biggest. The coaches and system I was around on my visit was really a great one. It helped me feel confident with the environment I had there.”

Umenyiora, the two-time Super Bowl champion with the New York Giants and native of London, told ESPN he knows just how bright the future is for Okoye, based on how far he’s already come.

“He’s going to get (to Tennessee),” he said, “he’s going to see some incredible things, some crazy things and some athletes just like him, but the mentality and the spirit that he has from Africa won’t allow him to back down. It just won’t.

“I don’t really need to say anything. The fact that he’s sitting here, right now, having this conversation, is testament to the mental capacity and the ability as a person and he’s going to be successful without a shadow of a doubt.”