It was the spring of 2010 and Jeremiah George was sprinting to the bathroom.

He was at Florida State’s Seminole Showcase football camp in Tallahassee, Fla., doing what he could to get recognized by the Florida State coaches and earn himself a scholarship.

It was mid-sprint that he saw one of his idols, Derrick Brooks.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance and George took advantage of it, taking a minute to pick his brain.

George had grown to be a fan of the former Buccaneers linebacker and 2014 Hall of Fame candidate. He and Brooks are similar in that they both faced questions about their size as linebackers. The average size of a linebacker at the 2013 NFL combine was six-foot-2 and 235 pounds. George only stands in the middle of the Cyclones’ defense at 5’11, weighing in at 219 pounds.

Brooks didn’t break six-foot either, weighing in at 236 pounds and played on the outside linebacker in the famous Tampa-2 defensive scheme back when Tony Dungy coached the team.

George was in love with being a linebacker and had his mind set to that, but the Florida State staff had wanted to him to see what he could do as a safety, a position that perhaps fitted his size and explosiveness better.

That’s where the talk with Brooks came in.

“He told me to go with my heart and play whatever position I truly felt in love with, which was linebacker,” George said.

Florida State had exhausted all of its available scholarships for that year and had to break the news to George that he would not end up as a Seminole after all.

It was Mickey Andrews, Bobby Bowden’s longtime defensive coordinator and associate head coach that turned George over to none other than Iowa State’s defensive coordinator Wally Burnham.

“He was too small,” Burnham said as to why Florida State passed on George. “And at that time he was maybe 195 pounds. I knew he was a hard-hitting and aggressive, physical kid, but they felt if they tried to play him at safety he wouldn’t have those abilities so he was a tweener for those guys.

“We had to take a chance on a smaller linebacker.”

And so Iowa State did. Burnham’s son, Shane Burnham who is now the team’s defensive tackles coach came to visit Jeremiah at spring practice. He took a picture with George to get an idea of his size and then a few weeks later George was offered a scholarship to come play for the cardinal and gold.

———–

Two years had passed since George had stepped foot on the ISU campus and something wasn’t right.

Through two years he had only seen the field mostly for special teams situations. Not much more than a wedge-breaker with only two years of eligibility left. It wasn’t clicking.

“It wasn’t important to me,” George said. “It wasn’t important enough to make it my life.”

His head coach echoed George’s opinion of his first two years. It wasn’t what he needed to see for George to keep progressing.

“For two years, he was playing a lot of bad football,” said ISU head coach Paul Rhoads.

Then it was the spring after George’s sophomore year and he had heard a rumor regarding the linebacking core for Iowa State — a JUCO recruit was going to be brought in to fill the open spot next to Jake Knott and A.J. Klein in the ISU linebacking corps.

So George did what had to be done, he shifted his focus. When he got to campus as a 195-pound, undersized linebacker, it was all about getting bigger.

Now it needed to be about getting smarter.

“The weight would come, but I needed to understand the scheme,” George said. “Why we do this in certain defensive packages so I made it my mission to try to understand. That sophomore spring it started to happen. I could see myself making certain plays that I used to not be able to make in the past because I wasn’t having to use my athletic ability because I was using my knowledge of the game.”

And so George continued to focus for hours at a time in the film room, pleading with his fellow linebackers Knott and Klein for help. The two All-Big 12 linebackers critiqued and taught George what they knew.

“Just having them, I used to tell them they were like tutors for me because they’d say ‘OK right here you’re steps are pretty good, but imagine if you stepped here,’” George said. “’You’re already fast enough to get there, but you don’t have to be that fast if you do it right.’”

George was already up to his boa constrictor-like neck in the weight room aspect of being a Division I football player. And it was in the spring before his junior year he started to put it together. It didn’t go unnoticed by his head coach, either.

“You’ve got to commit to the strength piece of it, you’ve got to commit to the learning piece of it and the physical part of the game,” Rhoads said. “He made the biggest improvement in the mental part of it and the understanding.”

George started that season in the middle between the two All-Big 12 linebackers and was a pivotal part of a defense that finished No. 3 in the Big 12 in scoring defense and started midway through the season for Jake Knott, who was lost for the rest of the season due to a shoulder injury.

It had all started to click.

———

When George was four years old, he and his dad Ike George Sr. moved away from his biological mother, whom George hasn’t talked to since a random text message his freshman year.

And that’s when he met Shannon Sebek, who George’s dad dated and later had a child with before splitting up when George was nine years old.

Sebek has zero biological relation, but without hesitation George calls her his mom and best friend.

George left his dad’s house because of the butting heads that took place and moving in with Sebek was one of the best things for him. Truly a mom for George, she did everything a mom is supposed to do for her high school son.

“Life was just school and football,” George said. “She didn’t like if I came home with a bad grade so she’d get on me about it and take football away. I struggled with it, but I shifted attention away to where I was balancing it out.”

George has leaned on Sebek since he can remember. Every high school football game, Sebek was there in the stands. And it holds true today. She’s been to every game she could possibly make it to, even during George’s underclassmen years when the only time he saw the field was on special teams.

And now this year as the starting middle linebacker, leading the Big 12 in tackles by a landslide, Shannon — and sometimes the rest of George’s family — is still sitting in the same spot, making it to every game possible. The rock for George to look to in the stands when he needs it.

So what exactly drives Jeremiah George?

“My family,” George laughed. “Especially my mom. She’s been up here so much. I realized it a little bit last year, but looking back I look at my freshman year and I see that I was sitting on the bench and I was doing kickoff and a little bit of kickoff return, and they were at every single game they could make it to.

“Here now I’m starting and I’m out there and I’m starting and I’m making an impact, and they’re still there in the same position, cheering for me and being there for me. Knowing that they’re there when times get really tough for me, it really means so much to me.”

Sebek is on the same page, gushing over how proud she is and how much she loves her son, George.

“He loves the game, he always has,” Sebek said. “There were so many people that said what he couldn’t do or why he couldn’t do it, but I feel like he personally wants to show everyone that he can do it, he will do it.

“He says he does it for us and he wants to make us proud, but he already has so anything else is a bonus at this point.”