Charlotte 49ers’ NFL prospect played for 5 college teams — and for his late grandmother

There was a flashpoint, sometime during his lone season at the University of Tennessee at Martin in the middle of his tumultuous football career, when everything changed for Eyabi Okie.

And it was his grandmother who drove that change.

It was 2021, and Okie wasn’t on pace to graduate. The standout defensive end, who’d later set records for the Charlotte 49ers in 2023, was “taking too much time, dragging my feet.” That year, his grandmother, Grace Beason, became ill. The two were quite close. She helped raise him. She unconditionally “believed in him,” he said, and seeing her sick was difficult for him.

“It does a lot to you,” said Okie, who previously went by Okie-Anoma. He added about his grandmother’s illness, “You can either cry in a hole, or you can say, ‘This is the only time I have left with you. Let me give you what you want.’

“She wanted me to graduate. And that’s why I took 30 credits in three months and graduated.”

Okie said she died the day after he earned his degree in interdisciplinary studies in 2022.

“But it was really sweet,” he said, “because I know I gave her what she wanted.”

It’s easy to draw conclusions about Okie, who told this story in the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on Wednesday during the 2024 NFL Scouting Combine.

Enrolling in five schools in five years in college would do that.

After a stalwart career at St. Frances, a football prep school of national acclaim orchestrated by current Charlotte 49ers coach Biff Poggi, Okie embarked on what would be a tumultuous college experience. He began his career at Alabama. Then after an SEC All-Freshman selection in 2018, he didn’t play the next year, reports saying he was kicked off the team for “a university-level issue.”

He transferred to Houston in 2020, a redshirt season that saw him dismissed before he could take the field. He transferred again to UT Martin in 2021. In 2022, he reconnected with Poggi when he moved to Michigan and then followed the coach again when he arrived in Charlotte — where he’d go on to lead the team in sacks and tackles for loss in 2023.

And while he wore a jersey for all those teams, all those coaches, he played for his grandmother, he said.

He’ll do so, too, when he begins his NFL dreams after the NFL Draft, which is slated for April 25-27.

The draft process has been good to Okie-Anoma, he said. He’s had several informal meetings with a bunch of teams, he said, and is projected to be a Day 3 pick. His potential is great. His lateral quickness, honed by years of playing high-level basketball, is exceptional, draft reports say. In fact, there haven’t been many questions asked of him about his game in this pre-draft process — it’s largely been about his maturity, he said.

That’s something he embraces, he said, and has helped him through the NFL evaluation process.

“I think it’s the mental aspect of it,” he said, when asked about the toughest part of the pre-draft process. “Because physically, everyone’s talented. I feel like in college, you have control of what’s going on to a certain degree, versus right now, everything is out of control.”

Looking back, Okie appears thoughtful about who he was, who he became. He says that he wishes there was more transfer portal regulation — and “that’s coming from someone who transferred four times,” who perhaps could’ve benefited from staying at a single school. His social media is littered with inspirational quotes about pushing through doubt, about relentlessness, about prevailing despite some people misunderstanding his story.

The background photo on his X (formerly Twitter) profile is of a young Kobe Bryant, gripping what looks like his first NBA championship trophy, looking grateful but unsatisfied all at once.

He said he and his grandmother would watch Los Angeles Lakers games together when he was a boy. She loved Shaq. He adored Kobe.

The picture reminds him to be “relentless,” he said, as he pursues his NFL dream. It’s also a reminder, then and now, of who he plays for.

Note: A previous version of the article incorrectly stated that Okie set records at Charlotte in 2023. He instead led the team in sacks and tackles for loss in his one season.