Sit down across from Kenechukwu Orjioke, and it’s easy to forget that he still can’t legally drink.

The 6-foot-4, 240-pound linebacker arrived at UCLA in 2012 at just 16 years old, having skipped the sixth and seventh grades upon immigrating to the United States. As one of the Pac-12’s three student-athlete representatives, he spoke in front of 65 university presidents in Washington, D.C. Last year, he started his own business.

But at 20, Orjioke has decided to leave football behind, forgoing his last season of eligibility. When the redshirt junior lines up against Nebraska on Saturday in the Foster Farms Bowl at Levi’s Stadium, he will be making his 34th and final appearance in a Bruin uniform.

He began flirting with the idea of leaving the sport this past offseason. Last September, he tore his right ACL and meniscus in a win at Arizona State. The meniscus flipped over, locking his knee in place. He needed to undergo surgery immediately, rather than waiting a week or two for swelling to subside. During the grueling months of recovery, he started having doubts about whether or not he could still chase his NFL dream.

“As soon as I started having second thoughts, I knew that was kind of it,” he says. “Because if you’re not really focused on it — unless you’re some freak-of-nature athlete — if you don’t really commit to it, be consistent with it every day, you can’t succeed.”

Even if he doesn’t classify himself as a “freak,” Orjioke always had natural athleticism. He played only one year of football at Lassiter High in Marrieta, Ga., but received scholarship offers from Georgia Tech and Ole Miss after a season-opening win over Brookwood, the reigning state champion. Against Sprayberry the following week, he picked off a pass, blocked a punt, and knocked off someone’s helmet. He got three more offers. After his third game, he started thinking about an NFL future.

Orjioke’s mother, Ngozi, and his father, Job, were both college athletes in Nigeria — playing tennis and soccer, respectively. The family relocated to Shepparton, Australia when Kene was 5 years old, and he began gravitating to soccer. During one game, another mother told Ngozi that she could see Kene becoming a professional.

He was precocious off the field as well. Orjioke would sometimes get bored with the academic structure at school, which led to some mischief and a few calls home. As a child, he once pretended he had a church event to free himself for a friend’s sleepover; his mother found out the truth when she called the youth pastor. In high school, he convinced his father to allow him to drop a math class — only to find out three weeks later that it would be a college prerequisite.

“He has an ability to convince you, if you let him talk long enough, that what he wants to do is the right thing to do,” Ngozi says.

What also stood out to her, she remembers, was his ambition: “He wanted to make a lot of money, like most kids. Be famous. Change the world. The question of how he was going to do that? He didn’t know.”

For years, Kene was convinced that the only way for him to make an impact was through football. His time off from the sport, Ngozi says, “completely changed the way he viewed life.” Without practices and team meetings on his schedule, Orjioke had to find new ways to occupy his schedule. He joined the Bruin Athletic Council, which serves as the students’ voice to the athletic administration. He started networking more.

“In my mind, I always have to be progressing,” he says. “I hate feeling as though I’m plateauing in anything. I hate the feeling of being average. So as soon as I was able to walk (after knee surgery), even before I was able to walk. I’d go meet with as many people as I could meet with on crutches. I’d put a suit on and be crutching it in meetings.”

Orjioke still isn’t sure where he’ll be a year from now. He says that working as a Pac-12 representative has become “an adrenaline rush,” giving him a chance to debate with his peers. Set to graduate with a political science degree in June, he might try and intern for an election campaign. He’s still trying to grow Tonite, the event management business he started with defensive back Justin Combs — the son of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.

“I’m happy it happened,” Orjioke says of his knee injury, “because it taught me a lot about myself. … That I have to rely on myself to achieve anything I want. And that I can achieve anything I want. I have to focus on it. That football wasn’t …”

He trails off, falling silent for several seconds.

“I can achieve anything I put my mind to.”