Joshua Jacobs

(247Sports.com)

Nick Saban was expecting to hear something negative, some reason why -- less than one month before National Signing Day -- Alabama and most other schools around the country had never heard of a running back good enough that he ended up signing with the Tide.

Saban and Alabama weren't even aware of Joshua Jacobs until after the national championship game in mid-January.

They were impressed enough after watching film that running backs coach Burton Burns flew to Oklahoma to visit with Jacobs.

But there was skepticism and a collective belief that Burns was going to find some issue, some reason why Jacobs didn't have a single Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) scholarship offer before December despite running for 2,704 yards and 31 touchdowns as a senior while averaging more than 15 yards per carry.

Burns never found any problem. He called Saban after meeting with Jacobs and watching him go through a basketball practice.

"We thought something was wrong with the guy -- maybe he's too small or whatever," Saban said. "And (Burns) said, 'No, this is a pretty good looking guy. I watched him practice basketball, and he's very athletic and very explosive.' And I said, 'Well there's got to be something wrong with the guy.' And we kept searching and searching and searching and never really ever found anything."

Most players that end up at Alabama are known about well before their senior year of high school and sometimes before they even get to high school.

Not Jacobs.

As late as early December, Jacobs was strictly hearing from Division II teams such as Missouri Southern State. Even after getting some FBS interest, his best FBS offers entering January were from Wyoming and New Mexico State. Then, things got crazy, a wild final month for Jacobs leading up to National Signing Day that ended with him having to choose between schools like Alabama, Oklahoma and Missouri.

"A story like this is more and more rare in the sense that -- as you follow recruiting -- everything is getting more and more accelerated, the calendar," ESPN recruiting analyst Craig Haubert said. "With video and camps, we're already starting to talk about players in the 2019 class. So when you're starting that early and people are looking that far down the road, it's a little more difficult to have those players who burst on the scene late. And with Joshua, he came on our radar late as well. But I think, though, it's kind of neat in the sense that it proves that -- even though the calendar has gotten accelerated and you're learning about players earlier and earlier -- that the process truly never ends."

The power of social media



Jacobs' high school coach, Jarvis Payne, had what he described as his "weekend chore," spending time on weekends emailing Jacobs' tape to different colleges around the country and attempting to get in contact with coaches through that school's football office.

For so long, Payne never even heard back from coaches at FBS schools, let alone prominent FBS programs such as Alabama and Oklahoma.

It was a process made more difficult with Jacobs' high school, McLain, being a lower level program in "the middle of nowhere" that hadn't produced a Power Five conference player since former Oklahoma State running back Prentiss Elliott in 2004.

Payne, who just finished his fourth season as McLain's coach, had never dealt with many, if any, coaches from Power Five conference schools.

"I don't even know if coaches looked at the emails," Payne said. "It's hard to get in contact. You don't have their cell phone numbers, so you're really just calling the office phones. You're just trying to get discovered, so you're just sending emails and hope that they read them or open them."

So what changed? Twitter helped.

Payne sought advice from someone he knows at Rivals.

The recommendation was to utilize social media, most notably Twitter.

So Jacobs created a Twitter page, and the combination of Jacobs and others began sending his tape out to various coaches from around the country.

From there, Payne said, "it took off like wildfire."

Oklahoma State was the first Power Five conference school to visit McLain. That was in January. Then TCU called. Each day, Payne said, it seemed like a new prominent school was calling or visiting and expressing interest.

The day home-state power Oklahoma visited was particularly memorable -- both for Jacobs and for Payne, a longtime Sooners fan.

Oklahoma offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley and running backs coach Jay Boulware made the around two-hour trip from Norman to Tulsa to meet with Jacobs. Sooners coach Bob Stoops then showed up around 30 minutes after Jacobs' conversation with Riley and Boulware.

"I think we were fairly early on it (compared to other Power Five schools)," Stoops told reporters in Oklahoma of Jacobs' recruitment at his Signing Day news conference in February. "And listen, it will happen this spring, too. He's an excellent player. I'm not taking that away. But a lot of times, once we have offered, there will be a lot of people that offer without even looking. And again, he's worth the look. I'm complimenting him all the way. I'm not saying that's the case. They should have offered him. Believe me. So I'm sticking up for him. But, point being, we knew that as soon as that happened, we said, 'All right, here it goes.' And it did."

Staying patient



The calls, visits and interest reached a point during the final two or three weeks leading up to National Signing Day that Jacobs said the same thing usually at least once a day to Payne.

"He'd say, 'This is crazy.' And I'd say, 'Yeah, it is,'" Payne said. "He would say that all the time, 'Such and such called. I can't believe it.'"

But it also made Payne wonder why it took schools so long to find out about Jacobs.

Jacobs ran for around 1,300 yards as a sophomore and 948 yards and 13 touchdowns in a little more than four games as a 5-foot-8, 180-pound junior.

Jacobs then grew to 5-11, 200 pounds between his junior and senior seasons, moved from running back to a Wildcat quarterback and ran for an average of 245.8 yards per game as a senior last year.

"In the beginning, people weren't believing his stats," Payne said. "The newspaper and everybody else thought we were padding his stats until they actually came to one of our games, and they'd say, 'Wow.'"

Payne told Jacobs, "It will come around. Eventually, somebody's going to have to see this."

That proved true.

It was too late by that point for coaches to see Jacobs play football in person, but watching Jacobs play basketball confirmed the athleticism on display throughout Jacobs' football highlight tape.

The top player on McLain's basketball team, Jacobs scored 22 points against one of the top basketball teams in Tulsa with football coaches from Oklahoma State, Missouri and Wyoming in attendance.

"I think it was frustrating for Josh (before interest started to pick up recruiting-wise), but Josh, he's kind of got a poker face," Payne said. "He's a really strong kid, and he doesn't really let that stuff out. He's a deep thinker. He may have had it inside, but he didn't really show it. His main focus was really just getting us to the playoffs, and that's all we talked about and that the rest will work itself out. Eventually, I knew it would take off. I didn't know it would get that big, but I knew eventually someone would see it."

A 'whirlwind' two weeks



The first contact with Alabama was a phone call from Burns that preceded his visit to McLain.

That was around just two weeks before National Signing Day.

The Tide offered Jacobs a scholarship days later, and Jacobs spent the weekend before National Signing Day taking official visits to Missouri and Alabama.

Burns and Saban both talked to Jacobs on the phone in the days following his visit. Missouri, meanwhile, made a final push to land Jacobs days before National Signing Day with offensive coordinator Josh Heupel visiting Jacobs in Oklahoma and telling him that he would have a good chance at playing early with the Tigers.

It was the culmination of what Payne described as a "whirlwind" two weeks.

Jacobs didn't decide on Alabama until shortly before his announcement ceremony, explaining to local reporters later that it was tough to choose between the Tide and Missouri.

But Jacobs chose Alabama, giving the Tide something it was eager to add -- a second running back in this year's recruiting class to go along with four-star B.J. Emmons.

"We wanted to make sure that we got two running backs," Saban said. "... We got one early that we really, really liked and then just never ever found the next guy or had an opportunity to get the guy that was really interested or close by here. This really worked out well for us."

Still, it had to be surreal for Jacobs to sign with the Tide considering the lack of interest prior to January.

Shortly after signing with Alabama, with a crimson-colored Tide hat on his head, Jacobs smiled as a local reporter asked, "If I had told you a month ago, before you got some of these big offers, that you'd be wearing the Alabama hat and going to play for the national champs, what would you have said?"

Still smiling, Jacobs thought for a second before responding, "Man, I wouldn't know. I'd probably just laugh at you. Man..."