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| Last year, Martin Egbo was second team all-conference on a 3-7 team in the NACC. But after finishing his bachelor's degree in three years, he went looking for a place to do his master's degree. Turns out, North Central was willing to let him do more than just throw hammers for the track team. Photo by Larry Radloff, d3photography.com |
By Greg Thomas
D3football.com
Four years ago, North Central defensive end Martin Egbo wasn’t even sure he wanted to pursue college football.
As a senior in high school in 2019, Egbo had to battle to get starts. Four years later, Egbo is the CCIW Defensive Player of the Year and right in the middle of a chase for Division III football’s national championship on the No. 1-ranked team in the country.
It’s been quite a journey.
Egbo did get those starts in his senior year of high school, but the COVID-interrupted spring of 2020 made recruiting a challenge. Undeterred, he took to social media to jumpstart his recruiting. “Twitter's a great thing where I was just posting myself anywhere under any post or anything that I could find,” Egbo explained. Through those posts, Egbo was discovered by Chalres Watkins, then the defensive coordinator at Concordia-Chicago.
Egbo is from Corapolis, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh which is 467 miles away from Concordia-Chcago, in River Forest, Illinois, and 483 miles from North Central.
“All of that was over the phone because I didn't get a chance to really go and see anyone in person,” Egbo recalled of his recruitment to Concordia-Chicago. “But everything that I saw pointed me in the direction that this was a place that I could really grow as a person, get a degree that was favorable towards me, and play some place in college football, which I had no thought of playing really up until that point.”
Egbo is just 2.5 tackles for loss away from matching the program record and he was as relentless in the Concordia-Chicago classrooms as he is in opposing backfields. Egbo pushed himself to complete his undergraduate degree in just three years. “I took some summer classes at Concordia and I started to look and talk to my academic advisors. I noticed that there was potential for me to be able to graduate in three years,” Egbo said.
“I talked it through with my parents and I was like, ‘if we can do it, why not?’ It'll open up a lot more doors than potentially just sitting back and waiting.”
The door that opened happened to lead straight to North Central, just not quite to North Central football.
“When I was in the transfer portal — I also do track and I'm a thrower — North Central's throwing coach actually reached out to me first for me to be able to come on a visit and just see what he's all about,” Egbo said.
North Central is also a national contender in track and field, having won a national title six times in 30 seasons in outdoor track and won a title in five of the past 12 indoor track seasons.
During the visit with North Central’s track team, Egbo was contemplating having to choose between throwing the hammer for North Central or potentially doing both at another school as he was assuming North Central had a full roster and wasn’t looking for additional players. Egbo continued, “at the end of the visit, he talked to me and he said, ‘Hey, do you want me to send your film to the football coaches?’ And I was like, that would be awesome.”
What Egbo may not have been aware of is that North Central was indeed looking for student-athletes to join the defensive line position group which was one of the few position groups the Cardinals suffered significant graduation losses to following 2022.
“We were looking still at that time to solidify some guys in our defensive line class and, you know, Martin's name came across on Twitter,” North Central defensive coordinator Shane Dierking said. “Actually, a great friend who was a former vice president and was our chaplain at North Central for the football program now works at Concordia. I got a text from that friend really supporting Martin and saying you should look into this young man.”
The next week, Egbo found himself back at North Central, this time to meet with the football program and the rest is history. Egbo completed his degree at Concordia, enrolled in the sports leadership graduate program at North Central and officially became a Cardinal.
Egbo’s first preseason camp at North Central was quite an adjustment and it took some time to adjust to North Central’s expectations, even in practice. “It took an insane amount of work. I mean, I was out of breath and dying during our first day of helmets just because of how intense the practices were,” Egbo noted of his first days practicing at North Central. “You're going up against some All-American level talent. Some all-region and all-conference type of players.. So you have to put your big boy pants on and go to work. And really that was the mindset I kind of had to adopt every day is to attack this practice almost the same way I have to attack the game or at least each rep I have to attack like a game rep.”
Egbo’s place on the depth chart was fluid through preseason camp. He rotated at times with the first, second, and third strings. He kept working, however, and during the team’s bye week in Week 2, an opportunity presented itself. “During our bye week the coaches came in during our meeting and they said this week is basically going to be a competition week. We've got some spots where there's some uncertainty of who's starting and who's going to get some significant playing time.” Egbo continued, “I felt like they were talking directly to me or directly to the defensive end group because so I just took that as a challenge to kind of take the spot if it's up for grabs.”
Egbo earned that starting spot for North Central’s second game and embarked on a season that would end with his being named the top defensive player in the CCIW. In just two more weeks, Dierking saw that Egbo had the potential to achieve great things with North Central. “I think the Wheaton game, really,” Dierking said. “That's where he blossomed because that's one of the best offensive lines in the country and he made several big plays, really elevated his game and that's when myself and the defensive coaching staff are like, hey, we think we have something special.’
Dierking continued on Egbo’s development. “It was just an incremental, daily process that you just saw him continually get better and take steps every single day, but when you can do it for us in the biggest regular season game of the year against one of the best offensive lines in the country, that's when you know you’ve got something special.”
If the story of a student-athlete working his way from a second-team all-NACC season in 2022 to the starting lineup on the No. 1 team in the division to the CCIW’s defensive player of the year is surprising to you, you’re not alone. When head coach Brad Spencer told Egbo that he had been named the conference’s defensive player of the year, he also couldn’t believe it.
“I was like there's no way. That's not real. So it was a shock at first,” Egbo said. “And it was an honor. I just thought right away to my teammates and how much they have helped me get an award like that because I couldn't do it without the 10 other guys I'm playing with on defense or any of the other guys on the team who pushed me to make them better in practice and in games or without our coaching staff putting me in a position to make plays.”
Egbo’s fit at North Central becomes more natural when one hears Dierking’s observations about Egbo and his work ethic. Like North Central’s drive to become the best team in Division III, Egbo’s pursuit of excellence is relentless, and his teammates have noticed.
“He wants to be elite at everything,” Dierking said. “Academics, his social life. He's really come in and was a great teammate and created those relationships. You start to see him progress in having those leadership traits and especially in the guys looking up to him. Those young guys who are still figuring out the college life.”
If elite is the goal, Egbo is well on his way to achieving that at one of the elite programs in the division. His impact has stabilized a Cardinal defensive line that was in flux even through the early weeks of the season. As an early college graduate, Egbo is also an elite example for his teammates and has quickly become a leader and one of the key individuals in North Central’s pursuit of a third national championship.