Shane_Marinelli

Easton Messer is five foot nine. He scored five touchdowns for Florida Atlantic today, and he did it three different ways. Two of them he caught. Two of them he ran in himself. The fifth one he returned a punt for, and it was the longest punt return touchdown in the history of his school. He finished with 262 all purpose yards and 12 catches. He had 14 catches in the game the week before that. Messer was a two star recruit coming out of high school. Now here is the part almost nobody knows about him. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and his family moved when he was small. His father is an engineer who ran global operations for his company, and the job kept moving them. Messer grew up in Costa Rica. Then Panama. Then Malaysia. He speaks fluent Spanish. Somewhere in the middle of all that he had to pick between soccer and football, and he picked football, which is not the obvious choice for a kid being raised in Central America and southeast Asia. Messer came back and went to Christian Academy of Louisville. Two stars. His offers were Air Force, Marshall and Eastern Kentucky. Western Kentucky took him. He played three games as a freshman and caught one pass all year, a 44 yard touchdown, and then redshirted to save the season. The next year he caught 42. The year after that, 55. Then the coach who had recruited him to Western Kentucky, Zach Kittley, got the Florida Atlantic job. Messer followed him, and so did the quarterback, Caden Veltkamp. In his first season at Florida Atlantic Messer led the entire country in catches per game at 8.67. In his first game there he caught 15 passes and tied a school record. This year his team voted him a captain. Here is what he says about playing that way. "Pressure is a privilege." Before every game he eats a big bowl of plain spaghetti, catches a set number of balls from a set number of spots, and listens to the same music. Be honest about the context. Florida Atlantic won 51 to 49 in a game where both teams gave up almost everything, Rice is 1 and 7, and a 5 foot 9 receiver running past that secondary is not the same as doing it in November against somebody good. And Messer is 22 years old, in his fifth year, on a watch list rather than a draft board. But a two star kid who grew up on three different continents, who caught one football his entire freshman season, scored five touchdowns in one afternoon and broke a record that had stood at his school since it opened. What is the furthest from home you ever had to start over.