Look at Drew Mestemaker’s Oklahoma State bio and one thing jumps out right away: there’s no recruiting profile attached to it. No star rating.
No list of other schools circling him. Just a trail that looks nothing like the usual path to big-time college football.
His senior year at Vandergrift High School in Austin, Texas, tells part of the story. Mestemaker was an all-district punter and safety.
He wasn’t the quarterback. He was the backup.
Now he’s drawing Heisman buzz, and NFL scouts reportedly believe he could hear his name called in the draft next April. That kind of leap is hard to ignore, especially when the starting point was no recruiting attention at all. He walked on at North Texas, and the whole thing does have a little Hollywood to it.
“I mean I definitely went into it and had no idea how it was gonna work out,” Mestemaker said to reporters during OSU’s media day last week, in a video posted to OSU's official YouTube page. “But I like always had the belief in myself that once I got the opportunity like I could make the most of it.”
He’s made plenty of it. At North Texas, Mestemaker threw for 4,379 yards and 34 touchdowns in a 12-2 season that ended with the Mean Green in the American Conference championship game.
The production looks like the work of a quarterback with a long recruiting trail behind him. It wasn’t.
He played like a guy who had already been through this before, even though he nearly never got the chance.
Mestemaker said he went through camps in high school and kept leaving with the same result: no interest, no calls back. That was a tough stretch, especially with two future college athletes ahead of him at Vandergrift - Brayden Buchanan, now a baseball player at Baylor, and Deuce Adams, now a quarterback at Wisconsin.
By his senior year in 2024, he wasn’t even expecting much from a workout in front of then-North Texas quarterbacks coach Sean Brophy. Mestemaker was training with Dallas-based quarterbacks coach Jeff Christensen, and the initial audition for Christensen was a FaceTime call.
According to an ESPN feature in 2025, Christensen was the one who contacted Morris and his staff about Mestemaker if they needed another “camp arm.” There was just one problem: no game tape to send.
Brophy still came out to see him in person. Christensen put the workout together and shaped it to highlight Mestemaker’s strengths. When it was over, Mestemaker said Brophy didn’t say a word to him.
“[Christensen said] You’re good, you’ll be good, they’ll give you a call,” Mestemaker said. “And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
He did catch Brophy in the parking lot afterward, and they spoke briefly. Brophy told him North Texas didn’t have a scholarship offer, but he would call in a week. Mestemaker had heard versions of that before, so he didn’t get excited.
Then the call came a week later. He was a walk-on at North Texas.
He redshirted in 2024, but he was paying close attention to everything around him, especially the work Eric Morris was doing with Chandler Morris, no relation. Mestemaker’s first goal was simple: make the travel roster. But by the end of fall camp, Eric Morris knew the walk-on had more in him than that.
The sign was clear in practice. Mestemaker was handling the fourth-string offense, checking it out of the wrong plays and into the right ones.
“That was something I saw grow throughout camp, as we got into scrimmages,” Morris said. “You could really see it as he started learning, gaining more confidence. By the time that last scrimmage came he knew he was battling for the number two position.”
That climb mattered because Chandler Morris was moving on after throwing for 3,774 yards, 31 touchdowns and 12 interceptions before transferring to Virginia. The job opened up, but Mestemaker still had to earn it. For once, though, he was in position to do exactly that.
Last season, he became a full quarterback. The mechanics, the processing speed, the decision-making - all of it came together in a season that turned him into one of the best quarterbacks in North Texas history. It also pushed him into the national conversation, especially after his coach left for Oklahoma State and Mestemaker entered the transfer market.
He said he explored his options. That was never going to be a surprise.
But the last call before he made his decision came from Morris. The message was short: “Don't break my heart.”
Mestemaker didn’t. He chose Oklahoma State, and with that, he followed the coach and staff that were first willing to bet on him.
Now the challenge is different. Along with running the offense and throwing touchdowns, he has to deal with the attention that comes with being a rising name. That part is new, but the background makes it easier to handle.
“Seeing all this hype on my name it is crazy because I had none of that coming out of high school,” he said. “But I feel like you just gotta keep the main thing the main thing. It's cool to see all that but we still gotta go out and perform this year and win games.”
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