Auburn Tigers LB Eugene Asante Follows in Footsteps of Brother

Auburn Tigers senior LB, Eugene Asante is using his brother’s journey from Ghana to the NFL as powerful inspiration for his own football story.

Auburn Tigers linebacker Eugene Asante / John Reed-USA TODAY Sports

After enjoying a breakout campaign in 2023, Auburn Tigers  linebacker Eugene Asante has set some pretty lofty personal and team goals for his upcoming senior campaign.

If leading the Tigers with 86 tackles last season was impressive, then the five sacks and 8.5 tackles for loss he also added might even serve notice that Asante is in the running for the prodigious Butkus Award moving forward.

Individual awards always help raise the personal profile, especially with regard to the inevitable aspirations to turn professional, but Asante is determined to keep talking about team ambitions above all else.

"The goals and aspirations that I have within this game are the reason why I came back to Auburn, because I truly do believe we can have a special team," Asante told Riley Hubbard of auburntigers.com. "I want to play for an SEC Championship, and I feel like our fans deserve that. From top to bottom, people do truly care about our team and our success.

"I feel like it's only right for me to go 110 percent because they deserve something. Personally, I believe that if you play in an SEC Championship , you're playing for something special. But ultimately, I just want to be somebody that fans say, 'Eugene left it all on the field.' That's what I really want to be remembered for here."

Climbing the mountain back into conference title contention has been a process which was never going to happen overnight. Laying down incremental building blocks is essential, so the tangible shoots of recovery certainly were self-evident in the manner by which Asante started to mature into a well rounded college athlete.

Above all else, Asante wanted to prove to head coach Hugh Freeze that he could be a player he could always rely upon to give his all, and that he would be fully prepared to do his job.

"To be honest, I was extremely hungry to show Coach Freeze and his staff what I could do," Asante said about the start of his Auburn journey. " I was on the scout team my first season and it was a hard thing for me because I was an underclassman on the scout team. Last year was kind of personal for me.

"First and foremost, I wanted Coach Freeze to know I cared about football. And how I let him know I cared about it was by my preparation, by knowing what I needed to do defensively and by busting my tail while I was out there. It really attested to everything I went through in 2022, just trying to prove to the coaches that I could."  

Now that he's returning for his senior year, Asante will be trying to be that savvy veteran leader everyone looks up to for inspiration and positive guidance.

It's a task Asante is warming to, but that shouldn't really come as that much of a surprise. After all, his older brother,  Larry, was a standout defender for the Nebraska Cornhuskers before playing for a total of four NFL teams as a professional.

"I grew up with those memories of watching him play at Nebraska," Asante recalled. "I didn't miss a game. I didn't miss any moment because it was such a surreal thing to see your brother get to college and play at that level. So as a young kid, I remember saying, 'Man, I'm going to be there one day too.'"

Auburn is now reaping the benefits of having a player in their ranks who was always deeply immersed in the lifestyle it takes to succeed in a big college environment.

Indeed,  the backstory of how his brother went all the way from Ghana in West Africa, to the NFL is extremely inspiring and uplifting for Asante, and he's thankful for having it.

"I saw his hard work all throughout the house growing up, even in high school," Asante explained to Leonard. "He spent a lot of time outside the house, working out and putting in that dedication of perfecting his craft. It's so impressive to me that my brother was able to make it to the National Football League because he wasn't born in this country. So just being able to develop that within such a short period of time and then get drafted is something I really do admire, and I tell him all the time."

In so many ways, it sure sounds like little brother learned from the example set by his older brother and is following in his footsteps.