IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Drew Ott is a non-conformist, the guy who eats raw eggs for amusement and drove his Honda mini-motorcycle 400 miles from the University of Iowa to the family farm in central Nebraska after his freshman year of college in 2012. This much, you probably know.
Stories about Ott quickly turn to legend -- like the tale of how he flew over the hood of a four-door Buick last September when he struck the car on his moped, wearing no helmet. Ott can still point to dents in his shins, yet he took the hit so well that to inform his parents and teammate Nathan Bazata of the accident, Ott texted them pictures of himself lying in a hospital bed.
The Buick was towed away. Ott's moped was totaled.
He bought a new bike hours after the accident and repurchased the wrecked one from his insurance company, storing it at the Ott farm outside of Trumbull, Nebraska, so he could fix it up later.
"I don't know," his mother, Sheree Ott, said. "He's just strange."
Drew played that week against Iowa State.
"He's so hard core," Iowa center Austin Blythe said, "I think he made his girlfriend eat a raw egg, too."
What you may not know about Ott is that he's more than just an oddball with a nice spin move.
Below the surface, Ott's unique, occasionally bizarre personality pushes him to reach his ceiling. He strives to stand apart, not just as an athlete but in all aspects of life. Ott is driven to be different -- different from every kid who came before him at tiny Giltner High School and the players across the line of scrimmage in the Big Ten.
"He's definitely quirky," said Drew's sister, Stasia Most, a speech pathologist and former volleyball player at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. "But there's more to him. He can be deep."
For instance, Ott likes to draw and paint. He has beautified a truck, among other items at the farm, with his artwork. Much of it displays the Hawkeye logo.
He worked from a young age to conquer a severe speech impediment. At Iowa, Ott has taken classes to learn Swahili.
Young Drew pestered his uncle, Don Ott, to let him lift weights. Don made Drew complete 50 sit-ups and 50 push-ups before introducing Drew to a weight bench and dumbbells in the Snake Pit, a dingy corner of Don's basement where Drew worked tirelessly.
Drew wanted to play as a true freshman at Iowa in 2012. After sitting for seven games, he burned his redshirt. Then he started as a sophomore in 2013 and followed with a request to flip sides of the line so he could refine his technique in practice against All-American offensive tackle Brandon Scherff.
Last year, Ott's eight sacks ranked fifth in the Big Ten. He earned second-team all-league recognition at defensive end from the media but strives to play a more complete season as a senior, anchoring a front seven on which the Hawkeyes are placing lofty hopes in a season crucial to the trajectory of coach Kirk Ferentz's program.
"Don't count him out," Don Ott said. "Because he's going to do what he wants, and he's going to do it his way."
Drew's penchant for the unusual is simply a byproduct.
"My sense," Ferentz said last year, "is that he's probably laughing at all of us."
Television is banished from the Iowa City basement Ott shares with fellow defensive linemen Bazata and Kyle Teurlow.
Ott won the hale bay toss in July 2014 at the Beef Days celebration in Solon, Iowa. He grew a mullet last season, along with something of a Mohawk and a disheveled beard.
"Drew's a man of tremendous character," Ferentz said. "But he is a character."
'I'm not surprised to see him do anything'
Ott's work ethic is easily traced to the farm.
Dan, Drew's dad, and Don raise cattle along with corn, beans and alfalfa, and Drew helped his dad with chores from a young age. The route to their land from Giltner High School covers about eight miles. Two giant Cottonwood trees hang over the gravel road at the entrance.
"It keeps you honest," Drew Ott said of the rural lifestyle. "Everybody knows who you are. You've got to be on your best behavior, because everyone is always going to hold you accountable."
Life on those 450 acres shaped Ott's personality, too.
Start with uncle Don, a thinner, older, equally bearded and mischievous version of Drew.
How much did Drew learn from Don?
"Probably too much," Don said.
Like his nephew, Don eats raw eggs, usually at Christmas time to get a rise from gathered family. He has also swallowed june bugs, which he reserves for the Fourth of July, live minnows and night crawlers.
It's funny, Don and Dan said, few of the stunts Drew has pulled are original. The Ott brothers remember doing most of the same stuff in their childhood.
Just a year ago, Ott and his longtime buddy and high school teammate, Logan Rath, drove a John Deere Gator some 40 miles to Grafton, Nebraska, to eat wings.
"I guess that's what happens when you don't really have anything better to do your whole childhood," said Rath, a walk-on defensive tackle at Nebraska who started his college career at South Dakota State. "We've been doing weird things, especially him, since we were kids.
"I'm not surprised to see him do anything. That's just another day in the life of Drew."
They often trekked long distances on three- and four-wheelers to the Platte and Loup rivers, fishing for carp and catfish. Ott ate a few minnows. And they hunted snapping turtles, which can grow much larger than 20 pounds and make a good meal, according to Rath.
"You grab them by the tail," he said, "or you might lose a finger."
Ott's passion, though, even before sports, involved anything with an engine.
"If it moved," Dan Ott said, "he would want to learn how to drive it."
Drew often sat on his dad's lap behind the wheel of tractors before he reached school age. A few years later, he surfed through the farm fields, clinging to the back of a tractor as Dan laid irrigation pipe.
On a winter morning, Stasia Ott, then 14 and equipped with a school permit to drive, steered off a snowy road with 12-year-old Drew in the passenger seat of the family's green Z-71 Chevy pickup.
"She started crying," Drew said, "so I had to drive it out of the ditch."
And he likely drove the rest of the way to school, Dan Ott said.
Drew worked diligently to convert an old three-wheeler into a watercraft. He even hauled it to Iowa City, where Ott and Bazata tinkered with the vehicle last year. Ott said he got it to run for a while on a pond back at the farm. The engine block cracked when it got too hot. It's broken again now, but Ott said he has an idea how to make the fix when he gets time.
Of the infamous 400-mile ride home on the moped three years ago, Ott insisted over his parents' objections. They wanted to pick him up in Iowa City. Dan Ott told Drew the transmission would burn up on such a long ride. So Drew got confirmation from the dealer who sold him the bike that it would run well -- and off he went.
"We just sit here and worry," Sheree Ott said. "He does some strange things, but that's fun for him. It's the same with sports. He's always going to go for it."
'We just accept it'
Two years after the high school closed in Trumbull, a town of barely 200 people nearest to the land that Dan and Don Ott have farmed since 1983, Drew received a sixth-grade assignment at his new school in Giltner to write on a topic relevant to current events.
Drew looked far for inspiration. He wrote about Adam Ickes, a former 8-man football star from Page, Nebraska, who walked on in Lincoln and grew into a special teams mainstay and fill-in starter at linebacker in 2005, his final Nebraska season.
A year later, as Ott first tried organized football -- running over opponents as a quarterback -- he told Rath that he would play the game in college. And Ott intended to get a scholarship.
"He had a goal," Sheree Ott said. "And he reached it."
Giltner High School, in Nebraska's smallest classification, had never produced a Division I football signee. But Ott, who graduated with a class of 11 students and finished his own 8-man career with 626 tackles, did not care.
It is Ott's nature not to care about predetermined limits and traditional expectations.
In 2004, Adam Ickes blocked a punt and returned it 16 yards for a score against Missouri. Last November in Iowa City, Ott scooped up a blocked punt against the Huskers, scoring on a 12-yard return.
He was Adam Ickes. Only better. Once a diehard for Nebraska -- which overlooked him as a recruit -- Ott is all in on Iowa today.
The Hawkeye logo adorns the front door at the Otts' farmhouse and numerous items inside. Drew's 8-month-old niece and god-daughter, Hayden, is regularly decked out, too, in black and gold. Incidentally, Drew's parents said, she is not named after Hayden Fry, the former legendary Iowa coach.
At the high school, Giltner coach Jeff Ashby said, kids wear Iowa gear because of Ott. On the eve of the first day of school two weeks ago, Ashby reviewed film of Ott's senior year to help prepare for a new season.
Safe to say, there's not another Ott out there on his practice field.
Ashby, in fact, ordered larger dumbbells for the school in case Ott wanted to work out on a trip home. That is, if he can escape the Snake Pit. In Don Ott's underground weight room, Drew taped Iowa football posters over the top of old Nebraska displays that celebrate national championships from generations past.
Ott cut his hair last fall. He shaved the beard after Iowa's loss to Tennessee in the TaxSlayer Bowl. It was time to clean up, Ott told his mom.
But as this season grew near, the beard returned. Some things will never change for Ott.
He still rides the moped around Iowa City.
Ott may watch his step more closely away from football this year, he said. A solid NFL prospect, he understands he has more to lose than ever before.
He'll maintain that sense of adventure and the personality to boot. Just look at uncle Don for proof. No matter where Drew's football career takes him, the farm boy will make the trip. If resources allow, Ott said he would not buy a fancy new truck or a tractor. He'd like to invest in his dad's 1957 Chevrolet Apache. Put a new diesel motor in the truck, he said.
Ott's family, friends and teammates understand about Drew what outsiders cannot learn from the outlandish stories. Without the quirky traits, he just wouldn't be Drew.
"We just accept it," said Bazata, Drew's roommate and a fierce high school rival as a fellow Nebraska 8-man star. "And we know that Drew doesn't care what anybody thinks."