More than one eyebrow was raised in the early winter of 1998 when Bill Whittemore of Brentwood High in suburban Nashville was named Mr. Football in Tennessee’s largest classification.

Ricky Upton, a running back from Jefferson County High, had been favored. Upton was regarded as one of the state’s top 11 college prospects while Whittemore wasn’t even on the list.

Today Upton and Whittemore are both fourth-year juniors at NCAA Div. I-A schools, but Upton is a special teams player at Penn State while Whittemore is the starting quarterback at Kansas.

Just goes to show you about prep projections.

Whittemore’s high school coach, Jack Daniels, couldn’t believe back in ’98 that none of the major football-playing schools were interested in his quarterback.

“We were all scratching our heads,” Daniels said. “We couldn’t figure why in the world  We made a tremendous highlights film showing what he could do, but no one wanted to give him a scholarship. A lot of people wanted him to walk on.”

Spread decision

Two years earlier, Daniels had decided, based on his returning talent and what he had seen of Whittemore as a sophomore, to implement a spread offense.

“Bill had great feet. I think playing soccer helped him in that area,” Daniels said. “And he had an uncanny ability to throw going to his left. He weighed about 175 pounds and we didn’t have any linemen much bigger than him, so we were always in the shotgun and Bill always had to scramble.”

As a junior and a senior, Whittemore threw for more than 6,000 yards. As a senior, Brentwood went undefeated and Whittemore earned the Mr. Football award. Then Whittemore dropped, more or less, out of sight because Martin, Tenn., is hardly bathed in the college football limelight.

Whittemore and a handful of his high school buddies opted to go to Tennessee-Martin, an NCAA Div. I-AA school. Like many freshmen, Whittemore chose a red-shirt season right away in order to mature.

When that red-shirt 1999 season ended, Tennessee-Martin changed coaches. Sam McCorkle, the new UTM coach, wasn’t a proponent of the wide-open offense so Whittemore felt like a fish out of water. Whittemore started the opener, but played in only five games after suffering a mid-season knee injury.

Wrong place, wrong time

Soon it became apparent to Whittemore that he was the wrong quarterback in the wrong place at the wrong time. After discussions with his father and with Daniels, it was determined his best option was to transfer to a junior college where he could showcase his skills and, hopefully, land a I-A scholarship.

“I hated it that it didn’t work out here,” UT-Martin coach McCorkle said. “I’ll tell you what  people around here speak highly of Bill. He’s a winner and a competitor.”

McCorkle recalled offseason workouts when Whittemore would run sprints with the rest of the players.

“Bill runs OK. He doesn’t run great,” McCorkle said. “We had this guy who could fly, but after they’d run a few and were