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By Ralph Morrow
September
14, 2021
It was quite an
accomplishment when Key West grad Mekhi Sargent made the 53-man Tennessee
Titans cutdown squad on Aug. 31. He was to start the season Sunday, Sept. 12,
as the Titans’ No. 3 running back against the Arizona Cardinals with
Derrick Henry getting most of the carries.
The NFL Network’s Good
Morning Football crew also chose Sargent as one of three running backs — and
the only non-drafted player — to make their “Rookie Risers” list. The
other two were Pittsburgh’s Najee Harris and New England’s Rhamondre
Stevenson.
The Titans’ network page
said Sargent was “easily the team’s best back during the exhibition
slate.”
The University of Iowa
product got plenty of opportunity to show what he could do in the preseason and
made good, gaining 51 yards and a touchdown on 17 carries in the final game
against the Chicago Bears. In two previous games, against Tampa Bay and
Atlanta, the Conch gained 78 and 58 yards, respectively, both times on 16
carries. He caught a pass in each game.
In the Bears game, CBS analyst
Charles Jones “raved” about him, according to Alex Seats of
247Sports.
In Sargent’s senior year at Key West High School, he rushed for
2,094 yards and 27 touchdowns, wrote Marc Morehouse for the Iowa
Gazette in 2019.
“This was a bit of a quest for (Key West football coach) John
Hughes,” Morehouse wrote. “He pointed the way to Iowa Western. The Iowa Western
coaches saw Sargent at a University of Florida football camp.”
“’My coach at Key West basically led my tour to go to juco,’
Sargent said in 2019. “I didn’t know anything about junior college. He said,
‘That’s an opportunity for you. I think you can go to juco and make the most of
it and move forward.’ I took that route and I’m thankful.”
Sargent ended up redshirting his first season at Iowa Western.
He didn’t even know you could do that at a junior college.
“My mom, Yolanda Gardner, kept me mentally stable,’ Sargent told
Morehouse in 2019 in Iowa. “I just kept working hard, on the scout team and in
the weight room. I’d just pay attention to the older guys and do the right
things and my time came.”
“‘He
put up 1,000 yards as a sophomore and just kept going from there,’ Hughes said.
‘He became kind of a household name throughout South Florida. There were
coaches and teams that were just tired of playing him because he was such a
physical force. He ran so hard. He was one of those heavy contact guys. You
felt it when he hit you.’”
