Family, coaches of rookie tight end detail his path to Jacksonville

• Originally from the small town of Aurora, Nebraska, Boerkircher started his college career as a walk on.
• Boerkircher was the third tight end selected when the Jaguars drafted him at No. 56 overall.
• Boerkircher’s tight ends coach at Texas A&M believes his best football is ahead of him.

They all gathered in Gretna, Nebraska, on the night of April 24, a bundle of excitement and anticipation mixed with a sprinkle of anxiousness. Nate Boerkircher was at his parents’ house and joined by the full crew of his older siblings and four nieces, his fiancée and her parents.

There was no need for a first-round NFL draft party — they all loved Nate, but understood he wasn’t going to be selected the night before. And they would later admit, they weren’t completely sure the second- and third-round party would have a celebratory end, either.

But then a call with the 904 area code appeared on Nate’s phone. The Jacksonville Jaguars were calling to tell him he would be their initial draft pick. His older brother, Ian, was in another room when Nate’s future father-in-law burst through the doorway to tell him “The Call” had arrived.

“I ran into the room and we were over the moon when he told us it was Jacksonville,” Ian said.

The reaction of Jaguars fans was the opposite of over the moon, their angst at an irrational level because they had never heard of Boerkircher and because they adopted the dreaded “consensus board” that ranked Nate as a Day 3 (rounds 4-7) prospect as the “consensus truth.”

But Jaguars fans, this is a guy worth getting to know, a guy from really-small-town Nebraska who will bring an enforcer-type mindset to the Jaguars’ offense via maximum effort and whose journey to Jacksonville was the opposite of a figurative straight line. Deliberate was his race.

“He’s been a steady climber all of his life,” said his dad, Matt.

This climb was a mixture of horizontal and vertical steps. Under-recruited in high school. Walk-on at Nebraska. Five seasons in the Huskers’ program. One year at Texas A&M. And now the Jaguars.

“Nate has always wanted to do the right things even when it was hard,” said Emily Stolpe, one of Nate’s three older siblings. “For him, doing the right thing is showing up, working his butt off and doing what he could to better himself as an athlete even if people didn’t believe in him.”

Throughout the last two weeks, the Times-Union connected with Nate’s inner circle to detail his journey … and get their draft night memories.

The draft night experience for Matt Boerkircher (Nate’s dad):

“Incredible. Emotional. Excited. Very happy for Nate. Being new to the draft thing, I had been starting to follow the ‘consensus board,’ and all of the mock drafts and they were projecting him in the fourth or fifth rounds so we were expecting a Saturday announcement. But his agents said (before round 2), ‘He’s probably not going to get out of the third round.’ I was like, ‘I’m glad we all got together (Friday).’ But even then, I was in a believe-it-when-I-see-it-on-Friday-night (mode).”

Small-town Nebraska native

Aurora, Nebraska, is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody, mostly because there aren’t a lot of people to know. The 2020 census listed a population of 4,678 and when the four Boerkircher kids attended high school, their graduating classes were around 100.

Located five miles north of Interstate 80 at the intersection of Highways 14 (north-south) and 34 (east-west), Aurora is 72 miles west of Lincoln (home of the University of Nebraska) and 125 miles west of Omaha. On the main drag, there is a Pizza Hut, a Casey’s General Store, JoJo’s Gelato & Grill, Pueblo Veijo, Scooter’s Coffee, Dollar General and a hospital. The closest brand-name hotel is a Hampton Inn 26 miles east in York.

Matt and Sherry’s four kids are Abby, 31, Emily, 29, Ian, 26, and Nate, 24.

“Very busy house,” Sherry said with a laugh. “Kind of chaotic, but fun.”

Where did the kids hang out?

“People’s basements,” Emily said.

And the adults?

“You would see a lot of the older guys at McDonald’s talking about the football team,” said Emily, who lives in the Omaha area with her husband and two daughters.

The Huskies were the only game in town and community support was a constant. You went to watch them play on Friday nights (basketball and football) and then watched the Cornhuskers on Saturdays.

All of the Boerkircher kids played sports and being young, rambunctious boys, Ian and Nate would play jump-ball for Matt’s football throws in the family room (that poor couch took a beating) and backyard. Rough-housing was common.

“Oh, absolutely and we encouraged it,” said Sherry, who is a registered nurse. “It was great.”

Said Ian: “It would get fairly physical. I just felt like our family in general was high-energy. It was a ton of fun growing up.”

Nate missed the start of his junior season in 2018 due to knee surgery, but returned in time to catch two touchdown passes (4 and 27 yards) from quarterback Baylor Scheierman (now a guard for the Boston Celtics) to cap a 13-0 championship season with a 49-7 win over Ord at Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium.

“In a lot of ways, Nate was a late bloomer,” Aurora High School coach Kyle Peterson said. “But you saw the talent and athleticism and the tools he always possessed were exceptional hands and a kid who was willing to be physical.”

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It was fitting that title season was capped at the Huskers’ home because it was Nebraska or nothing for Nate. He could have taken the Division II route like Ian, who started his career at Nebraska-Kearney, but Nate only had the red “N” in his dreams.

“I was shocked when he said he’s going Division I or he wasn’t going to play and just go to college,” Sherry said.

Following a game he attended in Lincoln, the Huskers’ coaching staff invited Nate to walk on for the 2020 season. Ian had transferred to Nebraska in 2019, also as a walk-on.

The Boerkircher Boys would be reunited in Lincoln.

The draft night experience for Sherry Boerkircher (Nate’s mom):

“I was holding my 2-year old granddaughter and somebody said, ‘Nate got a call,’ so I handed her off to somebody, I can’t even remember who. I went into the room — I had to get in there to see what was going on — where he was and it was surreal. Hard to explain. So amazing.”

Walk-on and wait at Nebraska

Nate red-shirted in 2020 and appeared in three games (two catches) in 2021 before his role increased in 2022-24 (36 games/17 starts). Some Huskers rosters swelled to 150 players because of their commitment to recruiting in-state walk-ons. They were all long shots to earn a scholarship and/or regular playing time.

“It was all about working as hard as you possibly could to make a name for yourself,” said Ian, who was a reserve offensive lineman.

Walking into his house during a phone interview, Ian looked at two touchstone pictures that made his Nebraska experience with Nate so special.

A man who fled an uprising in the Middle East decades ago, and whose son serves in the U.S. Air Force, was taken into custody during a routine immigration appointment in Des Moines, Iowa.

Another man brought to the country as a child in 1999, who now has a U.S.-born child, was arrested after a minor traffic stop in southwest Missouri.

And a man from El Salvador with no criminal record spent weeks in a Nebraska prison that had been converted to hold immigrants fighting to stay in the country.

In each of these cases, a federal judge ruled that their confinement, detailed in what’s called a habeas corpus petition, violated their rights and they were released.

As President Donald Trump’s administration dramatically expanded who was subject to mandatory detention, more than 45,000 habeas corpus cases have flooded federal courts across the country. Petitioners have alleged that their detention was illegal and asked to be returned to their families so they can continue their civil immigration cases from home. An analysis by The Marshall Project and The Midwest Newsroom found that habeas corpus filings in four Midwestern states have been overwhelmingly successful thus far.

In Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, more than 450 cases have been filed since Trump’s inauguration last year. The vast majority of people in the roughly 160 cases that had been resolved through mid-April were granted a hearing to determine if they could be let out of detention on bond, or in some cases, were released outright.

“It’s actually really remarkable,” said Suchita Mathur, an attorney with the American Immigration Council, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for immigrants. “I’ve never heard or seen any legal issue with this much consensus among district court judges.”

But as the Trump administration files appeals to attempt to narrow the discretion of judges in habeas corpus cases about immigration, the legal landscape is in flux.

Habeas outcomes

The legal concept of habeas corpus dates back over 800 years to the Magna Carta in England. For centuries, people in prison have used it to challenge confinement. Today, petitioners in civil immigration cases have used the legal mechanism to fight the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. Noncitizens have argued they should be released because of prolonged detention, a lack of access to bond hearings or inhumane conditions in the facilities where they are held.

We reviewed nearly 160 case filings in the four states covered by The Midwest Newsroom, but are not naming the immigrants who filed the petitions because nearly all of them still have immigration claims pending, and many expressed a fear of retaliation from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump administration has justified its large-scale arrests and mass raids on immigrant communities in several major cities by saying it is targeting the worst of the worst, but a review of the filings in habeas corpus cases undercuts those claims. Among the people held in ICE detention in these Midwestern states were people with pending asylum cases, no criminal history and parents of U.S.-born children.

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, recently contended in court documents that a man from Spain should be subject to mandatory detention and then deportation. He filed a habeas corpus petition while he was being held in the Cass County jail south of Omaha, Nebraska, after being arrested in January during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.

In 2022, under the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security had granted the man permission to stay in the U.S. because he was a minor who had suffered physical and emotional abuse by a parent.