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How long-time GA Jacob Peeler finally made it

It's hard to tell at first, but Jacob Peeler isn't joking.
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"I can actually go to Target and buy some deodorant and shampoo and not have to watch my budget," he says, hours after helping to put the finishing touches on a Top-30 2015 recruiting class for the Cal football team. "When you can get that stuff you know you made it."
Promoted almost a month ago from Graduate Assistant to Inside Wide Receivers coach, the Kosciusko, Mississippi product needs to pause -- for a long while -- before he can verbalize his first-ever job as an FBS assistant coach.
"Before you die they say your life flashes before your eyes -- it's kind of an accumulation like that," he says. "The opportunity to get my first job, my first full-time job at this university... I was completely overwhelmed. It was just the accumulation of years and years of hard work.
"Every person, whether it's coaching, or business -- whatever -- you set goals for yourself, and ever since I was young my goal was to be a Division I football coach."
A converted tight end, Peeler earned first team all-state and first team all-NJCAA Region 23 honors as well as All-American accolades while at Holmes Community College in 2002 and 2003. After signing with Louisiana Tech and redshirting in 2004, Peeler saw action in four games as a junior before starting all 13 games at center during his senior season, helping pave the way for more than 4,000 offensive yards. He also earned Academic All-WAC honors.
After short coaching stints at Itawamba Community College and Independence Community College, Peeler got his first FBS job of any kind in 2009, hired as a quality control assistant by then Louisiana Tech head coach Derek Dooley.
"Then Sonny (Dykes) and coach (Tony) Franklin all came in, and I got an opportunity to go with coach Dooley to Tennessee -- but I knew within the first month working with those guys that I wanted to be able to work with them. Coach Franklin took me under his wing and I stayed with them the entire time."
Quite literally. Peeler has been everything from a quality control assistant, to a strength and conditioning intern, to a graduate assistant over the last six years, including the last two in the Bay Area -- one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country.
The former Louisiana Tech offensive lineman says his parents have helped him through the struggles of trying to live on a college football graduate assistant's salary (the average FBS GA makes $37,000 a year) while living in Berkeley where the median rent price is $2,435 a month (or $29,220 a year).
For Peeler, though, the hours, salary, and grind that comes with being a graduate assistant never deterred him from the goal he set for himself as a young man.
"I think as a GA it's always -- in the back of your mind -- there's always that little thought that creeps in... will you ever make it?" he says. "I never thought about opting out, it never crossed my mind. You can get frustrated at times, money gets hard, especially out here, and you have have those thoughts, but I never got frustrated to the point that I thought I'd give up, that's just not part of my character, not how I grew up."
Peeler's accent is a thick southern one, the kind that usually accompanies a pitcher of sweet tea and a front porch.
It doesn't take long to see why DePriest Turner said this of Peeler: "Coach Jacob Peeler, this guy, without him I never would've come out to Cal. Just building the relationship with him, it's just been great. He's a great person, the best recruiter I've had thus far. Hands down the best. He's just a great person, you can tell he really just cares."
Or Brandon Singleton this: "Throughout this recruiting process it's been a real bumpy road. A lot of times coaches from other universities sold me dreams that weren't true. Coach Peeler has always been straight up and genuine -- he'll tell you the truth if it's good or bad. That's one thing that stuck with me, he's honest, unlike a lot of other people."
The son of a car dealer, Peeler says he grew up surrounded by coaches -- all friends of his dad.
"I wasn't a son of a coach, but I almost... was. I was a water boy as soon as I could do it, I just grew up in it, in the game, loving it. I always wanted to be a football coach."
And while he had the coaching part of the equation down early on, it wasn't until a sit-down with head coach Sonny Dykes and offensive coorindator Tony Franklin that Peeler added the recruiting part.
"You know we have a really strange job, we don't get to do much besides our job -- being a college football coach it means you coach a lot of football, you do a lot of recruiting, you don't really know what's going on in the world -- you don't really get a chance to watch Snoop Dogg's television show or any of that stuff," Dykes says during his Signing Day media conference. "It's kind of an interesting way to make a living, it's not suited for everyone, so when you get young people in your program and you get to watch them grow as student coaches and GAs, you kind of get a sense for whether they can handle it, and the second sense you get is a sense for is how good of a recruiter they're gonna be. A year ago I had a conversation with Jacob and coach Franklin did, too, and we said 'At some point we're gonna need you to take hold of this recruiting.'"
Peeler remembers the conversation, and he remembers it well.
"It was last year, a little bit before Signing Day last year, during Christmas break time," Peeler says. "Obviously coach (Rob) Likens, it was always a deal where he wanted to be a coordinator, we knew there was going to be an opportunity for him to go advance his career. The thing was, though, I wasn't proven as a recruiter. I knew deep down I could recruit. Even at LaTech, I was able to recruit a couple guys. But I had to prove myself, prove I could do it consistently."
And prove it he did.
Peeler turned his attention to Darius White, the top-rated JuCo cornerback in the 2015 class, and James Looney, a gargantuan defensive tackle at Wake Forest who had been granted his release and was eligible to transfer.
Peeler landed both.
"I'm one of those guys where I enjoy a challenge. I enjoy when coach gives me an assignment and I go and do it the best I can. That's why I started going after Darius White and James Looney, just trying to prove I could do it. I was always fascinated with recruiting, going through it myself, I had a lot of experiences, good and bad."
Dykes says Peeler has been able to lean on the good while utilizing a tool some of the older guys on the staff will just never be as comfortable with.
"I think young people have a good understanding of social media, certainly a better understanding than I do, and that's the way these young people communicate these days and [Jacob] was able to make those connections and start to build those relationships. Even though he wasn't allowed to be in their homes, he was talking to them every day," Dykes says. "Before long it became pretty apparent to me that he was driving the bus on a lot of these recruits."
Peeler followed up a productive 2014 cycle with commitments from high 3-star WR Brandon Singleton -- a one-time Georgia Tech commit -- and former 3-star Duke ATH pledge Trey Turner, plus cemented 3-star OL Ryan Gibson's commitment after Gibson's position coach, Zach Yenser, bolted for Kansas.
"When a job opportunity presented itself, you know, I know he can coach, I've seen him coach," Dykes says. "And then it became pretty obvious to me that not only was he an adequate recruiter, but he had an opportunity to be a really good recruiter. As we know, recruiting is important for college athletics, particularly college football, and he knocked it out of the park. So I'm excited to see what he can continue to do. Like I said the kids like him, the kids trust him, you know, he does a great job communicating and he really enjoys it."
Does he ever. And at all hours of the day.
"He has a lot of energy, knows how to be driven, knows how to be a good recruiter, he's gonna push any other schools to the limit," says Wide Receivers Coach and Recruiting Coordinator Pierre Ingram. "He lives on his own, so he talks to those guys when they're up late at night and other coaches are putting their kids to sleep."
Peeler says that his attention has already turned to the 2016 class, but he's also diving into position coaching duties (including watching every single one of last year's games, all the way through -- "just seeing how I can get those guys better") that he's already more than a little familiar with.
The LaTech and Mississippi State alum (Peeler earned a master's degree from MSU in kinesiology in 2008) -- who tutored current Green Bay Packer Richard Rodgers during his final season at Cal -- has been in (and will continue to be in) charge of the likes of Darius Powe, Stephen Anderson, and Bryce Treggs, all of whom reached out to Peeler after his hiring was made public.
But it was senior WR-turned-DB Bryce McGovern who made the choke-you-up phone call.
"'Coach,'" Peeler says, recounting what McGovern told him after he earned his first FBS assistant coaching job, "'you may have been a GA, but you've always been my inside receivers coach.'"
Now he's just one who can also afford a bottle of Pert Plus and a stick of Old Spice.
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