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Jeremiyah Love is expected to be one of the most closely watched players when the 2026 NFL Draft begins this evening. The Notre Dame football star, 20, grew up in St. Louis, where he played football, basketball, and track at Christian Brothers College High School, and won the 2025 Doak Walker Award as the nation’s top running back.
Running backs aren’t normally drafted early, but the betting market suggests Jeremiyah may be the exception. “Love has been bet heavily in the third, fourth and fifth positions,” Joey Feazel, lead football trader for Caesars Sportsbook, told ESPN. “But both the draft betting market and news coming out of the league suggest Love is a special running back that may be the most talented in this draft.”
In his final college season last fall, Jeremiyah recorded 52 carries for 284 yards and three touchdowns in his final college season, adding eight receptions for 79 yards and a score. He finished third in the voting for the 2025 Heisman Trophy Award.
While always athletically gifted, Love has struggled with focusing his energy where it needs to be sometimes. Though he has never officially been diagnosed with ADHD or obsessive-compulsive disorders, Love and his parents, L’Tonya and Jason, have been open about Jeremiyah’s journey with neurodiversity.
“As a kid, when you’d be ostracized or excluded—it doesn’t feel great,” Jeremiyah told ESPN in 2025. “But I’m thankful I was that way. I never got into the wrong things, never hung out with the wrong people. The way I was protected me from that. My parents did, too. I’m thankful for how I was raised and who I was as a person. It just goes to show, don’t be afraid to be yourself, because that’s the best thing you can be.”
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Jeremiyah Love at Notre Dame Stadium in November.
Below, get to know Jeremiyah Love’s parents, L’Tonya and Jason.
Meet Jeremiyah’s mom, L’Tonya:
YouTube/ESPN
L’Tonya Love in the ESPN College GameDay interview.
A former sergeant with the St. Louis Police Department, L’Tonya has always remained closely attuned to her son’s social development throughout his high school and college years. She even pushed him to attend high school prom, and threatened to accompany him herself if he didn’t bring a date.
However, both she and her husband had to work long hours while Jeremiyah was still in school, which created distance—both physically and emotionally–between them and their son. Jeremiyah wanted to see them more at his football games, and eventually he wrote a note asking him to be there more.
“It was heartbreaking,” L’Tyona said last year. “I was ashamed, feeling like, hey, I had no idea that he felt like I wasn’t there. So I decided to make more room for that. It’s probably the most important letter I ever received.” After that, L’Tonya has been at almost every game. Even further, when Jeremiyah was in college at Notre Dame, she almost moved to South Bend to be closer to him, according to a profile about Jeremiyah in The Athletic.
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Jeremiyah with his parents when he was young.
There was a reason for this. As described in the feature, Jeremiyah was a self-described introvert who requested a single room in student housing so he could “retreat to his own space without apology.” He had difficulty coming out of his shell and socializing with his teammates, but his parents still visited him at college as often as they could. “There was a time when we thought we’d be taking care of Jeremiyah for the rest of our lives,” L’Tonya said. “We didn’t know if he was capable of showing emotional attachment. Jeremiyah was always kind of alone.”
L’Tonya further spoke about her son’s childhood on ESPN’s College GameDay ahead of a Notre Dame game in September 2025, describing the confusion and concern she felt as Jeremiyah struggled to articulate his feelings. “He would tell me, ‘Ma, I don’t feel emotion,’” she said. “It’s like he didn’t feel happiness, he didn’t feel grief, he didn’t feel any of that. I was like, ‘Ya, you do,’ but he was like, ‘No, I don’t.’ Jeremiyah was perceived, at times, to be standoffish, a loner, not a team player.”
The family eventually reached out to their family doctor. “We spoke with the pediatrician who had seen Jeremiyah since he was a baby and he kind of leaned into that Jeremiyah could be on the spectrum, that he could be higher-functioning,” L’Tonya explained.
Meet Jeremiyah’s dad, Jason:
YouTube/ESPN
Jason Love in the ESPN College GameDay interview.
Jason, also a former St. Louis police officer and an Army veteran, has been coaching him since he was six years old. They also maintain a regular pregame ritual in which Jeremiyah will look for his father in the stands for some words of affirmation before every game.
Once Jason and L’Tonya understood their son’s triggers and motivations, they found a way to channel his energy rather than suppress it. The family chose not to pursue a formal diagnosis after the doctor’s assessment. “The doctor advised us to just continue to let him be who he is, and learn how to adapt to it and encourage him,” Jason told The South Bend Tribune. “Don’t try to change him, let him change the world.”
Sports, therefore, became one place for Jeremiyah to manage his sensory output and behaviors. “If you challenge his competitive nature, he turns into a different creature,” Jason said. “He wants to dominate.”
Away from football, Jeremiyah has been a lifelong devoted anime fan. “I just fell in love with it,” he told ESPN. “I stumbled upon it on Netflix when I was about 6. As a kid, I liked cartoons, and anime looks like cartoons but it’s not. I kept watching more and more, and I got addicted.” Jason describes anime as a space where his son could inhabit a different world entirely: “It was his chance to be in a different place, a different world, where he can release all of his powers.”
The two are now working on a comic book together, built around the idea of turning perceived limitations into strengths. “That’s the whole point of the comic, of the message we’re trying to put out,” Jason said. “Sometimes kids like Jeremiyah are labeled, but he reverses all those things—all the doubters and cynics. That’s his superpower.”
Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at @rk.passport.