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Like so many other professional athletes, Matthew Stafford was a two-sport star growing up. He was obviously very good at football, but he was also quite the baseball player as a kid. So much so that he thought he would actually pursue a career in baseball over football before he emerged as an outstanding quarterback in high school.
He told reporters exactly that, saying he just became a little bit better at football in high school and obviously earned a scholarship to the University of Georgia.
“Growing up, I probably would’ve told you that’s what I was going to do until high school hit,” Stafford said of playing baseball. “Baseball at that point in our lives – travel baseball, you were getting recruited a whole lot more. Now, every eighth-grader in America’s got a D-1 scholarship for football, but that wasn’t the case when we were kids, so you didn’t really know if you were that good at football or not until you played on varsity and somebody offered you a scholarship. Growing up, I loved baseball, loved football. But I probably would’ve thought I was going to play baseball and then football just kind of happened to be something I was a little bit better at, so.”
Stafford was a five-star recruit out of Highland Park in Dallas, Texas in the class of 2006. He was the sixth-best recruit, according to 247Sports and received offers from Florida State, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas and Oklahoma State.
He ultimately picked Georgia where he threw for 7,731 yards and 51 touchdowns in three seasons before being drafted first overall by the Lions in 2009.
Given the career he’s had, it seems like Stafford picked the right career path on the gridiron.
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