Anthony Munoz had three knee surgeries over the course of his collegiate playing career at USC. Not one, not two. Three. In modern times, if an NFL prospect has three knee surgeries on his medical file, teams are not going to take him with the No. 3 overall pick in the NFL draft. The idea of making a massive investment in a player who has repeatedly run into injury problems and has not been able to play a large number of games just doesn’t hold a lot of weight.
Munoz, if he was a 2015 or 2020 draft prospect, would have fallen out of the first round, probably out of the second round. Three knee surgeries would have knocked him far down the draft board.
When you listen to Munoz talk about the 1980 NFL draft with Tim Prangley and Rick Anaya on Trojan Conquest Live, you can tell he wasn’t absolutely convinced he was going to be a top-five pick or even a first-round pick. The injuries were a concern. Munoz was intent on doing whatever he could to prove to an NFL team that he could contribute. That’s not how a top-five pick would think about his place on the draft board. He really didn’t know what was about to happen at that draft.
Why did Munoz go at No. 3 in that draft, despite his injury-marred run at USC? It’s very simple: Paul Brown, who won a national championship as the head coach at Ohio State nearly four decades earlier, was at the 1980 Rose Bowl in which Munoz and USC played against the top-ranked Buckeyes.
Paul Brown got to see with his own two eyes how dominant Munoz was. The eye test enabled Brown and the Bengals to look past the medical file and see that Munoz was the real deal. The right man was watching Anthony Munoz. It reshaped his entire pro football career, and by extension, his life journey.
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