Who would have been Brady Quinn’s favorite target: Jeff Samardzija or King James?
While scanning some college basketball news Friday evening I came across the story that Bronny James, the oldest son of NBA great LeBron, is said to be down to three potential colleges. It appears it’ll be between Ohio State, Oregon, and USC for Bronny.
I recalled something about LeBron once speaking about Notre Dame and didn’t recall the context. So I did what we all do these days – performed a Google search of “LeBron James Notre Dame” and found out that he was once a recruiting target of the Irish. It wasn’t for basketball though and it wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill assistant that offered him a scholarship.
According to a 2012 story written by Melissa Rohlin in the Los Angeles Times, it was Notre Dame wide receivers coach [autotag]Urban Meyer[/autotag] that extended LeBron a football scholarship all the way back in 2000. James was coming off a sophomore football season where he secured 42 receptions for 820 yards and seven touchdowns.
“Thank you very much, I’ll consider it” is what Meyer said in 2012 about how James reacted to the offer. It didn’t take long for his high school football coach to laugh it away, however.
“I didn’t know what he was laughing at,” Meyer said, “so we went down and sat in a room and he said, Do you know who that is?’ and I said, ‘No’ and he said, ‘LeBron James’ and I said, ‘Who’s LeBron James?’ and he said, ‘He’ll be the next Michael Jordan’ and I go, ‘Come on.'” – Los Angeles Times in 2012
James obviously didn’t take Meyer up on the offer. He played just one more year of high school football, catching 61 passes for over 1,200 yards and scoring 16 times as a junior. The soon-to-be top-overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft didn’t play football as a senior.
Meyer didn’t argue about James choosing the right path, but had he gone football then Meyer thinks he would have been great at that, too.
“A first-round draft pick, a Hall of Famer,” Meyer said. “Obviously he’s a winner.”
James obviously made the right call but for a second just think about how he may have looked along with [autotag]Jeff Samardzija[/autotag], [autotag]Maruice Stovall[/autotag], and [autotag]Rhema McKnight[/autotag] while [autotag]Brady Quinn[/autotag] threw them all passes in Charlie Weis’ offense.
Check out a few pictures below from LeBron and Bronny’s Ohio State visit during Notre Dame’s season opening game against the Buckeyes this past September.
[lawrence-related id=59641,27265,22290]
