The Detroit Lions selected Ohio State Buckeyes cornerback Jeff Okudah with the third overall selection in the 2020 NFL Draft, and they’re hoping that he’ll be a major part of the team moving forward.
But how did he first learn his craft? Interestingly enough, in the same way that many of us who weren’t as fortunate to be able to put it into real life practice.
As a third grader in Parsippany, New Jersey, he rented a copy of Madden NFL 07 at Blockbuster Video (talk about a blast from the past), and the rest was history.
“I had never watched football before,” Okudah said. ” … My thing at the time was more winning and losing. I loved games that I could win. So playing it, I was losing at first to the computer and I didn’t understand the rules. “But the competitor in me just wanted to keep getting better at the game.”
“I tell people all the time I learned the rules from Madden. Just me knowing about players, like old players back in the day, is literally through Madden. Because I played so much Madden, I started getting up to watch SportsCenter and all those highlights.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere!
According to Okudah, it was then he made his choice that playing football for real was his life path.
“What happened was, my birthday was in February,” Okudah said. “So for five or six years, maybe even longer than that, every time it’s my birthday I would just ask my dad, ‘Can I get the Madden when it comes out in August?’
“So I would have to wait six months to redeem my own birthday present.”
Suppose he had grabbed a game of a different game – would he still be playing football? Who knows? We’re glad he went with Madden!
“It’s pretty cool how it played out that way,” Okudah said. “Because who knows if I had grabbed a baseball game, I might have never been introduced to football.”
– – Quotes via Michael Rothstein of ESPN ESPN – –
