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Meeting at bar helped lead to Saints drafting player


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Bushrod marches uniquely to NFL

Meeting at bar helped lead to Saints drafting Towson's star tackle

By Don Markus

Sun Reporter

Originally published May 24, 2007

 

Most NFL prospects are discovered through a traditional process that begins with scouts coming to practices and ends with players being invited to the league's combine in Indianapolis and workouts for individual teams.

 

 

Then there is the less-conventional way the New Orleans Saints found Towson's Jermon Bushrod, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound offensive tackle taken in the fourth round in last month's draft.

 

"The computers," Saints assistant head coach Joe Vitt said, "had nothing to do with this one."

 

The process started over beers at a Cockeysville bar two weeks before the draft.

 

Vitt, a star linebacker for the Tigers during the 1970s, was in the area planning his annual summer crab feast in Ocean City.

 

During cocktails at a bar on Padonia Road, Towson coach Gordy Combs mentioned to Vitt that officials from 20 NFL teams had come in for the school's pro day. At least five offensive line coaches came specifically to see Bushrod, who later would visit nearly a dozen teams for interviews and workouts.

 

"I told Joe there were a lot of people in to look at him," Combs said. "I said he did really well, he ran a 4.9 [in the 40-yard dash]. I guess he went back and said something. That Tuesday [before the draft], Doug Marrone, the offensive coordinator and line coach, came up and worked Jermon out for a short period of time and watched video."

 

Said Vitt: "I thought that if all those guys at Towson raved about him - and some of them coached me - there must something to this kid."

 

Five days later, Bushrod became the first Towson player to be drafted since 1994 and the school's fourth overall. At No. 125, Bushrod became the highest selection in school history.

 

About a month has passed, but the whirlwind of finding his way from the obscurity of a program in what was formerly known as Division I-AA to the likelihood of playing for one of the NFL's top teams still stuns a young man who grew up in the backwoods of King George, Va.

 

"I didn't think I would be at this point at all," said Bushrod, 22, who paid his way his first two years of college when Towson was transitioning from the then-nonscholarship Patriot League to the Atlantic 10. "I thought after two or three years coming out of high school, hearing from different people that I had the size and footwork and stuff like that, I thought I may have a shot, but never this."

 

Continued...

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During cocktails at a bar on Padonia Road, Towson coach Gordy Combs mentioned to Vitt that officials from 20 NFL teams had come in for the school's pro day. At least five offensive line coaches came specifically to see Bushrod, who later would visit nearly a dozen teams for interviews and workouts.

 

I don't understand why the Saints didn't have a scout at the school's pro day in the first place, especially considering the AHC is an alum. :D

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