In the NFL, Osi Umenyiora was a chiseled, 6-foot-3, 255-pound beast who wreaked havoc on opposing offensive lines to the tune 85 career sacks, 106 QB hits, 78 tackles for loss and two Pro Bowl selections. In high school — well, he wasn't any of that.
"I played my senior year [at Auburn] High School. I wasn't particularly good because I only really played that one year," Umenyiora explained on the "Green Light with Chris Long" podcast. "I came from Nigeria so I didn't really play football until I was 15, so I only played one year of high school football really, which was my senior year. I'm done, no scholarship offers, no colleges came to see me. We were 1-9 as a team. We were a terrible football team.
"And to be completely honest, I wasn't really good."
But Umenyiora was big. He was strong. He was freakishly athletic. And, thankfully, he was a licensed driver.
That last point may be the most important of them all, as Umenyiora would go on to explain that it ultimately led to a bizarre scholarship offer from Troy, where he'd eventually play in college and carve out his path to football stardom.
"I had this car that my sister had given me, so I'm driving her car to school every day," Umenyiora said. "I already had my driver's license, and I was supposed to go to this class called driver's education in high school, but I already had my driver's license so I was like, I'm not going to driver's ed when I got my driver's license. It didn't make any sense, so I wasn't going."
That's pretty sound reasoning, but it didn't keep Umenyiora from landing in the principal's office as a result. His punishment? In-school suspension — defined as the instance "in which a child is temporarily removed from his or her regular classroom(s) for at least half a day but remains under the direct supervision of school personnel" — for two weeks. Supervising the suspension was the high school's running backs coach, James Joseph, who would ultimately go on to fill that same coaching role at Troy.
As soon as Umenyiora sat down, Joseph asked him what he wanted to do with his life following high school graduation and suggested that with his athleticism, a future in football certainly made sense. It made so much sense, in fact, that Joseph called a friend — current Eagles defensive line coach Tracy Rocker, who was Joseph's Auburn teammate and a fellow coach at Troy University — to give Umenyiora a look. Luckily, he was in town, and he interrupted Umenyiora's suspension to give him a tryout of sorts.
"He's like, 'Oh man, you are a big kid,'" Umenyiora recalled. "He threw on some tape, he's like, 'Damn, man, you sure don't know what you're doing. Can you run?'"
Fortunately, Umenyiora could do just that, and he showed off his speed with a 40-yard dash — one at which he remembers clocking in around the 4.85-second mark, impressive for a 270-pound high schooler — and that was that. Rocker called up the then-Troy head coach, Larry Blakeney, and what Rocker shared in that brief phone call was enough for the program to extend Umenyiora an offer.
How's that for a disciplinary punishment for skipping driver's ed?
"This all took, like, three hours," Umenyiora remembered, laughing. "I promise you, I sh-- you not, from me stepping into in-school suspension, I got a scholarship to go to Troy."
Umenyiora ranks second all-time in Troy history with 38.5 tackles for loss and also finds himself in the top ten in sacks. That production led to a relatively high draft stock, good enough that the Giants selected him with the No. 56 overall pick in 2003.
Check out the full interview for more stories from Umenyiora, including his take on the most impressive technical pass-rusher in the league today.
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