NBANFL

What If LeBron James Were A Football Player?

The NBA’s going to miss the first two weeks of its regular season and quite possibly more, so LeBron James doesn’t have a job at the moment. So what’s a guy to do? Well, LeBron was a tremendous wide receiver for his high school football team, and his passion for that game runs deep enough that he recently participated in a high school football practice in full pads, just because he wanted to get back out on the field. Oh, and today he tweeted this at ESPN’s John Clayton:

@ClaytonESPN When is the deadline for a team to sign a free agent?

Oh LeBron, you tease. And let’s face it – that’s what this is. As fun as it is to imagine LeBron trying his hand at the NFL, it’s also hard to imagine. LeBron is, at worst, one of the few very best basketball players on the planet. The second the lockout ends, he’s one of the NBA’s marquee players. Basketball is his livelihood. It’s what he does. The NFL’s not about to get in the way unless LeBron decides he’s making an abrupt career change. We’re not counting on that.

RELATED: The latest in LeBron’s image rehab through self-deprecation: this McDonald’s commercial.

But man, it really is fun to think about, isn’t it? It’s so fun to think about that a couple years ago, ESPN’s Tim Graham did just that. And he was met with a lot of intrigue at the prospect of LeBron as a football player, and several people who thought he could have succeeded at the game’s highest level. He’s got the physical tools – he’s got the physical tools to do pretty much anything he wants. And though it was only high school, there’s evidence LeBron can dominate a football game if he sets his mind to it.

Would it be an easy transition, were LeBron to try it? Of course not. LeBron’s a 6-8, 260-or-so-pound guy with tremendous strength, but he’s never been hit by an NFL player. He’s got the physical capacity to take – and dish out – a beating, but he’d be in for a wakeup call if, say, Ray Lewis got his hands on him. And as good a football player as LeBron was in high school, he wasn’t perfect. No matter the physical tools, there’d be an adjustment period.

But the guess here is that after that adjustment period, LeBron would make some plays that wowed us all. Eric Mangini seemed to think so. And as Graham noted, the idea of a guy who never played college football succeeding in the NFL isn’t without precedent. If LeBron tried to play in the NFL, we’d be riveted…and ultimately, we think LeBron would be successful. Too bad his tweet to Clayton was just trolling all of us.

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