quote:
Before he became the starting quarterback at Ole Miss and sliced up SEC defenses every weekend, and before he orchestrated the most thrilling comeback in the College Football Playoff, Trinidad Chambliss was the exact opposite of a game-breaking superstar.

“He looked like a dweeb, for lack of a better word,” said Tony Annese, his first college head coach. “A skinny, little, frail-looking dude—there was a reason he was a ‘zero-star.’”

Zero-star recruits usually wind up as end-of-the-bench scrubs who spend less time on the field than the marching band. Which is why Chambliss’s first stop in college football came a long way away from the national spotlight, at Division II Ferris State. Even when he transferred to Ole Miss in April, he seemed sure to spend the year on the sideline as a backup.....

At Forest Hills Northern High School in Grand Rapids, Mich., Chambliss barely qualified as a football prospect. Although he played quarterback, he was so scrawny that it was hard for even the most optimistic coach to imagine how he would survive a college pass rush.

Luckily, though, Ferris State coach Annese had scouted Chambliss somewhere other than the gridiron: the basketball court, where Chambliss flashed court vision so advanced that it seemed as though he had eyes in the back of his head. That was a characteristic that Annese—who runs an option-heavy offense at Ferris State predicated on the quarterback making split-second decisions—thought he could put to good use.

“There’s quarterbacks with unbelievable arms who can’t see the field,” Annese said. “Trinidad—he just sees everything.”

Annese’s hunch proved right. At Ferris, Chambliss spent long hours bulking up in the weight room and soon transformed into one of the best Division II players in the country: a whirlwind quarterback who could outrace defenders and pick apart coverage like a point guard.

But after Chambliss carried the Bulldogs to the Division II national title last season—racking up 26 touchdowns with his arm and 25 with his legs—college football’s most valuable secret was out.

“The phones started ringing,” Chambliss’s father, Trent, said. “Schools all over the country, big-time programs.”

WSJ

The WSJ had a story many moons ago about Michael Jordan. It reported Jordan had far superior peripheral vision. One reason he seemed so quick was because he literally saw things before other people did.