Congrats to Bobby Okereke - Printable Version
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Congrats to Bobby Okereke - BostonCard - 02-24-2014
Winner of the 23rd annual Watkins Award to promote academic excellence among young African-American males. I would link, but the site is awful, and they need a better PR company, for I only found out about it on Stanford Football's twitter feed:
Stanford Football â@StanfordFball 25h
.@BobbyOkereke has won @watkinsaward as nation's top African American male high school scholar athlete! #cardclass14 pic.twitter.com/wXjPB8uIpp
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BC
Add: He joins former Stanford players Jamal-Rashad Patterson, Ekom Udofia, Michael Craven & Marcus McCutcheon as Watkins award winners, and 12 other finalists. Stanford now has 5 award winners and 17 finalists in the 23 year history of the award. Not quite Sears Director's Cup level dominance, but close.
Re: Congrats to Bobby Okereke - Bruce Wang - 02-26-2014
Nice article on the award.
http://msn.foxsports.com/west/story/watkins-award-winner-bobby-okereke-is-the-total-package-022414
Re: Congrats to Bobby Okereke - OutsiderFan - 02-26-2014
Udofia likely would have had a better football career were it not for his leg injury, but at least he was a solid starter for a couple years.
Aside from the pick-6 in the loss at Boston College in 2002 (game I attended - first dose of Buddyball - ugh), Craven had a very ordinary playing career.
I remember Marcus McCutcheon being a nice recruiting win, but don't remember him having any noticeable impact as a football player at Stanford.
Jamal-Rashad Patterson didn't produce much if anything until his RS Senior season, despite being a highly touted recruit himself.
So 3/4 previous Watkins winners at Stanford had surprisingly nondescript football careers.
A good reason to believe Mr. Okereke might turn out to have a more dynamic impact as a football player than those who's Watkins Award steps he is walking in, is that Stanford's program and coaching situation is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when the other Watkins winners were first brought to the farm.
Re: Congrats to Bobby Okereke - BostonCard - 02-26-2014
Yeah, I was going to comment on the "curse" of the Watkins award but thought better of denigrating our players. FWIW, Myron Rolle (who we recruited heavily) won the award, had a good career at FSU and went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship and get drafted by the Titans (though I don't think he ever played as a pro).
The Watkins page, as poorly designed as it is, has a list of some famous awardees who did quite well.
BC