It was a good weekend for former NC State football players in the NFL as both Jerricho Cotchery’s New York Jets and Adrian Wilson’s Arizona Cardinals advanced to the second round of the NFL Playoffs.
If you didn’t see the Jets-Bengals game on Saturday, Cotchery turned in a very impressive performance – figuratively painting the sidelines with amazing catch after amazing catch. The Jets now have to travel to San Diego to battle with Philip Rivers’ San Diego Chargers and the NY Post is figuring out the connection.
Jerricho Cotchery caught 21 of Philip Rivers’ 95 touchdown passes at North Carolina State. Cotchery, at Phillips High in Birmingham, also competed against Rivers of Athens High in the basketball playoffs.
“It was my job to stay on him the whole game,” Cotchery told me last year. “He was a great shooter, so I knew I had to stay in his face the whole game. I couldn’t even let him breathe. We won by almost 30 points.”
Asked what it was like playing in college with Rivers, Cotchery said: “Our senior year, we were playing Carolina; we ran the same play like eight times in a row. He ended up passing for almost 400 yards, and I ended up catching like 200 yards.”
Speaking of Rivers…Philip finished third in MVP voting this year as he earned his second NFL Pro Bowl appearance for the AFC. Philip has been featured in some nice interviews and videos over the last 7 to 10 days that we have not linked on the blog but have mentioned on the Message Boards. We would encourage you to click here for our “Tag” of Rivers on our forums and you can pick and a choose some threads/videos to review.
NC State was sent a very impressive group of three alums to this year’s Pro Bowl – Rivers, Wilson and Mario Williams. The Jets, Chargers and Texans all appear to have very bright futures; it will be nice to have some Wolfpackers to monitor in the NFL.
