When Odell Beckham Jr. says he made 2015 NFL All-Pro cornerback Josh Norman “relevant” thanks to their battle during week 15 of the 2015 season, he sounds like a jilted ex-lover.
To watch the footage now, coupled with Beckham’s endless quotes since then (a sign in itself that he was bested that day, like an ex-girlfriend who can’t move on with her life), it becomes obvious what happened: Beckham, for possibly the first time in his life as an athlete, ran into a player that was better than him, and he didn’t know how to handle it.
As Troy Aikman said during the broadcast, “Norman has owned [Beckham] in this game.”
“People have been underestimating me since high school. And I don’t mean that in the cliched way. I had to walk-on to even play in college,” Norman told me in an interview for DiscoverBoating.com.”That by itself was so much work. And I have just continued to work from then on.”
Norman was an All-State football player in South Carolina but received zero scholarship offers and eventually walked on at Coastal Carolina, a school that boasted only two prior NFL draft picks in its history.