The Football Brainiacs

Picture from twitter.com/jonny_suave1

In the past couple weeks 2014 LB, Jonathan Thomas, out of Collins Hill High School in Suwanee Georgia has really blown up according to his coach. He’s had offers from Syracuse and Cincinnati and a number of schools have begun to take notice of this very athletic but very raw talent. One of the schools interested is Oklahoma.

So lets first talk about Jonathan’s size. Coach Reach confirmed that he is a at least 6’2 and probably closer to 6’3 and currently weighs around 210 lbs. Jonathan “looks the part”. Coach Reach mentioned more than a couple times how well built Jonathan is and said he’d probably play around 230 lbs in college. To me he looks like he can carry closer to 235 lbs. He’s very lean and long.

When I watched his film they lined him up in that loose 7 technique and would let him terrorize the QBs but Coach Reach said they can line him up all over the place. He’s obviously very explosive off the edge. But he plays great in space as well. He looks exceptionally athletic in coverage but he looked raw to me. He didn’t look particularly smooth in his drops even though it was obvious that he was physically good enough in space. I mentioned that concern to Coach Reach and he told me that Jonathan does have the great athleticism needed to play in space. In fact Collins Hill faces a lot of spread teams. But he admitted that Jonathan is indeed raw. The reason for that is Jonathan played soccer all his life. He just started playing football his sophomore year. “He was so athletic we talked him into playing football” Coach Reach commented, “and now he’s a football player and he loves the game.”

Coach Reach said that he is literally watching Jonathan grow up in front of his eyes. He said that a lot of kids who have played for a long time are peaking in their senior season. He said with Jonathan “there’s no telling how good he can be…he’s still getting better…the sky is the limit.” Coach Reach mentioned that Collins Hill beat one of the best teams in the state recently and he said that Jonathan had a tremendous game. It was another point of growth for the untapped talent and it sounds like there is plenty more growth to come. He’s only scratching the surface of what he can become. Coach Reach said Jonathan has had a great half season and they expect him to only continue to get better.

So why not more interest from big name schools before now? Well the reason for that is early on there were a lot of people concerned about whether Jonathan would qualify. Coach Reach said people dismissed him because of his grades but he said Jonathan is definitely good enough to play at the highest levels. Recently Jonathan has made major strides in his GPA so there is still a chance he will qualify. “He’s right there but it’s too early to tell.” It sounds like we will know more in Dec/Jan when first semester grades are released.

Recruiting coordinator, Sean Calhoun, at Collins Hill said coach Montgomery has been the coach in touch with them. He confirmed that Oklahoma has indeed offered and they are working to schedule an official visit for the Iowa State game on November 16th.

My personal take is that if this kid qualifies he is the kind of athlete you want at the LB position in the Big 12. If you can bring in a long lean kid like Jonathan with all that speed and coach him up you’ve got yourself a very interesting prospect who could probably play any of the LB spots, inside or out. Bottom line is you take athletes like that all day and figure it out later.

I’ll leave y’all with the last thing Sean Calhoun said to us about Jonathan “JT (Jonathan) is a wonderful kid and and y’all will be getting a gem and good person if he ends up in Norman…hit potential is limitless.”