Football
James attended Stratford High School in Houston, Texas, where he was a star on Stratford's 1978 Texas class 4A championship football team, setting the single-season Texas 4A rushing record with 2,411 yards gained in 15 games. James, a running back, also attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. In the 1980 Holiday Bowl (known as the Miracle Bowl), James' offensive production of 225 rushing yards and 9.9 yards/carry were not enough as SMU lost the Holiday Bowl while he set records that stood for 13 and 15 years respectively. In 1982, he scored on a 96-yard touchdown reception to set a new record as the longest scoring play in Southwest Conference history.
After his senior season in 1982, James was drafted by the Washington Federals of the USFL with the 4th overall pick in the spring league's inaugural draft. James subsequently signed with the Federals a week after being drafted.
His first pro season in Washington saw James and the Feds struggle to a 4–14 record. He rushed for 823 yards and 4 TDs in 14 games (starting 14). He also caught 40 passes out of the backfield that season.
The following year, 1984, James suffered a knee injury on Sunday, March 4, in a game at RFK against the Philadelphia Stars. He was placed on injured reserve later that week. He was subsequently released by the cash-strapped Federals a month later, allowing him to join the Patriots for their training camp in August that year.
According to James, speaking on an ESPN broadcast of the Florida State Seminoles vs. North Carolina Tar Heels, the first player to tackle him in the NFL was Lawrence Taylor.
In the 1985–86 season, James rushed for 1,227 yards, becoming the last white player to rush for more than 1,000 yards in a season, until Peyton Hillis reached that mark in 2010. In week 2 against the Chicago Bears he caught a 90-yard touchdown pass from Tony Eason which was the longest touchdown from scrimmage in Patriots history at the time. He was a major factor in the Patriots' 31–14 upset win over the Miami Dolphins in the AFC title game, rushing for a career postseason high of 105 yards. However, he was dominated by the Chicago Bears' defense in Super Bowl XX, which held him to only 1 yard on 5 carries.
James retired from the NFL after the 1988 season, having rushed for 2,469 yards and eleven touchdowns in his five seasons with the Patriots. He also had 819 yards receiving and two touchdown catches.
Read more about this topic: Craig James (American Football)
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)