Allen Iverson was one of the NBA’s biggest superstars, but if things bounced a little differently, he could have been torching the NFL instead.
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Iverson was picked first overall in the 1996 NBA Draft, and he quickly went on to prove why he was deserving of that pick. He averaged 23.5 points per game en-route to finishing as the rookie of the year in the 1996-97 season, and from there on things only went up.
He was a scoring master, never averaging under 20 points a game until his later years when age had caught up to him. He made the NBA Finals in the 2000-01 season even taking a game off the Lakers when nobody had pegged the 76ers to do that.
However, Iverson also played a little bit of football back in the day, and according to him, he’d be better at it than he was at basketball.
Allen Iverson Says He Could Have Dominated In The NFL
Iverson is not alone in being a multi-sport athlete during high school or college. Many NBA or NFL players have played the other sport or even other ones like baseball.
Football was Iverson’s thing, however, and not only was he a multi-sport athlete, but he was also a multi-position athlete as he played almost every position on the football field: wide receiver, safety, defensive back, punt-returner, and quarterback too.
Iverson sat down with Shannon Sharpe one day to discuss several topics and his high school football playing days came up which led to Iverson saying this:
“Not being cocky, not being arrogant. I think…no, I know that I would have been a better player in football than I was in basketball”
According to a VICE report, this take may not even be that far fetched. He was a football star, and games would sell out just because he was playing.
“When Iverson was a five-foot-six, 145-pound eighth grader, hundreds of fans would come out to watch him play for Bethel’s junior varsity team. The next year, he started at wide receiver and safety on the varsity. In his sophomore season, Kozlowski moved Iverson to quarterback but still played him on defense.
“As a defensive back, Iverson tied a Virginia record by intercepting five passes in one game and helped Bethel to an undefeated regular season before losing in the first round of the playoffs.”
We have no idea how Iverson would have panned out in the NFL, but the closest we can get to it is looking at his high school football highlights because they sure are a treat.
