Florida Attempted To Recruit Teddy Bridgewater. . .As A Wide Receiver

On this National Signing Day, ESPN's Ben Goessling passed along a story that I hadn't heard about everybody's favorite quarterback and his travels to the world of college football.

It turns out that, when young Teddy Bridgewater was being courted by college football programs throughout the land, one of the schools that had an interest in him was the University of Florida. But it was a markedly different kind of interest.

One of the questions we asked quarterbacks was whether any college recruited them to play a position other than quarterback. When I talked to Bridgewater for the survey, he mentioned that the University of Florida recruited him as a wide receiver -- as then-coach Urban Meyer was in the habit of doing with some quarterbacks back then.

Bridgewater is 6-foot-3, of course, but he ran pedestrian 40 times between 4.67 and 4.86 seconds before the NFL draft last year. He would have needed to work on his speed to be a receiver, and probably add some bulk.

I'm not sure why, exactly, Urban Meyer thought that he would have been better off with Bridgewater at wide receiver than he would have been keeping him at quarterback. A look at the 2011 Florida roster (which would have been Bridgewater's freshman season) shows a collection of quarterbacks named Jeff Driskel, John Brantley, Jacoby Brissett, and Chandler Carr. Yeah, I don't know who any of those people are, but I'm relatively sure that Teddy Bridgewater is better than all of them at the whole "playing quarterback" thing, and was probably better than them at it back in 2011, too.

My favorite part of the exchange, though? Bridgewater's response.

Those two things came through at the end of this little story: I was chatting in the locker room with Vikings PR assistant Sam Newton, who used to work at Florida, when Bridgewater walked by. We told Bridgewater what we were discussing, and Newton asked him if he thought he would have made it to this level as a receiver. Bridgewater calmly replied, "I would have," and he kept walking.

And you know something? He's probably right.

But I think I speak for pretty much all Minnesota Vikings fans when I say that Bridgewater going to Louisville and not Florida and not having to worry about converting to wide receiver has worked out just fine to this point.