Julio Jones is easily one of the best receivers in the NFL (I’d say the best but then someone would rightfully point out Antonio Brown exists and then we’d have a long fruitless debate about it), but in Thursday’s game, Jones found himself on the other side of the ball. After Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore picked off Matt Ryan, Jones legged it out and put a solid hit on Lattimore to end the play.
The path Jones has to take to track down Lattimore is impressive, and it’s just another piece of evidence that Jones’s abilities are unreal. A couple of weeks ago, Sports Illustrated had a feature on the WR and peppered in some high-school anecdotes about the kid named Quintorris. I read this one 10 times:
Here’s one more, Sam Jones says, that you just have to hear. It happened in Mobile, that same season, when Julio drove baseline against a 6' 8" defender and took off like a NASA rocket. “He kept going up, and up, and up,” says Sam. “His whole body was over the rim. On the way down, the [defender] got a little bit of the ball, and Julio took the guy’s arm and the ball through the goal—he dunked them both. He broke the kid’s hand, it was so bad. He took him all the way through the [basket] with him.”
Okay, that has to be horseshit. Julio Jones didn’t break a kid’s hand by dunking his arm through the hoop...right?