The Atlanta Falcons gave up a lot of draft capital to get Julio Jones way back in the 2011 NFL Draft, reckoning that he was a generational receiver who could lift their offense. They were proven right on that, but I don’t think even the Falcons suspected that the man they were drafting would be so big, so fast, and so gifted as to inspire awe even in the hyper-competitive world of the NFL.
Yet he has, and it appears to have been this way for Julio for essentially his whole life. In this fascinating new profile from Sports Illustrated, they explore Julio’s upbringing, from the time he beat a grown man fresh out of prison 15-2 in one-on-one pickup basketball as a teen, to the way he would seem to hover above the rim during basketball games, to the way Nick Saban talked about him as the kind of athlete Alabama could build a program around.