MIAMI - Look at the physique on Dolphins" sixth-round draft pick Donald Thomas - short, massive neck; chest deeper than John Donne’s poetry; Exxon-profit-sized upper arms - and you would be excused for thinking Thomas (6-3, 303 pounds) must be a football player.
Which is ironic because, until a few years ago, the only thing Thomas couldn’t be was a football player.
Nothing outside pads, a playbook and a room at training camp are guaranteed for sixth-round picks. But the idea that Thomas might be a few months from being on an NFL roster a few years after being a walk-on at the University of Connecticut - with almost no high school football in his background - comes off as one of those Rudy-esque stories they reject in Hollywood these days.
"It’s crazy," Thomas said. "It doesn’t even register. It doesn’t seem like it’s real."
As a matter of fact, if Thomas had not been drafted, he figures he still would be in the classroom.
"Hopefully, I’d probably be substitute-teaching in the Bridgeport Conn. school system and hopefully getting some acceptance letters from some law schools and getting ready to go to law school in the fall," he said.
Thomas, like Dolphins coach Tony Sparano, is from New Haven, Conn. In addition to the pizza joints - "We talked a little bit about some pizza places on Wooster Street in New Haven, Sally’s or Pepe’s Pizza. He knows them well. That’s not good," Sparano joked - the city has a couple of universities: New Haven, where Sparano went and later served as head football coach, and a pretty fair school called Yale.
With that institution partnered with New Haven Hill Regional Career Magnet School, it helped make Hill Regional one of the places for the academically inclined.
