They were supposed to be in Las Vegas Thursday night, but it felt like they should have been right there since this will always be remembered as the draft of the Area Code T-Shirt. Joe Burrow wore a simple white one with the southeastern Ohio digits of 740 enclosed in an outline of the state of Ohio. Jimmy Burrow could sense this was more than a big night, but a historic one.
“It did mean more,” Jimmy Burrow said about this draft. “For the NFL to stick with this, it’s a credit to them. It’s a big moment for a lot of different people. It’s an outlet for sports fans across the nation to get their mind off it. We’ll never forgot how hard the times are, but we’ll remember how everybody embraces pro football.”
His son’s feelings for his hometown were made quite clear when he picked up his Heisman Trophy last December. The city’s mayor, Steve Patterson, recalled the part of his speech that meant everything to Athens County took just 32 seconds to say. Grown men and women living in the 740 area code called each other to weep.
“Coming from southeast Ohio it’s a very impoverished area and the poverty rate is almost two times the national average,” Burrow said that night in New York. “There’s so many people there that don’t have a lot and I’m up here for all those kids in Athens and Athens County that go home to not a lot of food on the table, hungry after school. You guys can be up here, too.”
Those words spawned Facebook donations of half a million dollars to the local food pantry, and you have to feel like Burrow is going to be talking about more plans like that judging by what he said Thursday night as the Heisman looked over his shoulder while explaining how the shirt came to be.
“It was mine,” Joe Burrow said of the idea. ” I signed with Nike and they made some great custom stuff for me, and this was something I kind of wanted to represent, and we have some more things in the works the next couple weeks as…
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