It has already been broughten to the Redskins' practice squad: freshly-inked running back Quinn Porter is a former college cheerleader, complete with the nickname "Pom-Poms."
Not that we suggest you use it, or that there's any reason the 6-foot, 205-pound running back should be sheepish about it. No, sir.
See, Pom-P -- er, Porter -- wasn't highly recruited out of his Los Angeles high school. Letters to USC went unanswered. So he enrolled at tiny Division II Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and set off to bide his first season without football as a partial qualifier.
It all changed when Porter was approached by two female students during orientation.
"Our conversation and everything was going cool," he told the Wisconsin State Journal, "and then the subject of cheerleading popped up. I was like, ‘What? You want me?'"
"I was kind of spooked," he later relayed to Packers.com. "I said, 'I'm not a cheerleader, I'm a football player.' But they were like, 'Well, we'll give you scholarship money for the football and basketball seasons, room and board on away games, ...'
"So I thought about it for three days and called my parents up, and they said, 'If that's what you want to do, go ahead and do it.'"
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Porter said his time on the sidelines came in handy for observing Stillman's offense and scouting their opponents. While he may not offer up that particular chapter of his college experience, he said he regrets nothing.
"I found my niche," he said of doing flips, round-offs and back handsprings, and performing lifting stunts. "And the following year, I was out there, I was out there trying to compete."
Hey, whatever it takes. We've seen Ray Lewis do ballet in spandex, and there's no shame in that. At least not to his face.
Porter's road from jazz hands to carries wasn't easy, even in DII. He was put at wide receiver and redshirted the very next season. He didn't play the first four games of the next. But when the team's first-string running back went down with injury, the kid with the flips asked the coach for a chance in the backfield.
He scored on his first three practice carries, officially becoming the coolest male cheerleader ever -- and going on to rush for 1,541 yards over the next two-and-a-half seasons.
Porter comes to the Redskins from the Packers' scrap heap, replacing the short-lived Javarris James experiment. And if it doesn't work out, perhaps another position switch can be arranged: Those Redskins cheerleaders are never going to toss themselves.
