Former USC receiver Marqise Lee visited Detroit this week and said he had a great time getting to know the Lions’ coaching staff, saying afterward that he’d be thrilled to go there -- or anywhere else.
“Think I did pretty well, left a good impression, so hopefully, at the end of the day, I end up going there. If not, wherever I end up,” Lee said. “Honestly, to tell you the truth, I’m going to be happy wherever I go down. If it’s 10, it’s 10. If it’s 29, it’s 29. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as I get the opportunity to actually go out there and play.”
Lee had a brilliant sophomore season in 2012, catching 118 catches for 1,721 yards and 14 touchdowns and winning the Biletnikoff Award as the best receiver in college football. If not for the NFL’s rule requiring players to be three years out of high school before they can be drafted, he probably would have been a Top 10 pick in last year’s draft.
But he struggled in 2013 after suffering an early-season knee injury, catching 57 passes for 791 yards and four touchdowns. As a result, his stock has dropped, and now he’d be seen as something of a reach if the Lions took him with their first-round pick, No. 10 overall. Lee says he’s now fully healthy, and teams should expect him to look more like he did in 2012 than in 2013.
“I’m 100 percent,” Lee said. “One of the issues I ran into, a lot of people didn’t think I was healthy, my knee issue. But before I even got started to train for the combine, I went to go see doctors, and they let me know I was going to be 100 percent and I would have no more problems with it.”
When healthy, Lee was a great player at USC. Maybe great enough that the Lions would consider him at No. 10.