Colt McCoy looks back on freshman year at Texas, meeting Kevin Durant

2006 was a special time for all Texas Longhorn fans with the football team securing a BCS National Championship win over USC at the Rose Bowl in one of the most historic college football games in history.

But following that season the Longhorns would keep their momentum going in the athletic department as two of their best athletes of all time would begin their careers in their freshman seasons, quarterback Colt McCoy and forward Kevin Durant.

“We lived on the same floor in the dorm room,” McCoy said on ‘Green Light with Chris Long’. “So KD came in and he was just 7 feet tall and kind of lanky and the athletes sort of hung out right? It’s a big campus but we would see each other, there’s one athletic dining hall at the time and now they’ve got a dozen of them or whatever, but we would all eat at the same place so you would see the basketball players.”

McCoy was redshirted during the 2005 national championship season, poised to be Texas’ starter under center in the 2006 season. But Durant was a little bit more of a mystery, arriving on campus as a highly touted recruit from Rockville, Maryland.

“You’d go play in the rec, play pick up games and stuff and everybody was like who is Kevin Durant right? He’s not from Texas, he came from way up north, and we’d play games in the rec and everybody had an idea of like man this guy’s legit,” McCoy said.

Durant was in fact legit, ranking fourth in the nation in points and rebounds per game by dropping 25.8 points and grabbing 11.1 boards a game in his freshman season. He’d go on to become one of the most prolific and versatile scorers the game has ever seen at the professional level, but McCoy remembers Durant’s early days and seeing him compete for the very first time.

“And then I remember the first home basketball game our freshman year. We’d walk over to the Erwin Center, watch the game, and he drops like 40 points or something and everybody’s like this guy just scored 40 points? And obviously he’s evolved into one of the best players in the world, he’s unbelievable,” McCoy said. “It was pretty cool to have that year with him, I think we went to the Elite Eight, it was fun.”

Durant didn’t exactly score 40 points in his first game in the Erwin Center, dropping 20 points in a blowout win over Alcorn State.

But Durant would go on to score 30-plus points in 11 games his freshman season, unanimously named the National Player of the Year. And McCoy set the freshman record for touchdown passes in a season with 29 and was named the Big 12 Player of the Year by College Football News.

Over a decade later the two are still playing professionally, Durant with the Phoenix Suns and McCoy with the Arizona Cardinals, as the two Texas greats have come a long way since their freshman year in the dorms.