James Cook, Zamir White battled tested and ready to become professional players
James Cook and Zamir White are no stranger to competition in their running back room. Each and every day at Georgia for the last four years, the two had to fend off the likes of 1,000-yard rushers in D’Andre Swift and Elijah Holyfield, the always-reliable Brian Herrien and potential future NFL backs in Kenny McIntosh, Kendall Milton and Daijun Edwards. Of course, there was each other too. So, stepping into NFL rooms that feature, in Cook’s case, Devin Singletary, Duke Johnson and Zack Moss or, with White and the Raiders, Josh Jacobs and Kenyan Drake, neither has any sort of fear about their level of readiness.
“We ran a two-back system at Georgia, so it helped me save my body. But whenever your opportunity was called, you had to take advantage of it,” Cook said. “That’s what I did, and I feel like they did a good job of rotating and keeping our bodies fresh so that we wouldn’t be banged up.”
“The training, the coaches and my teammates, we drove each other every single day at practice,” White added. ” We went out there, we grinded hard inside the weight room, the film room, we loved it man.”
Both have also had their fair share of struggles off the field. Cook lost his father at the end of the 2020 season. In his introductory press conference with the Bills, he wore a necklace that had a picture of him to honor him. Meanwhile, White was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate. His mother was told that she should abort the pregnancy at six months with the him weighing just one pound and he was also given two weeks to live the day after his birth after his body temperature dropped and he was losing weight not wanting to eat. That all makes his two torn ACLs look easy.
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“I think that one thing that is an attractive trait is when you have people that have been through different transitions in life and have had to go through different adversities in life and have come out on the other end and have succeeded, those are positive traits. Whether that’s people that we add to our staff or players that we add to our football team because this business, there’s a lot of adversity in this business, a lot of ups and downs when it comes to being a professional athlete or being in the football business,” Raiders general manager Dave Ziegler said when asked about White. “If you’ve experienced some of those things and you’ve dealt with them in an appropriate way and you showed high emotional intelligence to be able to handle those things, those are indicators that you can handle the grind and the ups and downs that come with becoming a professional athlete.”
Both Cook and White will inevitably have to work to prove themselves at the next level, just like they did at Georgia, but their respective teams saw talent in them that garnered a selection. Cook went No. 63 overall in the second round to the Bills while White waited until the fourth round and the No. 122 overall pick to hear his name called.
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