South Carolina QB LaNorris Sellers Rocks Rec Specs, a Rare Sight in 2024

The bespectacled football player is about as rare as Mr. Clean with hair. Long before contacts changed the game for athletes in all sports, sports fans rarely saw football players wear Rec Specs during games. Forty years after Eric Dickerson made them cool, LaNorris Sellers is trying to do the same for South Carolina.

The South Carolina quarterback is an enormous, 6-foot-4, 240-pound homegrown athlete from the Palmetto State. Wearing No. 15, optimistic Gamecock fans have prophecized the moment when Sellers becomes their Tim Tebow. While he may share a similar stature and jersey number, the Rec Specs set him apart from almost all of his contemporaries.

You might remember a goggled Kareem Abdul-Jabar or Horace Grant from the 80s and 90s on the hardwood. Can you remember a football player in glasses? There’s really only one answer and he was a kicker, Rodrigo Blankenship. Georgia’s “Hot Rod” won the Lou Groza Award in 2019 as college football’s top placekicker.

So why would a player who is compared by some to Tim Tebow want to be in the same company as a conference rival’s kicker?

“I’ve worn glasses since fifth or sixth grade,” said Sellers, who some refer to simply as Specs. “I probably needed them before then. I started wearing the goggles (in games) during my senior year of high school. Some people have mixed emotions about them, but I like them. They’ve grown on me.”

He’s not the first person who needs help seeing on the field of play, just ask the Harrison Twins. Why not just throw in some contact lenses?

His parents vetoed contacts right from the get-go, telling The State that he was “too carefree” to take care of them, and his mother wanted no part in touching his eyeballs to make sure they were properly placed. South Carolina’s equipment manager volunteered to get him contacts and a visor to protect his eyes from getting poked, but after successfully rocking the Rec Specs in high school, he wasn’t ready for a big change.

Cliff Haggard, South Carolina’s head athletic trainer, was tasked to find Sellers a new pair of Rec Specs, but that was much easier said than done. The big quarterback has big eyes. Finding the right fit took hours of internet research. They tried one pair and it didn’t work. Eventually, they found the right replicas and spent $1,250 to ensure he had a couple of extra pairs handy for every single South Carolina game day.

In his first start, Sellers ran for 68 yards and a touchdown, but only completed 10 of 23 passes. We’ll learn on Saturday just how well those Rec Specs help him see Kentucky jerseys.