James hoping to make impact at Combine on Sunday

INDIANAPOLIS — Throughout his entire football life, Javarris James has always had to answer different questions and debunk different perceptions than most anybody else, he isn’t expecting anything different this weekend at the NFL Scouting Combine.

James is one of 28 running backs working out Sunday on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium in front of coaches, general managers and scout representing all 32 NFL teams and the Immokalee native is hoping to make the kind of splash expected out of players coming out of the University of Miami.

James arrived in town under the radar, with some mock drafts projecting him as a fifth-round pick mainly over concerns about his injury history with the Hurricanes. After a phenomenal freshman year during which he rushed for 802 yards -- the second most by a freshman in school history -- and five touchdowns, ankle and neck injuries slowed him as a sophomore and then he missed four games his junior season in 2008 with a leg injury.

Thankfully for James, the MRIs, X-rays and comprehensive medical exams done by team doctors the first two days of the combine cleared up his health status heading into April’s NFL Draft.

“I was completely healthy, no extra MRIs or any of that stuff, so that let the teams know that I’m completely healthy and ready to go,” said James, who will be evaluated side by side with the likes of Clemson’s C.J. Spiller, Stanford’s Toby Gerhardt, Georgia Tech’s Jonathan Dwyer and Dexter McClusker of Ole Miss.

“Those questions didn’t come up in the interviews like I thought they would," James said. "I thought it would be a whole lot worse than that. A lot of coaches were like, ‘Hey, we play football and we know this is a physical sport.’ They weren’t really tripping about my injuries; they were just trying to see how my body was and if it was fully healed.”

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(naplesnews.com)