Freshman Phenom Jameis Winston Wanted To Play For Texas, But They Wouldn't Return His Calls

The two most talked about college football players of Week One - Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel and Florida State's Jameis Winston - both could have been playing for Texas if the Longhorns had been willing to recruit them.

Winston, a freshman from Alabama who had a perfect QB rating on the road against Pitt on Monday night, said he would have gone to Texas if he could.

His high school coach told CBS's Bruce Feldman that he called Texas' football office "four of five times" to tell them that Jameis was interested. He says Texas never returned his calls.

"Bottom line, that [Texas] was the only school that he wanted to check out and they weren't interested in him," his coach told Feldman.

This is a similar story to what happened when Johnny Manziel was coming out of high school.

Manziel's coach told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last year, "Johnny dreamed of playing in Austin. He absolutely loved Texas I guess from when he was a little kid."

But Texas never offered him a QB scholarship because they already had a ton of quarterbacks, and Manziel's style didn't really fit the system they were trying to put in place at the time.

Then, of course, there's what happened with Robert Griffin III. While he was in high school UT made a scholarship offer to RGIII, but it was as an "athlete" not a quarterback, so he rejected it.

He told the Dallas Morning News, "Texas did not recruit me as a quarterback. But they walked into my [high school] coach's office and placed an offer on the table as an 'athlete,' then walked out, so I never saw them."

Winston has a long way to go to reach Manziel/RGIII status. But if he pans out, Texas will have missed out on three different elite-level QBs in the past five years.