No matter how many passes he winds up catching, David Sills will always have a place in college football history. Way back in the prehistoric era of 2010, Sills received a scholarship offer as a seventh grade quarterback by then-USC head coach Lane Kiffin.
Sills, of course, did not become USC’s next great quarterback. He signed with West Virginia out of Wilmington, Del., and caught seven catches from 131 yards and two touchdowns as a freshman in 2015, then threw for 1,636 yards and 15 touchdowns as a quarterback at El Camino College in 2016. Sills is now back at West Virginia and once again listed as a wide receiver, a perfectly fine player at the highest level of college football (which, lest we forget, is still better than 99.9 percent of us slobs could ever say) but not at all what Kiffin’s offer suggested he would one day become.
Similarly, Kiffin’s career is now what we thought it would be way back then. He’s now the head coach at Florida Atlantic — and he’s still reportedly offering seventh grade quarterbacks.
According to a Facebook post from Fox Sports’s Bruce Feldman, has offered seventh grade quarterback Kaden Martin. Standing 5-foot-11 and checking in at 175 pounds, Martin stars for Adams Middle School in Redondo Beach, Calif. And unlike Sills, there’s a complicating factor that may have led to this offer — Martin is the son of former Tennessee quarterback and current USC assistant Tee Martin.
Call me crazy, but I think the likelihood of Kaden Martin leading a Lane Kiffin-led Florida Atlantic team to the 2026 Conference USA championship are lower than that of Sills fulfilling his destiny as the next Matt Leinart.
