WING BACKS: “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson (right) was good enough at quarterback to keep Fox’s Terry Bradshow riding the bench on the 1967 Louisiana Tech football team that went (oops!) 3-7 that season. (
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They started out in the same backfield.
But when their last football season was over, quarterback Terry Bradshaw and “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson went their separate ways.
It’s one of those real-life stories of what might have been.
In the late 1960s, Robertson was the starting quarterback for the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs while Bradshaw warmed the bench behind him.
Bradshaw, a high-school football sensation from Texas and two years younger, caused a media frenzy when he first arrived at the school, according to now-retired defensive backs coach EJ Lewis.
“The headline in the Shreveport Times was ‘Bradshaw is coming to Louisiana Tech’ and [Phil] saw that and he wanted to quit,” says Lewis.
When Lewis and the university president showed up at his apartment to try to talk him into staying, Robertson, a genuine NFL prospect, answered the door in bloody bib overalls.
“There was a tub on the floor with a deer hanging in it,” said the coach. “He was gutting it in the house.”
Long story short, Robertson stayed.
But “football meant everything to Bradshaw,” Lewis said. “He breathed it. And to Phil it was just about upholding his scholarship.”
Flash forward 45 years and Bradshaw is a football analyst for Fox Sports and Robertson — who started a duck-call company and made millions — is the head of the most-watched reality-TV clan of all time with rating three times bigger than the Kardashians.
True story.