GREEN BAY — It started with a conversation with his old Alabama teammate, Eddie Lacy. It ended with his photo, posted two weeks before the draft, proving prescient.
On April 26, Ha Ha Clinton-Dix hung up the phone with Lacy, the Green Bay Packers running back from Alabama and reigning NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year. Then the Crimson Tide safety reached in his gym bag and pulled out a Nike Packers shirt.
"I had been talking to Eddie for a minute, and I was looking through my bag and said, 'Oh, I'll put this on.' And it looked pretty good on me," Clinton-Dix said in a conference call with Wisconsin reporters after the Packers picked him with the No. 26 overall selection in Thursday night's first round of the 2014 NFL Draft. "So, I decided to take a picture on Instagram and I put it up and it kind of blew up."
Packers fans, desperate for their team to solve its problem at the safety position, seized on the photo and began following Clinton-Dix, who as of Thursday night had 24,000 followers on Instagram (@_ha6 ) and 77,930 followers on Twitter (@haha_cd6 ), en masse.
Now, they'll get to cheer for him on a weekly basis.
Clinton-Dix, meanwhile, confessed that he didn't really pay much attention to which NFL teams might be in need of a safety in the draft — until the reaction to the photo on social media. Then, he started taking a closer look at the Packers' depth chart.
"To be honest, I didn't [pay attention]," he said. "Like I was telling you, it's a gamble. So those opinions on who needs safeties or where I was going in the draft, I didn't look at it at all. But when I posted that picture on Instagram and I got 300, 400 comments and quotes from Twitter about the picture, I kind of went back and looked at Green Bay. And [thought], 'You know, they could use some help [at safety and] on the defensive side of the ball, period, with the great offense they already have.
"So I looked there, and I was like, 'Well, everybody might be right. I might end up in Green Bay. Seriously.' Everything happens for a reason. I put that picture up with that Green Bay shirt two, three weeks before the draft, and here I am a Packer."
Jason Wilde wrote: