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UW Pursues Big Swede, Offers OT a Scholarship

Lucas Simmons is European born but he has a strong American football connection.
Dan Raley|
UW Pursues Big Swede, Offers OT a Scholarship
UW Pursues Big Swede, Offers OT a Scholarship

Sweden has been considered the land of the hearty, of people known as Norsemen, of a Viking Age that held sway over this country from the eighth to the 11th century. 

Well, whatever ruggedness that's diminished over time might be making a comeback.

Meet Lucas Simmons, a 6-foot-8, 296-pound teenager from Uppsala, Sweden, and currently a junior offensive tackle for Florida's Clearwater International Academy, where he shared in a 10-2 football season.

He has an 84-inch wingspan and 33 college football offers in hand as a member of the Class of 2023. On Tuesday, his latest scholarship proposal came from Kalen DeBoer's University of Washington recruiters.

Simmons has played American football for only two years, growing up competing in soccer and basketball before he got really big and turned to a club version of football in his Nordic country.

His size, no matter what part of the world he hails from, will make him fast friends wherever he goes.

Besides the Huskies, Simmons holds scholarship offers from Arizona State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Ole Miss, Michigan, USC, Auburn, Georgia, Penn State, South Carolina, West Virginia, Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M, Florida and Florida State, to name a few.

While he's European born and athletically prone, Simmons has a fairly deep-rooted family connection to American football.

His father, Able, grew up in South Carolina, in SEC country, and played one year of football for Livingstone College in North Carolina before transferring to Oklahoma and spending the 1996, 1997 and 1998 seasons with the Sooners.

Curiously, his max frame was 6-foot and 301 pounds, leaving him eight inches shorter but five pounds heavier than his son.

Able Simmons traveled to Sweden while he was finishing up at OU and liked the country so much he stayed, had a family and raised it there in the shadows of Norway, Finland and Denmark. 

Football has brought his son back to unlimited opportunity, which includes the UW.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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