Editor’s Note: Twenty-three-year-old Brandon Scherff from Denison, Iowa, started playing football in fourth grade as a quarterback. He was a little over 5 feet tall and weighed about 140 pounds. Today, he is 6’5” and weighs 320 pounds. He played quarterback through junior high, and then he was moved to the offensive line. Today, he's the right guard for the Washington Redskins professional football team. He graduated from the University of Iowa where he played left tackle. In 2015, he was the fifth pick in the first round of the NFL draft. He has two passions in his life - football and hunting and is one of the newest members of the Mossy Oak Pro Staff. “When I'm not playing football, I'm out in the woods hunting,” Scherff says.
I started hunting deer and turkeys in the seventh grade. That’s my biggest passion. I had a Remington 870 smooth bore, a gun that’s legal to hunt with in Iowa. When I first started hunting, I was terrible (extremely unsuccessful), but I learned to enjoy the sport of hunting, being in the woods, watching the woods wake up and seeing the beginning of a new day.
When I went to college at the University of Iowa, I started bowhunting. I live in Virginia now, and I have a 16 to 17 football games scheduled each season. I still like to go back to Iowa and hunt with my bow. In high school, I hunted close to home in Denison. The town I grew up in only had about 8,000 people, and a good number of them were farmers. Many of them told me, “When you get ready to go hunting, you have my permission to hunt on my land.” The advantage of living and hunting in Iowa is that we’re right in the middle of the Corn Belt, where some really-big bucks live and grow. One of my best friends, Austin Vier, and his dad own a huge piece of property in southern Iowa where he’s harvested bucks in the 180 class, and he took a 165 class buck this past season (2015) from this land. When football ends each season, I've been fortunate enough to hunt with him.
When I was playing football for the University of Iowa, one of the video photographer’s family had land along the Ohio River. Again when football ended, we had a chance to hunt down there. Having grown up in Iowa, I made a lot of friends while playing junior high, high school and college football whose families owned great hunting properties in Iowa. So, I’ve had places to hunt really-big bucks and longbearded turkeys most of my life.
Today, I'm living my dream. I love football, and I really love to hunt. I get to do the two things I love the most, and I get to live two dreams bigger than I ever could have dreamed. To keep up with me during football season and hunting season, go to my Twitter account at www.twitter.com/bscherff68.
Tomorrow: The Washington Redskins’ Brandon Scherff’s Biggest Buck
