Gator Gridiron
Roger Franklin Williams
For those of us who follow football on a 365 day basis, late February and early March brings us to the "Silly Season" of football in America...aka the NFL Combine. The combine is a 3 day period a couple of months before the April draft where top NFL prospects are assembled to perform a variety of absurd tasks such as the shuttle run, triple jump, long jump, high jump, etc. that are ostensibly designed to measure a prospects potential as a professional player. (I guess scouting players during their college careers and watching tape of their on-the-field performances makes too much sense to NFL personnel types....or represents too much work.) After all the poking, prodding, one-on-one interviews, Wonderlik tests, etc. ad nauseum, the determination of the "experts" usually goes something like this, "Tim Tebow just isn't suited to play quarterback in the NFL because he 1) played in a shotgun-spread offense instead of a "pro-style" offense 2) he is not a "pure pocket" passer 3) he leaves the pocket to gain yardage running the ball.... and Emmitt Smith is too small and too slow to ever be an effective NFL running back."
Now that Cam Newton has come along in 2011 we learn that the talented young man with the checkered past is a "can't miss" NFL prospect due to the "benefits" of his style of play at Auburn which include 1) he played in a shotgun-spread offense instead of a "pro-style" offense, 2) he is not a "pure pocket" passer 3) he leaves the pocket to gain yardage running the ball.
Say what??? Cam Newton is being touted as a can't miss prospect by the same exact so-called experts who spent most of 2010 so matter-of-factly declaring that Tim Tebow could never play QB in the NFL, even though Tebow and Cam Newton played in a very similar shotgun-spread offense, neither of them are classic "drop back" passers and they both are noted for being prolific runners as opposed to "pro-style" QBs???
Why would Cam Newton be a better NFL prospect than Tim Tebow?
The intelligent, INFORMED short answer is that Cam Newton IS NOT A BETTER NFL PROSPECT than Tim Tebow.
Mel Kuiper, Jr. and his sad-sack peanut gallery of imitators in the so-called "talent expert" industry have unwittingly exposed their bias, incompetence and malevolence. Gator Gridiron, as well as other informed observers (which, sadly, is a very small community), have been declaring for years that Kuiper and his ilk are not talent "experts" at all. They are, rather, snake oil salesmen, making it up as they go along in order to generate more publicity for themselves, as well as to reward or punish young men, based on their own personal biases (or, reportedly, satisfy other more base motives). Now with their contradictory "analysis" of Tebow and Newton, both dual threat, spread option, shotgun QBs, they have revealed to America how subjective, nebulous and self-serving their "evaluations" really are.
(Also, for the record, if anybody is really thinking out there in NFL land.....Tim Tebow is one of the greatest passing QBs in the 140+ year history of college football: almost 10,000 career passing yards, over 80 career TD passes, the highest passing efficiency rating in SEC history, the 3rd highest passing efficiency rating in NCAA history, the best passing performance in BCS Bowl game history---over 450 yards in the 2010 Sugar Bowl, not to mention he had THREE outstanding years, as opposed to 1 outstanding year for Cam Newton.....not to mention, no arrests for burglary, no arrests for resisting arrest, never caught cheating, never implicated in any "play for pay" schemes, etc, etc, etc)
Thank you, Mel....for showcasing to America what Gator Gridiron and a cadre of other informed observers have known for decades.
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