Say you were an NBA GM at any point between 1993 and 2012 and you had a high draft pick and needed a point guard. I’m not going to say it’s been pretty easy to figure it out, but let’s just say it hasn’t been that hard.
From the ’93 draft, when Tim Hardaway was the first point guard taken, to the 2012 draft, when Damian Lillard was the first point guard taken, there have been just two busts among the first point guards taken. Felipe Lopez was a bust, and Mateen Cleaves was a bust. Every other point guard—we’re talking only about the first one taken, remember, guys like Allen Iverson and Jason Kidd and even Randy Foye—has been either a solid contributor or a star.
If you fail on back-to-back NBA drafts, you should probably be handcuffed and led out of the team’s facility.
Scott Pioli was fired after just four drafts as general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs. Nobody complained about this; most people associated with the team probably thought it was time for Pioli to go. But a quick look at his drafts shows a guy who really didn’t do all that poorly when it came to building a team. He drafted Jamaal Charles, Eric Berry, Javier Arenas, Dexter McCluster. He got a Pro Bowl linebacker, Justin Houston, in the third round.
For his first three picks of the 2010 draft, he got Berry, McCluster, and Arenas. Two years later, he was fired.
There was no outrage over his firing. In football, fans have seen Bill Parcells turn a team from 5-11 to 11-5 in one season, largely on the strength of a draft or two. The way it works in the NFL, Pioli had his chance and now it’s someone else’s turn.
Could you imagine the Cubs firing Theo Epstein—technically not the GM, but he’s the guy making the calls—after four years because he didn’t turn the Cubs into champions? That’s essentially what happened to Pioli, but there would be outrage—crazed outrage—if the Cubs jettisoned Epstein that quickly. Every single baseball writer would attack the Cubs for being callous.
Sorry, but it’s just way easier to draft in the other sports, and far harder to screw up. In the NFL, the teams get immediate control of a player after at least three years in college. They have a combine where they can ask anything they damned well please—legitimate or not—and have an English-speaking, college-educated person answer.
Everyone knows the MLB draft is a long-term, hit-or-miss proposition. Draft-eligible baseball players come from high school, junior college, and four-year college. Unless a guy is a college senior, he’s got the option to turn down the signing bonus and go back to school, which means general managers have to assess a factor called “signability”—something that doesn’t exist in the NBA or NFL. If a GM guesses wrong on signability, as the Pittsburgh Pirates did when they drafted hot-shot Stanford pitcher Mark Appel with the eighth pick of the 2012 draft and he chose to return to school … well, the GM looks awfully silly.
And once the players are signed, the fun begins. This is when general managers are handed a whole new set of issues. Even the most elite player is subjected to the minors, which means every player essentially leaves the control of the major-league team and becomes community property within the organization. There are so many steps, so many hands that get ahold of these guys—every change in managers or pitching coaches or hitting coaches could spell disaster. Teams try to monitor these kinds of things, but a bad pitching coach can screw up a prospect for years. A hitting coach who decides to put his stamp on a kid can change the course of a career.
The players drafted in the first round of the MLB draft in 2007 had combined to play one inning in the major leagues by the end of the 2008 season. One inning! Sometimes it can take seven years for a top pick to make it to the big leagues. From 18 to 25—you can be a totally different person in seven years.
There are just so many variables for a baseball GM to consider. In the NBA, every hoop is 10 feet off the floor and every court is 94 feet long. In the NFL, every field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide.
The baseball GM doesn’t have the luxury of consistent dimensions. He might have a short right-field fence, which means his scouts have to pay close attention to big left-handed hitters. He might have a pitchers’ park or a big outfield or the thin air in Denver, where sinker-ball pitchers are like gold. It’s amazing how specific this stuff gets.
Jason Bay can’t hit at Citi Field. Well, hell—there goes $66 million.
Mike Hampton can’t pitch in Denver. There goes $121 million!
In many cases, there’s a direct connection between salary and performance. Golf and baseball are the two sports with the most downtime, the most time to think about what you’re trying to do and the stakes involved in doing it.
It’s exceedingly rare to hear an announcer say, “Oh, Dwyane Wade is really pressing out there.” Sometimes you’ll see an NBA player or an NFL quarterback try to do too much, but in baseball it’s an entirely different animal.
Big contracts screw up some players. Barry Zito was affected by the money when he got his huge deal in San Francisco. Albert Pujols couldn’t hit for the first month of his first season with the Angels.
It’s like Greg Norman: fantastic on Saturday, ghastly on Sunday. Why? The money’s out there, and psychology gets involved.
Has there ever been a player comparable to Alex Rodriguez in another sport who so obviously and repeatedly gagged when the lights got brightest? Remember the divisional series against the Tigers in 2006, when Joe Torre had to drop him to the eighth spot in the lineup? One of the best hitters in baseball was reduced to being a Double-A hitter. He was completely overmatched, and it was all in his head.
The adverse psychological effects of outside influences—money, attention—are profoundly exaggerated in baseball. How does a GM account for that?
How does he account for chemistry? The season is so long and the travel is so ridiculous that you have to take into account how personalities will work together. You get Milton Bradley in the clubhouse and he can blow it up. You might as well just pack it in.
There’s just so much, and that’s without even mentioning the lack of a salary cap—“Mo’ money, mo’ problems,” says Biggie Smalls—or the battle for regional television deals or the fifteen- to twenty-year PED train that drove right through the center of the sport.
A great job? Oh, yeah, sure it is. It’s so great, everyone who gets one of them should demand two perks: a lifetime supply of Advil and Pepcid AC.
When Small Grows Up
American sports culture is dominated by team sports, and the broadcasting world follows that lead. Most of our reporting is on teams, and most of the fan interest revolves around teams and not individuals. Guys wear jerseys of players on their favorite teams; rarely, if ever, do you see a guy dressing up like Rafael Nadal to head out to a tennis match. That guy’s not a fan; he’s a stalker.
There used to be a time when quirky, nonteam, nonmainstream sports found a sizable audience. The flagship show was called Wide World of Sports, and you could find everything from barrel jumping to cliff diving. Comedian Norm McDonald once cracked, “There’s only two types of cliff divers: successful ones, and stuff on a rock.”
That’s how most NFL fans probably feel as they watch their team try to find its next franchise quarterback through the draft. You either hit the lottery with Aaron Rodgers (our figurative successful cliff diver) or you spend several years trying to convince yourself that David Carr (our figurative … well, you know) will eventually flourish.
You wouldn’t think it would be that difficult. You’d think great quarterbacking would follow a linear progression. The best high school quarterbacks go to the top college powerhouses and usually get the benefit of the best coaching. By this logic, it figures that simply drafting the star signal-caller from your top fifteen to twenty collegiate juggernauts would result in a predictable line of success.
And yet it’s anything but predictable. In 2013, there are as many starting NFL quarterbacks (one) from Eastern Illinois, Utah, Nevada, Delaware, and Miami of Ohio as there are from Oklahoma, Michigan, USC, and Virginia Tech. Ther
e are two from North Carolina State (Philip Rivers and—for most of his career—Russell Wilson) but none from Alabama, Boise State, Oregon, Florida, Texas, or Nebraska.
This is one of those quirks in sports—and life—that make no sense. On first glance, it seems outrageous that so many quarterbacks who were ignored by big-time college programs have gone on to become not only NFL starters but Pro Bowl players and Super Bowl winners.
Let’s take a look at the top fifteen college-football programs in America over the past five years (2008–13) based on an admittedly subjective criteria of wins, big wins, national profile, momentum, and stability. In alphabetical order: Alabama, Boise State, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon, Stanford, Texas, USC, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
In a league of thirty-two teams, there are only six quarterbacks from those fifteen schools. Several of them, including the Jets’ Mark Sanchez, the Cardinals’ Carson Palmer, and the Eagles’ Michael Vick, appear to be on the verge of breathing their last NFL breath.
This isn’t a recent trend. Dan Fouts, Terry Bradshaw, Brett Favre—all products of lower-tier programs, all Hall of Famers. Brady Quinn, Matt Leinart, Colt McCoy—all products of marquee programs, all journeymen.
For a three-year period, Kurt Warner was the best quarterback in the NFL. He went to the University of Northern Iowa, played in the Arena League, and bagged groceries. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was better than any quarterback produced by Florida State, Alabama, or USC.
Seems almost impossible, doesn’t it? However, if you dig a little bit and explore some of the underlying reasons, it makes perfect sense.
I can relate it to a study on human physiology released in the fall of 2012 by the University of Copenhagen. The study showed that people who exercised for thirty minutes a day lost more weight and were healthier than people who exercised sixty minutes a day. Wait … how could that be? Obviously, more exercise is better—burns more calories, increases cardiovascular strength, tones the body. It seems utterly counterintuitive to believe that less exercise can produce more results.
But, looking deeper, you see the researchers’ findings were backed by common sense. Guys who worked out for sixty minutes didn’t do anything the rest of the day; those who worked out for thirty were less tired and, therefore, more active. Exercising for sixty minutes increases hunger, and many of those study members ate their way past their workout.
Work out less, lose more weight. It would seem to make absolutely no sense, and yet it’s absolutely true.
Along those same lines, it makes absolutely no sense that the University of Delaware, with Rich Gannon and Joe Flacco, has produced two Super Bowl–winning quarterbacks, the exact same number as Notre Dame.
Makes no sense.
And yet absolutely true.
Just like the exercise study, the small-school quarterback phenomenon makes more and more sense the deeper you dive into it.
Here’s one obvious and slightly pedestrian reason: in high school and college, practice and workout times are limited because of NCAA rules or the practicalities of schoolwork. This puts a disproportionate emphasis on talent at those levels. But once a quarterback arrives in the NFL, he can work as long and hard as he wishes. He can sleep in the film room and be in the weight room at 5 a.m. As NFL schemes—both offense and defense—grow more complex, a quarterback’s talent becomes less important as his work ethic, study habits, and intellectual dexterity become more crucial. Workaholics tend to do better. An elite talent with a questionable work ethic (JaMarcus Russell and Ryan Leaf, to name two famous examples) can spell disaster or just underachievement (Jeff George and Michael Vick).
JaMarcus Russell was the ideal college quarterback. He was 6 feet 6 inches, 270 pounds; moved like a running back; and could throw the ball 70 yards from one knee. Playing with all the speedy receivers at LSU, he looked like a guy who could be great for a decade. I was doing the NFL Draft for ESPN when he was picked No. 1 by the Raiders in 2007, and when I shook his hand I was amazed at how big it was. It seems crazy, and it blew me away at the time, but Russell was bigger than Gaines Adams, a defensive end from Clemson who was drafted three picks later. Russell failed, though—he failed in that part of the game that requires a guy to spend sixty hours a week learning his craft. He failed in the film room.
The second factor became apparent to me when I was spending time in the locker room covering Trent Dilfer. He was a quarterback of his time: a guy who wasn’t particularly fast, didn’t leave the pocket unless it was necessary, and had a reputation for being able to stand strong against a pass rush. Even though he didn’t move much and wasn’t susceptible to open-field hits, his body was a mess after games. If you looked at his arms, neck, and chest, you would have been convinced he got into a fight with either a barbed-wire fence or a cat on meth.
I’ve interviewed plenty of college quarterbacks after games, too, and I’ve never noticed the same physical toll. In the NFL, a quarterback faces three hours of contact from bigger and stronger athletes. It’s an integral part of the job. From the first exhibition game forward, he’s playing with some degree of injury. His ability to deal with those physical challenges goes a long way toward determining his success.
When Dilfer came to work at ESPN years later, he confirmed my observations. He told me toughness is the most underrated part of being an NFL quarterback. That led me to the following theory: many of the big-school stars aren’t prepared for the next level because they haven’t been subjected to the same physical test. In relative terms, they’ve been coddled.
At the premier programs, a quarterback spends three or four years surrounded by the best high school offensive linemen, backs, tight ends, and receivers. He is sacked infrequently—in fact, he’s rarely even put in an uncomfortable position. He has a strong running game, so defenses don’t often have the luxury of a balls-out pass rush. His receivers create separation against inferior defenders, and his pass protection is unlike anything he’ll ever experience in the NFL.
Let me ask you this: Didn’t Matt Barkley, at USC, have better wide receivers than the Browns, Jets, and Bills have right now?
Big-school quarterbacks are like trust-fund kids. When they jump from their college programs to the NFL, it’s like going from a life sailing on the Cape to a sixty-hour-a-week job. A lot of them can’t handle it, and NFL teams see that right away. They don’t have any patience with that, so you see guys like Matt Leinart bounce around and never reach their potential.
Conversely, at the smaller and less-heralded schools, the quarterback plays with mediocre talent. He doesn’t have anything close to the same pass protection or running game or receivers. He’s already accustomed to delivering the football through tighter windows. Improvisation—out of necessity—has been woven into his DNA. This creates a toughness and resilience that is paramount to success at the NFL level.
There’s a psychological aspect to this, as well. The guy who’s been overlooked throughout the process, from the college-recruiting side to the NFL draft side, is pissed off. He sees the guys who were recruited to the bigger and better programs. He sees the guys who were drafted ahead of him. He’s got something to prove. The chip on his shoulder is big, and he can use it to his benefit.
Tom Brady started at Michigan, but he was constantly fighting off Drew Henson and the hype that surrounded him. His draft snub—taken in the sixth round—resulted in him playing with a level of anger that remains inside him to this day. Even the NFL’s most talented and highest-paid quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, was forced to go the junior-college route because he was a late-bloomer who grew up in a place (Chico, California) scouts rarely visited. He ended up at Cal only after Jeff Tedford came to one of his junior-college games to scout a tight end. The competitiveness you see in Rodgers is the product of all of that. (After everything he’s accomplished, teammates say he still gets testy when teased about his height.)
What are NFL teams seeking when they scout a quarterb
ack? Guys who can make plays. That’s exactly the quality sought by second-tier college programs. Jim McIlwaine was the offensive coordinator at Alabama before becoming head coach at Colorado State. He told me his hopes for the quarterback were modest: don’t lose the game; let the defense win it.
Could you imagine Baylor’s defensive coordinator telling Robert Griffin III the same thing before a game with Texas? It would be outrageous to even consider. Yet at the top programs, ball control and game management are often primary concerns.
Greg Cosell has been watching tons of film for years as a producer for NFL Films. He says one of the best attributes a quarterback can have is the ability to throw in a muddied pocket. If a guy can sidestep a defensive end and pump-fake a nose tackle and still keep his eyes downfield, that guy has a chance to make it in the NFL.
Think about how many times Roethlisberger is praised for his ability to improvise inside the pocket, to avoid the rush and free himself just long enough to get off a pass. Where do you think he learned that? Not in the NFL, that’s for sure. He learned that playing at Miami of Ohio, behind an offensive line that didn’t have any five-star recruits.
Matt Ryan saw a lot of muddy pockets at Boston College. So did Flacco, at Delaware. So did Eli Manning, at Ole Miss. They were constantly under duress, being pushed one direction or the other, forced to go through their progressions as they dealt with chaos in front of them.
The only times Barkley and Leinart saw muddy pockets at USC was when they were watching Ryan or Roethlisberger or Manning on television. They weren’t watching Flacco; his team wasn’t on TV.
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