Football is a game, not a track meet

Here is a great article written by Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Colt McCoy. Cabot's article does a fine job of talking about the intangibles that a Colt McCoy possesses and how and why this makes him a great football player.

It really does burn me up, everytime I read about a good football player who has been undervalued because of a tape measure, a scale and a stopwatch.

Football is a game, not a track meet. A relatively slow but fundamentally sound player who has a sophisticated understanding of his opponents tendencies is far more valuable than a fast player who does not. How much time is it worth if a player is able or not able to anticipate the action? Far more than a fraction of a second, that's for damn sure. Colt may not have the exact right size and speed that scouts desire, but he is a smart football player and in any case he's 6'1" so he's not exactly a damned midget. This guy dropped to round 3 essentially because he is only as tall as Joe Montana and only as fast as Brian Sipe....

The best example I can find of football skills is this film of former Kent State great and Ohioan Jack Lambert. Lambert of course was too small and too slow for the NFL but in the video you can see how he was far ahead of other players in game skills and intangibles like having an emotional edge, yet another huge factor on the gridiron that simply cannot be measured by a scout's tape measure.