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.

2010 NFL Draft

The 2010 NFL draft is little more than 3 weeks away. To follow the draft, I recommend visiting this excellent ESPN site. The Browns have several extra draft picks and we all know that the NFL draft will make or break a team's future. We need only site past draft disasters such as Fair Hooker, Steve Holden, Mack Mitchell, Mike Phipps and Tim Couch for proof of that fact. The question here is will Mike Holmgren's first Browns draft rank up there with ex Cleveland Brown and Paul Brown protege Chuck Noll's incredible 1974 selections that set the table for a long run of Steeler's Super Bown dominance by taking 4 future professional football Hall of Famers in Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster, or will we be picking the next Willis Adams?

To date, it's clear that Holmgren is dedicating himself very diligently to the draft and he has a good track record. The rumor mill would indicate that unless Holmgren is able to move up in the first round in order to grab QB Sam Bradford, that he will select a DB in round one, such as Florida's Joe Haden (Eric Berry, who is pictured on this blog and is in my opinion the most dominant db in this draft will likely be long gone by the 7 pick that the Browns possess). If the Browns are not able to move up and get a top rated QB, it's likely that Holmgren will look to grab a QB in round 2 or 3 that he can develop, such as Tim Tebow who has the potential to be a great quarterback, albeit many believe his career will be nothing more than an abortion.