Looking For A Hall-Of-Fame QB?

With the NFL Draft careening towards us with all of the speculation on who will take which of the top 2 QBs in the first round, there is something you need to go and read in its entirety. Dan Daly, formerly with the Washington Times, has done some extensive research on where QBs who ultimately wound up in the Hall of Fame went in the draft. Here is something that might scare the bejeebers out of the guys in Tampa and Tennessee and other teams with really high draft picks:

    More than 80% of the QBs who proved to be Hall of Fame quality were not the first QB taken in the draft in the year they were eligible.

I cannot do a synopsis here that does justice to Daly’s research and presentation and so I will urge you to follow this link and read this entry in its entirety at ProFootballDaly.com.

Since I mentioned the upcoming draft and the eligible QBs this year, you probably read or saw that Jameis Winston told Jim Harbaugh on the ESPN feature, Draft Academy, a new story about the infamous crab legs incident. Basically, Winston said that he did not shoplift the crab legs as one might conclude from watching the security videos in the store because the crab legs were given to him by a store employee as a “hook-up”. Translated into English, Winston got some free crab legs from the supermarket because he was the star QB on the defending national champion football team in town. It was no big deal; that is why he took no action to conceal the fact that he was walking out of the door with the crab legs bypassing the cash register.

This was treated as a revelation for about a day or so and then it seems to have faded into oblivion. Naturally, I look at this differently than most other commentators.

    1. Only about 2 weeks to go before the draft and Jameis Winston changes his story about what happened that night? And that is supposed to make me feel confident that his “off-the-field-issues” are nothing more than “growing up pains”? Here is what this “new story” demonstrates rather clearly:

      Either he is lying now or he was lying before regarding the crab legs incident.

    2. If the current story is the truth, where are the NCAA enforcement hounds? Jameis Winston just declared that he got free foodstuffs from a local supermarket and that it was no big deal that it happened. That is the seafood equivalent of a booster handing him money under the table. One would think that the NCAA would be swarming all over this matter; an athlete just admitted getting benefits that are not available to the student body at large.

      How long has this been going on?

      Are similar “bennies” available to other athletes?

      How come none of the coaches know about this?

      What did everyone tell the Florida State ‘investigators” about this matter back when it first surfaced?

Bob Molinaro took this matter in a totally different direction in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot recently:

“Good eats: I’m not sure what position to take on the latest twist in the Jameis Winston crab legs saga, except to surmise that it’s created more free advertising for crab legs.”

With all of the focus on the Mayweather/Pacquaio fight next weekend, one might surmise that boxing might be making a comeback. I think not. The moribund state of the sport was on display last weekend when the heavyweight champion of the world, Wladimir Klitschko, defended his title against an undefeated challenger named Bryant Jennings in Madison Square Garden. There was a time when such a happening would have been the single focal point for the sports world; I will suggest here that less than 5% of the people you might encounter on the street this week are even aware that the fight happened let alone who participated, where it happened and what was the outcome.

People today may not realize that at one time the three top assignments for sportswriters working at newspapers were – in alphabetical order:

    Baseball
    Boxing
    Horseracing

Some truly great writers covered boxing including Ring Lardner, AJ Liebling (my personal favorite), Stan Hochman, Bert Sugar, Dave Anderson, William Gildea and Jimmy Breslin. Not intending to disparage current boxing coverage, the great writers of today gravitate to different beats and to different issues than the world of boxing. And that is why you can have a heavyweight championship fight in Madison Square Garden in an environment where the vast majority of sports fans just do not care. Sad…

According to Forbes, total attendance at MLB games in 2014 was 73.7M fans. Barring some kind of catastrophe, total attendance in 2015 will be very close to this number. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council – yes, there is such a thing; Google is your friend – fans this year will consume 23M hot dogs and sausages at ballparks this year. Given the way MLB parks have added dining options to include pizza and burgers and sushi and nachos, I am surprised to see that teams can expect to sell a hot dog/sausage to about one in three fans.

Finally, Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times had a comment regarding the current WBC heavyweight champion of the world:

“Deontay Wilder, who won the WBC heavyweight boxing title by unanimous decision, is a former waiter at IHOP.

“No wonder the judges didn’t waffle.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………

8 thoughts on “Looking For A Hall-Of-Fame QB?”

  1. I am not qualified to predict Winston’s future as an NFL QB, but character matters. Looking at the 24 HOF QBs in the article, all were natural leaders in addition to being superb passers. I wonder if Winston has that trait in his genes. Is he somehow flawed or simply immature?

    Thanks for the link.

  2. I think the most amazing piece of information from that article was that Joe Montana was drafted 82nd overall in 1979. That tells me two things: 1. Joe Montana is likely the “best value” draft pick of all time, and 2. Anyone who watches the draft live on TV to see who goes in the first round is wasting their life. 🙂

    Also, a slight miscalculation on the hot dogs. You say that there are 74M fans at games and 23M hot dogs sold, and thus conclude that one in three fans will get a hot dog. I think it’s safe to assume that the average person who gets a hot dog at a ballpark is likely to get more than one, and those people are also likely the ones to go to more than one game I’d assume. Thus I don’t think every third person is the one getting a hot dog, though if it were true, we might have an explanation for the national obesity epidemic…

  3. Liebling was an amazing boxing writer, and wrote for The New Yorker. In his time boxing fans could pick up the local paper to read about the fights the day after they transpired. The New Yorker was a weekly publication; Lieblings articles were longer than newspaper reportage, filling the reader in on the training camps, the fighters, managers and entourage members, the gyms and workouts, all before the fight. He might give a brief description of his buying one ticket for the fight, perhaps walking to the venue and stopping for a shoe shine, finding his seat and the fight itself. Then some post-fight description of the event. Your readers may want to pick up The Sweet Science and The Neutral Corner, collections of many of these articles, to get an idea of what it was like when Boxing was so important.
    He was also a very good war correspondent during The Big One.

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