It’s undoubtedly true that the NFL is a higher level of competition, and that lots of great college players flamed out in the pros. But stopping there only tells half the story, because it offers no explanation for the large number of players who were much better as pros than in college: Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Tony Romo, Joe Flacco, Kurt Warner … there are plenty of them.
As RickJay’s story illustrates, it’s not just a matter of a higher levels requiring a greater level of skill, it’s a higher level requiring different kinds of skills. Imagine if college chess was played without a clock, but professional chess was done with a 60-second timer on each move, and with large cheering crowds in attendance. The fundamental game is still chess, but obviously, some players who excelled when they had time and quiet would struggle in the hurry-up cheering-crowd version, and others would do comparatively better. It’s a different style of play that values different skills; simplifying it to “the NFL is harder” misses that.
Which is why statements like this are so silly:
Most innovations are called “gimmicks” until they work. Bill Walsh’s offense was called a “gimmick,” but it’s now affected every NFL playbook; ditto the Run-and-Shoot, the shotgun formation, and all sorts of innovations all the way back to the forward pass.
Silly people still call the the shotgun option running game a gimmick because so far only a few teams in the NFL use it; presumably if it becomes more popular at the NFL level it will then be a “real” scheme. But this isn’t the way coaches or athletes think; they’re trying to win games based on the rules and conditions they find themselves playing in, and they adopt their strategies accordingly. Calling a scheme that wins multiple national championships and is widely emulated a “gimmick” betrays a misapprehension about what players and coaches are aiming at.
Show Sammy Baugh a shot of a shotgun 4 WR formation, and he might call it a gimmick … until he saw how it worked and you explained how the rules and the ball have changed since his day. Show a modern NFL fan a single wing formation, and they’d call it a gimmick … even though it dominated the game for years, is still used in youth leagues, and heavily influences modern shotgun-spread running games (especially Urban Mayer’s).
Different conditions, different rules = different strategies, different skillsets valued.
You assume that because Newton is a vastly better NFL QB than Tebow, he would necessarily have been better in 2007/08; that as an 18/19 year-old right out of high school he would have been better than the guy who won a Heisman and a National Championship those two years; and that the coaches who recruited both and watched both every day in practice were blind to this? :dubious:
