I think he’s a lot more than in the mix. If you’re talking about a full 4-year resume, I think he’s probably the hands-down winner.
His four year career went
Freshman (part time player): National championship
Soph: Heisman
Junior: National championship
Senior: 13-1
The year before he arrived, they went 9-3, the year after 8-5, so it’s not like he walked into a powerhouse.
If the question is evaluating players as collegians, how they did in the NFL is exactly as relevant as how they did in high school.
The speed and intelligence and reaction time of even the lowest end NFL defense player is greater than all but the best of college guys. But, we all here already know that.
Tebow, Jason White, Weinke, Andre Ware, and numerous others were legitimate stars in college, but either didn’t last in the NFL or maybe not even make a team.
I remember watching Elway in college, tho. Somehow, we just knew he was going to succeed in the NFL. What was it that made us think so? I seem to remember game management skills being part of what we talked about then.
I think Johnny Football could be a great NFL QB. But, he will need to accept coaching. Seeing some of his games, I wonder about his attitude. Regardless of his [likely successful] NFL career, I think he’s one of the best NCAA QBs I’ve ever seen.
If you insist on a BYU QB (a system that made stars of the QB) I would go with Jim McMahon over Bosco.
Otherwise (and I’m not a Notre Dame fan) I might say Joe Montana. He had the intangibles that got the most out of a team and showed leadership skills that are innate, not taught or learned. He was one of those athletes that is sort of like Gretzky, not the biggest, the fastest or the strongest but saw and played the game at a different level.
Another vote for Vince Young. (Yes, I’m biased.) But every time that guy took a snap, there was a chance he’d take it for six. I remember he was a sophomore, I believe, and Texas was sucking ass vs. Kansas. It was a 4th and 20… and without a conversion, the game would end with a Kansas victory.
VY took the snap, eluded one defender and took about four strides and went down. I was like, “WTF dude? You got to the original line of scrimmage! Why not try to throw for a first?”
Then I realized… he had run 20 yards for the first down. Unbelievable.
He had those two second half comebacks - 28 and 35 points, I believe, vs. Oklahoma State. I’ll bet Mike Gundy still has nightmares about those games.
And everyone saw both Rose Bowls. The one vs. Michigan was astounding. The one vs. USC, The Greatest College Football Team Ever (according to ESPN) in 2005, is the most amazing game I’ve ever watched. VY took the game in his hands and took down Leinhart/Bush.
True aside: my daughter’s PK teacher related a “cute story” about how she held hands with another little kid from another class - they call each other honey, etc. I was sort of unnerved, because why is a three year old doing this kind of stuff. Turns out that the kid who is holding my daughter’s hand is…you got it, VY’s son.
Sure it’s relevant, in that it sheds light on how good the player in question (probably) actually was in college. It’s really easy to determine who the most successful QBs in college football are, but success has a lot to do with the other 90 or whatever players on the roster. Performance in the NFL lets us know who’s best now, which strongly suggests who *was *best in college since development curves seldom vary all that much.
I mean, was Ken Dorsey a better college QB than John Elway? Just looking at their college résumés, you’d have to say yes: he had better stats across the board, and he was 38-2 as a starter, whereas John Elway had a losing record. Fortunately, their NFL careers shed light on the comparison and let us know that, in fact, Dorsey was an NFL backup-caliber QB who was buoyed by a college powerhouse, while Elway was an NFL Hall of Fame-caliber QB who was held back by a middling college program. Elway actually contributed far more to Stanford than Dorsey did to Miami.
There is still some room for discussion because the correlation isn’t perfect: sometimes a player improves greatly (or profoundly fails to improve) once in the NFL, and sometimes a player really does have a skill set that is tailored to college but not the pros. For instance, despite never being a great pro, Vince Young was clearly an awesome college QB. It’s just that his awesomeness mostly derived from his being bigger and faster than almost everyone on the opposing defense. Since that wasn’t so much the case in the NFL, his awesomeness was limited to the college sphere.
All of which applies equally well to high school performance.
Actually, they do.
We could also look at the fact that Dorsey’s Miami teams, and his stats, were not dramatically different from the years before and after he left. We could also look and see that consensus opinion at the time was that Elway was a great player on bad teams, and that many people at the time asked whether or not Dorsey was just an above-average player in a great system. We could point out that Elway finished second in Heisman voting despite being on a losing team, and that Dorsey finished third and fifth despite being on teams that went 25-1, and that in general, Elway did at least as well in terms of honors and awards.
Yeah, the NFL is one more data point that tells us how he was doing the year after he left, but so is high school for telling us where he was a year before he came (Elway, of course, was the top HS recruit in the nation).
As you note, development, happens for some guys and doesn’t for others, for all kinds of reasons.
As you also note, the college and NFL games can be very different. Ken Dorsey simply did not have an NFL-caliber arm, and the same goes for a lot of guys. He maximized his talent to succeed at the college level. That’s something to be praised, not disparaged. Kurt Warner/Tony Romo/these guys were not better players as collegians than Tommie Frazier/Scott Frost/Josh Heupel/Eric Crouch/etc. This isn’t the rare exception, it’s the norm. In almost every draft, there’s guys getting taken who had unremarkable college careers, and guys who were terrific in college that barely get so much as a tryout.
But thing you’re missing is that looking at the NFL as the measure of college success it conflates talent with performance. The fact that I have gone on to multiple advanced degrees does not mean my undergrad and high school GPA represent my being held back by incompetent teachers. The truth is that others who couldn’t touch my GMAT score nonetheless got better grades, and deservedly so. Tom Brady was not some secretly-elite QB held back by Lloyd Carr’s incompetence. He was a good-enough college guy then a good-enough NFL guy who eventually worked himself to greatness. Ryan Leaf was a vastly better collegian whose makeup was not up to the demands of the professional game/lifestyle/workload. Tebow has by all accounts worked like a madman, but has simply proven unable to improve his game. Its ridiculous to argue Brady was the best of the three as a collegian.
Really, the logical extension would be that college football shouldn’t have rankings; rather, wait a decade and award the national championship to whichever team produced the most NFL players.
What I was getting at is what VarlosZ is talking about. You can ask who had the best college career, clearly, and argue about that (and I did say I think the answer to that is Tebow, so I don’t think it’s quite fair to say I wasn’t answering the OP).
Both the OP and RickJay seem to be suggesting something else, though; that there’s a sport called “college football” that you can be a better quarterback at than other people without also being better at professional football. I don’t see how McCarron isn’t a better “college football quarterback” than Stabler or Namath based just on college performance, for instance, so obviously there’s some subjective element at play here. And I don’t see how you can say that if, for instance, Craig Krenzel, Tom Brady and Tim Tebow had each gone to Houston, Tebow would have still been a legend, Krenzel would have been a star, and Tom Brady would have been a nobody, because that’s how good each was at playing quarterback in college. It’s clear how it actually turned out in context, but Brady, it certainly seems to me, was probably the best overall quarterback the whole time. They were all playing college football, when they played, but I think it’s just incredibly obvious that the number one determinant of their performance was not how abstractly good they were at a sport called college football.
There’s more to it than just saying that quarterbacks who succeed within systems in college are better players than the ones who don’t succeed. We don’t even know what kind of performances swapping Mariota for Manziel for Daniel Sams would result in.
Another way of saying all that: if I was about to get thrown by a god of college football into an alternate dimension where I had to coach a college football season for my life, and I retained all of my knowledge, but the only choice I had over my personnel was whether my quarterback was going to be Kurt Warner or Josh Heupel, it’s my opinion that I would be a lunatic to pick Josh Heupel.
33-3 record as a starter
4 Big 8 championships
Started in 3 national championship games
Won back to back national championships
runner up for the heisman
All that while being hampered with blood clots for most of his career.
Disagree completely, at least w/r/t Tebow and Brady. Krenzel was an average Big 10 QB, same as Brady.
They’re not utterly different sports, but there are significant differences in what different levels call for.
[ul]
[li]Tebow’s long-windup throwing motion was not a hindrance in college; in the NFL, where the rush is on you faster and DBs are much better and windows close faster, it is a big problem. [/li][li]Ditto Tebow’s mediocre throwing strength.[/li][li]NFL offenses tend to require QBs to throw before a guy is open, which entails a lot of anticipation and confidence in your reads; college offenses typically don’t demand this. [/li][li]The type of personality that makes an effective leader of college kids is not necessarily also an effective leader of 30 year old professionals.[/li][li]And of course biggest of all is sheer athleticism. Lots of college guys succeed in large part by simply being the best athlete on the field; outrunning the defense, shrugging off the rush, etc. Outside of a very few guys for short periods nobody has succeeded on sheer athleticism in the NFL in 70 years.[/li][/ul]
You would be a lunatic not to.
Which is more probable:
The dozens of professional college coaches that looked at Warner and decided he didn’t even merit a D1A scholarship, and the college coach that watched Warner every day in practice for three years and decided he didn’t deserve to start until he was a senior, were all completely, dramatically wrong about how good he was at that time.
or
He got better after college.
And does it make a difference that Warner himself endorses #2?
All but the last fact there is completely irrelevant to the discussion, and Heisman runner-up isn’t all that useful either. Every other senior on the 1996 Cornhusker team who started also meets those criteria. There’s no reason to credit just a quarterback with a team statistic (wins or losses), or team accomplishments. There are plenty of other statistics and criteria to use - why use team stats to do so?
Frazier and Tebow, however, are exceptions to this - because you can point to their direct impact as the cause of their team’s massive success. A guy like McCarron you can point to the superhuman defense and dominant running game to explain the titles. Now, McCarron’s a great QB. But his actual performances over the last 2.5 years doesn’t even compare to most others’ in this thread.
I think they’re both true, furt, but I think the first is more probable as an explanation of Kurt Warner’s career path. I don’t think you just gradually grow into the capacity to make the kind of reads and the kinds of throws he made. It’s a pretty easy argument to make that his college coaches missed something his first three years, considering how he played as a senior. Even if he got better afterward, he didn’t just spring fully formed from Johnny Unitas’ head one day. And of course he’s going to say he got better; he’s like the say-the-right-thingest say-the-right-thing that ever said the right thing.
You’re right, though; I have to take back part of what I said. Like you and VarlosZ have both said, there’s something to be said for the less competitive athletic environment, and I don’t mean to discount that and I think I did. Tebow would have been athletically elite wherever he went, and it’s true that made him a very good college football quarterback. He’s obviously a great athlete; he even did the things he does well well in the NFL. So he was a great college football quarterback, and was better than some NFL quarterbacks (Nick Foles, say) in college, where that overlap allowed him to be.
But to the extent that he was asked to do some of the other things your average quarterback is asked to do on any given play, his flaws showed up, college or professional, and the fact that he wasn’t asked to do them very often at Florida doesn’t mean those things aren’t part of what makes up a college quarterback, same as they’re a part of what makes a pro. Tebow’d have trouble being Graham Harrell or Curtis Painter - much less Tim Couch or Matt Ryan - in college in the same way that those guys would have struggled in the offense he ran. The weaknesses are still there whether your environment is perfect for you or not. His performance was at least significantly determined by coaching and by his surroundings, not by his being good at something called “college football” where a quick release and a fifteen yard out don’t matter. He was what he was, and what he was was a guy who couldn’t win the Heisman if he had to play drop-back quarterback, but could as the centerpiece of an unstoppable Urban Meyer offense.
Do you disagree with that? Do you disagree that Tebow at BC or Kentucky or Texas Tech or Purdue would have been, in the sense we’re using it in this thread, a much worse football player? And if it’s true that his performance was highly contextual, why not Brady’s or Warner’s?
I disagree with people’s assessment about Brady’s time at Michigan. He wasn’t an underachieving QB who hadn’t developed yet - he was a possibly great QB who happened to play for Lloyd Carr’s Wolverines at a time when the most important job in the world was being able to hand the ball off to Anthony Thomas. Carr would have used Joe Montana in the exact same way.
I see where you guys are coming from - you’re basically saying that the variables in the college game make it hard to measure, and that by looking at their pro success, you get a more level playing field and therefore a better gauge of their true talents.
The problem is that the pro game isn’t the college game. The skills that make them good in the pros… make them good in the pros. You can’t really say that Matt Leinart wasn’t a good college quarterback because he wasn’t good in the pros, just like you can’t say that Tony Romo was actually a good college QB because he’s a starting pro quarterback.
Plenty of college players have been excellent, up to and including Heisman winners, and only a very select handful turn out to be good in the pro ranks. That doesn’t take away from their college accomplishments or skill, it just means that the game changed and they’re not as good at that as they were at the college game.
The analogy is like saying that someone’s salary out of college is reflective of how good of a student they were. We all know that there’s some correlation there, but that plenty of good students turn out to be middle-of-the-road workers, and plenty of mediocre students turn out to be very successful. The two systems don’t measure the exact same things.
I’m saying there aren’t really two systems, just two different difficulty levels. I think football is, more or less, football, and the guys who turn out to be the most talented at the highest levels are the guys who were the most talented, and that talent is the thing that makes you the best. If you like, I’m saying that the people with the best dissertation defenses were the smartest kids in high school, whether they got good grades or not. And that Tom Brady was a smarter kid than Josh Heupel, so I’d rather have him on my academic team.