Everyone knows who the top two picks in tonight's NFL draft will be: the Colts will take Andrew Luck of Stanford and the Redskins will choose Robert Griffin of Baylor. Yet, consider the following scores:
Brandon Weeden 41- Andrew Luck 38: in the Fiesta Bowl, a game which, if the NCAA did not have an SEC bias, would have been for the national championship.
Brandon Weeden 59 - Robert Griffin 24! slaughter in a regular-season Big XII game between Oklahoma State and Baylor.
Consider further that Luck's Stanford played in one of the weakest conferences in the nation, while Weeden competed in a league which, at various times throughout the season, had 30% of its teams in the top ten. Consider also that Weeden's team's only loss came due to a missed field goal on a day of an airplane crash which took the lives of members of the OSU athletics family; the players were in mourning. Yet, the guy who completed 408 out of 564 passes for 4,727 yards and 37 touchdowns will be selected either late in the first round or early in the second round tonight, while the two guys he outplayed will be #1 and #2. Why?
Because Weeden is 28 years old, having spent five years playing professional baseball before enrolling at OSU. One would think the NFL guys would be smart enough to know that this means one thing: Brandon is mature and ready to start at the pro level, while the other guys are young and inexperienced.
The most unfair result will be that Luck and Griffin will be drafted by teams which desperately need starting quarterbacks, and they'll get their respective chances immediately. Weeden, by virtue of going later in the draft, will no doubt be taken by a team which has an established QB, and Brandon will spend a year or two sitting and watching. By then, he'll be in his early 30s, and who knows if he'll ever have the chance to shine in the NFL? I hope this won't happen, and that the world will get a chance to see just how good this guy is.
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