Around the NFL: Offseason edition 2.0

[JoeRedskin]

Originally Posted by SolidSnake84

It's the sad side of football. Many of the athletes have very low intelligence, have a hard time reading / writing - all they've got is their athletic skills to get them out of poverty. Colleges slide them through because they want a national championship and don't care if the player is even literate. Correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't it Dexter Manley who said that all the way through college he could barely read?

When I was attending College Park (back in the Boomer Eisason days), I took a night class on Soviet Foreign Relations (or something like that) without realizing it was a "Jock Class." The entire football team was enrolled. When the professor gave a test, he passed it out then left the room and returned about five minutes before class ended. The guys just passed test answers around and blatantly discussed them. I just sat quietly and did my thing.

I routinely sat next to a guy who was on his last year of eligibility and was the 3rd string WR. We're talking one day and he tells me he has a plate in his wrist that restricts its mobility. In the next breath, he tells me how he's training hard for the draft and his agent thinks he could go in the 9th or 10th round; he was certain that, once he got drafted, he would be in the NFL for life b/c his coaches kept telling him he was just a victim of the numbers game at UMCP.

I just remember thinking - "3rd string WR from a sometimes top 20 school with a plate in your wrist. Oh yeah, that's spells perennial All-Pro." Guy was nice enough but dumber than a brick.