Draft Shaft?

Brown's Zak DeOssie, Headed to the N.Y. Giants (CREDIT: CSTV)

Congratulations to Zak DeOssie! I know all Ivy football fans wish him the best of luck. But I also know a lot of Ivy football fans are a little miffed that only one of our league's players was taken in the NFL draft. But there's no reason to feel that way, and here are five big reasons why:


OUCH!

1) The NFL is a professional league playing at a level of speed and yes, brutality, that makes even the most elite college-level ball look like an absolute cake walk. You could play a career's worth of Oklahoma-Florida State games and still be ill-prepared for the NFL. There's a reason why it's the only major professional league without guaranteed contracts for its players.

2) Draft day is a time for optimism, for the teams, players and the fans. A lot of the guys taken this weekend will not end up playing in the NFL. Some will get a short amount of playing time and then will be gone. Only a very select few will become starters and maybe 2-3 of this year's picks will become real stars. There is no shame in "not making it" in the NFL.

3) We can't have it both ways folks. Most Ivy fans I know are truly proud that our football players are students first, and athletes second. A huge percentage of NFL players either came out school early, never graduated, and frankly never belonged in college classrooms in the first place. This is no knock on them as people, (there are a lot of jerks in college classrooms these days in case you haven't noticed. And that goes for professors too), but "scholar-athletes" they ain't. But they are super-focused athletes making a 100% physical commitment to a very dangerous game. And the overwhelming majority of them still won't make it. Just to hammer the nail into this point, let's name the last 10 Heisman winners: Danny Wuerffel, Charles Woodson, Ricky Williams, Ron Dayne, Chris Weinke, Eric Crouch, Carson Palmer, Jason White, Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Troy Smith. Most of those guys haven't made it as NFL starters, and they probably never will. And these are supposedly the best players in college football over the last decade.

Here's the deal: Big-time college football coaches play to win, not to recruit talent for the pros; that's what minor league baseball, hockey and basketball coaches do. Big-time college football coaches will use the option, shuttle their quarterbacks, run the ball on 4th and 7, and whole host of other things that wouldn't fly in the NFL. That's because what wins you ball games in the NCAA is often an entirely different set of things that win in the NFL. Why more Ivy coaches have begun using NFL-like playbooks and sets is beyond me, (unless the coaches are simply auditioning for NFL jobs, and I suspect a great deal of them are). One of the things that worked extremely well for Columbia last season, the 3-5-3 defense, would never work in the pros. But there are at least 1-2 other teams in the Ivies looking at using it now as well. Hell, if there's an Ivy team that started using the single wing one day it might even make sense.



Marcellus Wiley, 1994 (CREDIT: Columbia Athletic Dept.)

4) The current crop of Ivy alums in the NFL have pretty much lived up to the preconceived notions about the league. The best of them are effective and smart role players who don't have the size and speed to be true stars in the brutal NFL. I'd say the two big exceptions are Columbia's Marcellus Wiley, who achieved all-pro status as a defensive end with the Buffalo Bills but is now well past his prime, and Harvard's Matt Birk, an excellent center and regular all-pro for the Vikings who is also probably in the latter stages of his career too. And besides, this past season did not exactly produce a bumper crop of super players or teams. I think the Ivy Champs of '03, '04, and '05 would have beaten co-champions Yale and Princeton this year.



5) This is actually a "Golden Age" of sorts for Ivy players at the professional level. The Ivies went through a serious drought when it came to breaking into the NFL in the late 70's and through most of the 80's. The NFL's expansion that began in 1995 and swelled the league from 28 to 32 by 2002 has given hundreds more college players a chance at making the pros... but only as bench players. Of course, if you're watching most NFL games these days, you have a good chance of seeing an Ivy alum on the field at some point. That simply wasn't true in 1977, 1987, or even 1997. Considering the fact that the Ivy League is made up of just eight teams with a total of about 800-850 players combined, the fact that 1-2 of them get drafted each year and another 4-5 get signed as free agents is not bad.

So despite what some reporters and NFL GM's say about the Ivies being a "soft league," the truth is the entire NCAA is a soft league compared to the NFL. That's why so few college stars even in the roughest conferences ever make it.