Millions of football fans around the world play fantasy football from their workplace, home office and living room every year.
Some men, however, play fantasy football on gridirons across the country every Saturday. And it's by no fault of their own.
The latest high-profile fantasy superstar is Auburn quarterback Cam Newton.
Newton comes from a long line of statistical superheroes, a list that includes the likes of Akili Smith, Alex Smith and, most recently, Tim Tebow. All three of these men excelled on the field in their final collegiate season, but question marks followed them to the NFL.
We know what eventually came of Akili and Alex Smith's respective careers. The jury is still out on Tebow, who enters his second pro season whenever the 2011 NFL campaign gets underway.
Newton is the most recent graduate of Hype University, run by Chancellor Kirk Herbstreit. During Monday night's BCS national sham-pionship game, Herbstreit could barely contain himself while gushing on-air about Newton's positive attributes.
Never mind the fact that Newton threw a terrible interception and allowed Oregon to tie the game after he fumbled late in the fourth quarter. In the end, it was Newton's, and Auburn's, SEC pedigree that makes the junior quarterback one of the nation's elite and a first-round prospect in this April's NFL draft.
The problem doesn't just lie there, however. Over the past few weeks, Newton has been compared to another dual-threat quarterback who led his team to an unexpected national championship.
Vince Young.
Young has a career quarterback rating of 75.7. He's never started all 16 games in a season, and he's never thrown for more than 12 touchdowns in a season. In fact, there have been four instances in NFL history in which a quarterback has thrown for more touchdowns in a single season than Young has in his five-year career.
Young was drafted third overall in the 2006 draft, by the Tennessee Titans. He was drafted to be the franchise quarterback - much like Newton likely will be - and he has fallen well short of expectations. The cavalcade of injuries, on top of his erratic and volatile behavior, has Young on his way to free agency this offseason.
While Newton appears to be more mature than Young, is Newton to be lauded for being a Vince Young-type quarterback?
History has shown us that quarterbacks who play in a spread offense in college rarely succeed in the NFL.
The runs simply aren't there. In college, dual-threat quarterbacks can run around defensive ends and linebackers. When they reach the NFL, they have the likes of Terrell Suggs, Clay Matthews and DeMarcus Ware to contend with.
Because of their size, Newton, Tebow and Young could run through tackles while in college. Tebow tried running through a Cincinnati Bengals defender in some of his early NFL action, and was injured doing so.
When these spread quarterbacks don't have the runs afforded to them in college, they are forced to pass. Rarely are the dual-threat quarterbacks proficient in drop-back passing, which is integral to NFL success. Michael Vick may have had an MVP-type season in 2010, but as the season drew to a close, opposing defenses figured him out. Even the incredibly elusive Vick couldn't run away from his problems.
On ESPN's College Football Live, draft guru (and one of ESPN's many resident idiots) Mel Kiper, Jr., said Newton would be a project, a quarterback a team would draft to sit behind the current starter for two to three years. Why?
Because he isn't developed as a passer.
The NFL draft is a crap shoot. It's largely built around potential. Some players are slam dunks - the Lions probably knew they were getting a winner when the drafted Ndamukong Suh second overall in last year's draft.
But, as Kiper highlighted on College Football Live, it is Newton's supposed potential, or upside, that makes him such a commodity in this year's draft.
Call me crazy, but I'd rather take a player like Newton's Auburn teammate, all-world defensive tackle Nick Fairley, if I were drafting in the first half of the first round.
I'd rather have proven players on my roster instead of players with "high upside." Isn't it more important to prove your worth when there are 11 opponents standing in front of you?
Maybe this line of thinking is the reason I'm not running an NFL team. Maybe I just don't have enough "upside."
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