Lots of folks are picking on Donovan McNabb for not knowing that NFL games can end in a tie.  Turns out there are a lot of players who didn’t know a game could end in a tie.  Guess what… it’s not the players’ fault.  It’s the coaches‘ fault.  The coaches are supposed to know the rulebook front to back, and they’re supposed to impart the required knowledge onto their players.  If a receiver comes from college, where they only need to have one foot inbounds on a reception, he should probably know just from watching games on TV that he needs both feet inbounds in the NFL, but it’s the wide receivers coach’s job to make sure he knows it.  If he admits later to not knowing the rule, and he’s not lying, it’s the coach’s fault.  End of story.

A lot of people are surprised at the success Matt Ryan is enjoying with the Atlanta Falcons.  Rookie quarterbacks, it is said, despite the success of guys like Ben Roethlisberger and Kyle Orton (yes, Kyle Orton won ten games his rookie year) aren’t supposed to win games until they take their lumps.  The truth is, Ryan is probably the most NFL-ready quarterback to be drafted in some time, so it really shouldn’t be too surprising.  You just need to look for the right things when predicting NFL success…

Is there anything physically or mechanically wrong with the guy?

It’s never a good sign when scouting reports talk about a guy having a ‘quirky’ throwing motion, throwing off the wrong foot, having a weak arm, needing to hit the weight room, being injury prone, or just being too short.  There’s nothing that precludes a player with these traits from success – Doug Flutie was short and Chad Pennington has no arm strength – but with the quarterback position being the most important one on the football team, this stuff can’t just be dismissed.

Matt Ryan was listed at 6′5″, 225 lbs (in otherwords, prototypical quarterback size), with decent mobility and without any blatant mechanical problems.  He missed some time with a broken foot but showed time after time that he could get up off the turf after a hit.

Did he play in a system than transfers well to the NFL?

Quick: Name the Steve Spurrier-coached quarterback who has had the most success in the NFL.  The answer is probably Rex Grossman.  The fact is not all of the offenses run by NCAA teams translate to the NFL.  This is why Eric Crouch won the Heisman Trophy as a quarterback at Nebraska, and yet had switch to the safety position to get a sniff of action in the NFL.  This is why Hawai’i quarterbacks under June Jones set all sorts of NCAA passing records but don’t get any playing time in the NFL.

Boston College runs a pro-style offense, where receivers and backs and tight ends all do the same sorts of things they’re responsible for at the pro level, so for his entire college career, Matt Ryan saw the same formations that are used professionally.  The learning curve is much lower.

Has he performed in pressure situations?

This isn’t really a major factor, because almost all quarterback prospects play in exciting, pressure-packed games.  Whether it’s a BCS Championship or the annual rivalry game between East Directional and East Directional State.  But their success in those games can be a tell-tale sign.  Peyton Manning never beat Florida – the one team Tennessee fans wanted the Vols to beat – and his penchant for performing poorly in big games followed him to the NFL until he broke through in Super Bowl XLI.

One player remarked about how cool Matt Ryan was on the road against a hostile crowd.  The first thing I thought was, “Why would he get rattled?”  The guy engineered a fourteen point comeback in the final three minutes on the road at Virginia Tech with an undefeated season on the line.  It’s unlikely that he’s going to worry too much about a mid-season NFL road game.

Is the guy coming from a solid background into a stable situation?

The solid background is less of an issue than the stable situation, but you should at least see where the player is coming from and what kind of background he has when you’re evaluating his chances for success.  In retrospect, the Michael Vick saga isn’t surprising when you consider the people he hung around with before and after achieving stardom in the NFL.  But the stable situation is important, too.  Remember Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf?  Now, before we continue, let’s just make it clear that Ryan Leaf was never going to be Peyton Manning, but consider the situations they were drafted into.  Peyton was selected by the Colts in a year where they had hired a new coach (Jim Mora).  The team already had Marshall Faulk and Marvin Harrison on it, but had no expectation of immediate success.  Peyton finished the season with 26 touchdowns and 28 interceptions, but he wasn’t punished for failure.  Mora remained the coach for some time and the team was built around Manning’s talents.

The same can’t be said for Ryan Leaf.  Leaf was drafted to lead a talentless San Diego Chargers offense and actually started off 2-0.  In Week 3 against the Chiefs, though, Leaf was 1-for-15, and after throwing four picks Giants in Week 4, the chain-jerking began, as he was benched in favor of Craig Whelihan.  After changing head coaches in mid-season, Leaf alternately started and didn’t start throughout the season, and actually finished with the same number of wins as Peyton Manning did that season (3).  Now Leaf had a serious attitude problem, but that environment wasn’t exactly the formula for success.  If you want to develop a quarterback for the future, you can’t be worried about winning now.

Matt Ryan was working on a Master’s degree, having completed his undergraduate degree on time and staying at Boston College for a fifth year.  He received scholar-athlete awards, never had any off the field incidents, scored high on Wonderlic tests, and was generally held in high regard by his coaches and his peers.  Going into Atlanta, he finds himself on a team with a new coach, significant talent on offense, and a philosophy where an emphasis on the running game will allow him to ease into the position.  He’ll make mistakes, but he’ll be allowed to make those mistakes without wondering whether he’ll be relegated to bench.

Now, if there’s one more reason to be unsurprised by his success with the Falcons this year, it’s this: everyone talks about how fast the NFL is, and how rookies struggle until the game slows down for them.  I remember something that Joey Harrington said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “In college, when I dropped back, there was somebody open on every play.  In the NFL, nobody’s open!“  Well, as anyone who watched Boston College during Ryan’s career will attest to, when Matt Ryan dropped back to pass in college, there was still nobody open.  The throws that most college quarterbacks don’t need to make until they reach the NFL were the throws that Ryan had to make every time he needed a first down.

I’m having trouble putting my thoughts together on the World Series… I’ve decided it’s not the worst World Series I’ve ever seen, having been reprieved by Wednesday night’s mini-game.  By the time I ended up writing something, it’ll probably be irrelevant, so to be more topical, how about the Texas-Texas Tech game played this evening in Lubbock?

Game of the Year?  Uh, yeah.

I expected Texas to win, not because they were ranked #1, but because this was their last big test before hitting the home stretch on their schedule and they had to be aware of this.  They’d already knocked off Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Missouri, so all they needed to do was win at Texas Tech and the path was clear to the Big XII Championship.  I was also of the opinion that had Texas run the table and lost the Big XII title game, they still deserved a spot in the Mythical National Championship.

That all seemed to fly right out the window when Texas Tech downed a punt on the 1 and notched a safety on the Longhorns first play from scrimmage.  The Red Raiders opened up a 19-0 lead, dominating in all phases of the game, and the Longhorns managed a grand total of two impressive plays the entire first half – a 27-yard run by Colt McCoy, and a forced fumble that gave the Horns their best field position of the half (they settled for three points).

The second half was a wild affair, with momentum flipping back and forth on big plays.  Texas had a punt return for a touchdown.  Tech had an interception return for a touchdown.  Texas blocked a field goal, then cut the deficit to three when the Red Raiders defense inexplicably allowed Malcolm Williams to get ten yards behind them en route to a 91-yard score.  Tech was poised to put the game out of reach until a phantom offensive pass interference call turned the game on its ear, making a first-and-goal from the ten a first-and-goal from the twenty-five.  The Red Raiders could muster only a field goal, extending their lead to a fairly useless six points.  Texas, having trouble sustaining drives all night, then marched down the field with ease, taking a 33-32 lead with 1:29 on the clock.

Too much time left for Tech?  Yup.

After a near interception on a tipped pass, Graham Harrell hit Michael Crabtree at the five, who then wrestled free of two would-be tacklers and scored the go-ahead touchdown with one second left.  You’d think that would be the end of things.  But after two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties assessed on the crowd of borderline retards who stormed the field with time remaining on the clock not once, but twice, the Red Raiders were forced to kick off from their own seven-and-a-half yardline.  The Longhorns tried the ever-popular Multiple-Lateral-Prayer Play, but managed only one good lateral before a Tech defender jumped the second and secured the victory.

Go ahead and exhale now.  Then catch the replay on ESPN Classic later this week.

The problem for the still-undefeated Red Raiders is that they’re in the middle of their gauntlet.  Upcoming games against the Sooners and Cowboys are winnable, but it’s almost impossible to get through the Big XII undefeated.  The road is much harder for the Raiders than it would have been for the Longhorns.

The fact that Penn State and USC don’t have to play conference championship games gives them an edge in qualifying for the Mythical National Championship, because even if the computers hurt them for not playing that extra game, other teams are going to need to not only win their conference title game but in some cases hope that the voters springboard them over idle teams.