Is Tyrod Taylor the Eagles' new Michael Vick?

So my man Tracer Bullet wants the Eagles to draft Tyrod Taylor, the Virginia Tech QB from Hampton, VA (hey, that's where Allen Iverson is from!) with the obvious physical skills and reasonable resemblance to our current hero, especually when he's tucking the ball and running. Check out the 2:45 highlight agsint UNC; that's Vick-esque. And sorry about the backing music. I know it's a bit much.



Which led me to ping an old friend of mine who happens to work at Va Tech, and has been watching the local team for some time. Here's what she had to say about him:

He can run OK, but we won't see him as a quarterback in the NFL. He hasn't got the brains. Yes, I know.

Which leads one to wonder how important that particular attribute is, really. Vince Young supposedly had a 6 on the Wonderlic and still won games in the league; his behavior, more than his intellect, has been his downfall. Every week on my tee vee, Dan Marino, Phil Simms and Troy Aikman prove that QBs don't have to be able to think, much less talk, to have had good careers. And for the most part, super brainy QBs like Ryan Fitzpatrick aren't stars; most of the times, guys like that are backups at best. (Oh, and when the back up is a white guy with odd ideas about life, a la Koy Detmer and his just pack a toothbrush joie de vive? He's an eccentric, never a dummy. Heh.)

But getting back to the point... If you are a really smart football player, I actually think that you aren't going to be as good as a guy with an average intellect. Mr. Brain is going to go to class rather than the weight room, and he's going to slide or run out of bounds rather than kill himself for yards, especially when the game is out of hand. He's got the ability to think about his future, and that's not a good thing between the lines.

The bigger issue for me with Taylor is that he is only a 57% passer, and has the Vickian disease of taking contact at the end of runs. He also doesn't look too big to me, so he could have all of the flaws of the original without the magic. But all in all, these seem to be better problems to have, in that they are coachable... and you would have to think that if he went to the place that made Vick his most dangerous, that might work out well. I also like that Taylor's Tech teams won a lot of games. That helps.

Not that, of course, I know college football for sour apples, or have any real idea when my laundry would need to spend a pick on this guy. Given that they currently have two capable starting quarterbacks and potentially no capable starting linebackers, it's also not an area of need, assuming a Kevin Kolb trade isn't in the works. Finally, by talking about him, we drive up his buzz and make the team have to select him earlier then they might like. So, um, forget we said anything.

(But for the record, the last time I thought about a guy for my laundry before he put it on, and the guy played in front of a friend? DeSean Jackson. And that worked out pretty well and all...)