Houston Should Pick Manziel in First Round of NFL Draft

From time to time I tune in to one of the sports talk radio shows on my AM radio dial.  Sometimes they are discussing football matters, which can be a little difficult to listen to in April, on the opposite side of the year from the football season.  Still, the folks running college and professional football are shrewd enough to schedule essentially around-the-year events to draw interest, even this far away from any games (except arena football, which also in a shrewd way is going on right now).  One of the premier events about to happen is the NFL draft.  Naturally, the greatest interest spent here is the first round, when the top prospects coming out of college get picked by teams, usually by order of how badly those teams did the previous year.  And this time around, there's no team that was as bad in 2013 as was the Houston Texans.  The consensus pick among the sports media seems to be that the Number One overall choice, and hence Houston's first round pick, will be defensive end Jadeveon Clowney from South Carolina. However, just a few miles from Houston, Texas, on Interstate 45 lies College Station, the site of Texas A&M University where "Johnny Football" quarterback Johnny Manziel just completed his exciting college football career.  Manziel decided after his junior year to enter the NFL draft and is expected to go high, probably in the first round.  But the talking heads on sports radio seem to think that he isn't up to the level of the National Football League, and that the Texans should select Clowney or someone else and bypass Manziel.

One of Houston's glaring problems this past season has been its lack of an effective quarterback, ultimately the most crucial and central position on a team.  Manziel has consistently shown his passing talent, as well as an ability to adjust quickly to opposing defensive schemes.  Against Alabama in a losing effort last year, Manziel helped spur his team, in a close game, to 42 points against what was generally regarded as the best college defense in the country. One of the criticisms against him is that he is too small for the NFL, but then so was Drew Brees, or all-time record rusher Emmitt Smith for that matter...if you believe the experts.  The most important trait I see in an effective quarterback is the ability to QUICKLY size up, at the start of each play, what's going on with the defense and what the options are to get around them.  A good offensive line will help buy time to do this, but if a quarterback can't quickly adjust and put the ball into play then it won't do much good anyway.  Conversely, a sharp quarterback can compensate for a deficient offensive line.  I believe that Manziel has the ability to be like those successful NFL quarterbacks who can make those decisions and move the ball down the field.  Besides, with the automatic huge fan base Manziel brings to Houston and the southeastern Texas area, sellouts are most likely to become commonplace with the Texans should they make him their franchise quarterback.  But neither business acumen nor successful team-building is necessarily the rule when it comes to the draft...

In 2010, after Tim Tebow finished his Heisman Trophy/two national championship stint at the nearby University of Florida in Gainesville, the Jacksonville Jaguars, desperate for a decent quarterback, had a chance to draft him.  It's true that Tebow isn't the archetypical NFL quarterback prospect.  For one, he's a bit off with his passing accuracy.  For another, he seems to have some difficulty with sizing up defensive strategies as a play is developing.  But Tebow is a strong exhorter and leader, and makes a team better than its parts.  He also is a terrific rusher and can poke gaping holes in opposing defenses just by taking the ball and plowing on ahead.  But even more than that, Tim Tebow would have solved Jacksonville's consistently woeful attendance problems by filling up their stadium game after game.  So what did they do? They bypassed him...and still have quarterback problems after awful 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 seasons.

Houston may be about to make a similar mistake with Manziel...