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Originally Posted by htismaqe

The problem with your analysis is that he wasn't a game manager at all. In both his junior and senior seasons, he won games all by himself. In his junior season, he had to win several games because it was his interceptions that put them in a hole in the 1st place. He was the antithesis of a game manager for 75% of his time at Iowa. My guess is the one or two times you REALLY got to see him was when he played Michigan or Georgia Tech. Those are pretty specific game plans that called for him to play like that.

Iowa's on ESPN all the time, man. Pretty sure I watched him play more than twice.

His picks are part of the reason I put him in the McElroy category.

I called him Ricky Cassel heading into the draft, because I thought that's the kind of player he would have to be at the pro level: heavily constrained in the confines of a safe system to have any success. So the only way I could ever see him playing at this level was in a strictly controlled manager role. He was not somebody that I would expect (or want) to try and carry a pro team. He's not Stafford or Ryan or even Dirty Sanchez. And I would guess that scouts agreed with that assessment, since he was ultimately drafted where he was.

I think if he was a sure-fire stud the way that some Iowa fans seem to believe that he was, he would not have been drafted in the fifth round. And "second tier Big 10 school (which Iowa is not anymore, they're one of the better teams in the league now)" would not be a reason for that fall, since QBs from no-name schools, who couldn't even hope to be in the same class as Iowa, regularly get drafted early now.