Just To Be Equal, You're An Idiot

The other day Miami Dolphins wide receiver Brandon Marshall was interviewed about the possibility of an NFL lockout for the 2011 season and said that if that happened he would simply go to the NBA and play for the Nuggets or Heat. (Cue heavy sigh.) Ok, since I crapped all over LeBron for saying he thought he could play in the NFL, in the interest of fairness I have to go the other way and inform Marshall that he is a giant jackass. First off, the NBA is also probably facing a lockout in 2011 (oh yeah, the winter of 2011 could suck), so Marshall is as oblivious as he is egotistical. Even though he hasn't played organized ball since before college, Brandon thinks he could make the jump to the NBA because he was a letter-winner in high school. Oh, well, when you have credentials like that, who am I to argue? What Marshall needs to do is go and take a look at the number of great college players who never even get drafted. We're talking about players who were not only letterman in high school, but some of them went on to be the best in their college conferences and they still didn't get a contract in the league. It should drive home the point that those who make the league, even the 15th men on 14-man rosters, are unbelievable skilled at what they do. Brian Scalabrine would school Brandon Marshall's ass on a basketball court.

Now, I get why Marshall thinks he can play ball. At 6'4" he is tall for an NFL wideout and as such his teams have run plays where the quarterback simply throws the ball up in the air to the back of the endzone and watches as Marshall comes down with it. I'm also sure that whenever he goes out and plays against all the other wideouts on the Dolphins or Broncos he lights them up and scores 30 points. The problem for him comes from the fact that 6'4" isn't tall in the NBA and those guys can leap out of the building. (Point of reference: at 6'9" Jonathan Ogden was often referred to as a "mountain of a lineman", while 6'8" Luke Harangody was deemed too small to play power forward in the NBA.) He'd be undersized at almost any position in the NBA, save for point guard, and I think the NBA guards would salivate at the the idea of him running point. I would put the over/under on his turnovers a game at 10, still take the over and my guess is that he would get maybe one rebound a game, which would be purely by accident. While the transition is from basketball to football is not an easy one, it is the more common of the two. Antonio Gates was a decent college basketball who turned himself into an elite NFL tight end because he couldn't hack it as a professional basketball player. It's easier to dominate a physical game like football with the pure athleticism that you need to play basketball than it is to try to bully guys in basketball like you can on the football field.

Now, Marshall isn't the first NFL wideout to make this claim. Terrell Owens once famously said that everyone referred to him as the "Michael Jordan of football." No, T.O., they don't. I follow basketball and football about as closely as a human can and I've heard exactly zero people use that nickname. Unfortunately, people like T.O and Marshall were given more of a reason to think this transition is realistic when a team of Owens, Gates and Donovan McNabb beat a team of Kenny Smith, Rick Fox and Hakeem Olajuwon on a recent episode of Pros vs Joes. What T.O. will forever fail to grasp is that Fox, Olajuwon and Smith are all long-retired from the NBA and have a combined age of about 150. If you were to take three NBA vets who are still playing and have that rematch and the outcome will be vastly different. What guys like Marshall and T.O. need to do is take a step back and see how disrespectful it is to the people who have played basketball everyday of their life to assume you could do what they do as well as them just by showing up. I'm sure they would get pissed if the Dolphins or Bengals let Kobe Bryant come in for a tryout, so perhaps a little bit of self-awareness is in order. Unfortunately, when talking about the new breed of diva wide receivers that the NFL keeps churning out lately, self-awareness is not one of the first traits that come to mind.