One timers, college flops and pro drops

Opinion Wicked Smaht Fun Fact Wednesday
#1

This week we’re looking at players that only ever got one game under their belt, Heisman winners, and professional whoops. Every year the NFL holds a draft and each franchise bunkers down in their war room to figure out which college hopefuls will work best with their team to give them immediate relief or long term success. Young men sport their best suits and gather in New York to await being selected to a team. Generally, the Heisman winner of the preceding college season is selected in the first round. But how often are they worth that first round pick? And how about all those players that don’t even make it through training camp even though they were drafted? This week we look at those players and try to find out a little bit more than what we knew before.

  1. Chris Weinke won the Heisman in 2000 and was selected in the 2001 NFL draft 106th overall to the Carolina Panthers. He spent 5 seasons in the NFL. He won 2 out of 20 games he started.
  2. Eric Crouch and Jason White never played a single snap of regular season NFL play. They were both Heisman winners.
  3. Danny Wuerffel, Troy Smith, Tim Tebow, Gino Torretta, and Ty Detmer are all players who won the Heisman since 1990 and are quarter backs. They also never started all 16 games in a season.
  4. Charlie Ward was also a Heisman winner who never played in the NFL. He was a professional NBA player from 1994-2005 however, where he was selected 26th overall in the first round of the 1994 draft.
  5. Vincent Alexander played exactly one game in his NFL career, which he played with the New Orleans Saints. He rushed for 71 yards on 21 attempts, running in one for a TD.
  6. Rollin Roach is the only other player to have scored a touchdown while only playing 1 NFL game in his career. He played that game in 1927.

Bonus fact!!!

This season, only two QBs with 70+ attempts have not thrown an interception. Those two QBs are Tom Brady and Brian Hoyer.

Well that concludes another week of facts that I can almost guarantee were at least 1/7 unknown. Keep checking back here every Wednesday to get your weekly dose of Wicked Smaht facts.

1 Like
#2
  1. Weinke also had already played 5 years of pro sports (baseball I believe) and thus was mid to late-20s as a starting QB. Not surprised he sucked.
  2. I believe at least one of them elected to actually never play in the NFL and instead went to Harvard Business School
  3. Injury or poor ability to play?
  4. Cool
  5. Good points-would’ve been the second best on my team this week
  6. Lol old people
1 Like
#3
  1. Weinke played in the farm system of the Blue Jays for 5 years before enrolling as a student at Florida State University. So not quite pro.
  2. Electing to not play still means you never went pro.
  3. Injury was not an issue from what I understand, just didn’t have a skill set that transferred to the NFL (kind of the point of this post)
  4. His interest in professional basketball is what inhibited his NFL success. He only wanted to play if he was drafted in the first round of the NFL.
  5. Right? Don’t know what happened, I literally couldn’t find anything on the guy other than that he played the one game for the Saints.