I'm calling a committee, a meeting of the airhead jocks, if you will. Because it's time to draft a petition, one that, despite being ground−breaking and landscape−changing, would help make the National Football League (NFL) a better place.
Ladies and gentlemen, I call for a permanent ban on Buffalo Bills quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick from the NFL, and I need your help to implement this dream into reality.
Fitzpatrick, field general of the undefeated Buffalo Bills, has no place in this fine football establishment, and should be barred immediately.
The reason?
He's too smart.
Think about it. This is the only explanation for the resurgent Bills, who somehow mustered a 34−31 win versus the visiting New England Patriots on Sunday, a victory blatantly aided by some sort of smart−person voodoo.
Tom Brady threw four interceptions, matching his 2010 total. Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, was brilliant to the untrained eye, throwing for 369 yards — his second−highestsingle−game total — and directed a second−half comeback from 11 points down that stunned the Pats.
It was a far cry from the Bills' 34−3 loss at home to New England on Dec. 26, 2010, in which he completed just 48.6 percent of his passes for 251 yards and three interceptions. Something clearly changed between then and Sunday. Analysts will point to a heightened work ethic and Buffalo's underdog mentality to explain the sudden shift in the AFC East's landscape. They'll spill nonsense about how brain triumphs over brawn, how the Bills have adopted that clutch, killer mentality reminiscent of the league's great squads. And Fitzpatrick will be the golden boy, the Harvard graduate who excommunicated traditions of old in upstate New York.
Well, it's about time to excommunicate this smarty pants from our glorious league. Fitzpatrick has about as much place in the NFL as high hits, wardrobe malfunctions and lame comparisons.
Fitzpatrick led the Crimson to a 10−0 season in 2004, and he was named the Ivy League Player of the Year. His father's a rocket scientist. No wonder Fitzpatrick's only been sacked once this season; his father and the other "smart" people clearly developed a force field. Talk about an artificial pocket protector. Listen, buddy, this isn't a galaxy far, far away. This is real life. Get with it and stop cheating. The NFL has no place for cheaters. Or science.
Even more telling is Fitzpatrick's startling acceptance of his alma mater. As he told the Providence Journal, "To me, I take a tremendous amount of pride going to school there and graduating from Harvard. I know that sometimes people use it as some kind of a joke or a sarcastic comment, [but] I take a tremendous amount of pride that I went to school there. I think it's a good thing."
The NFL needs more of the Ryan Fitzpatrick who proposed to his wife at McDonald's, not the one who engineers an offense scoring a league−best 37.7 points per game, .9 points more than the 2007 Patriots. Before this season, Fitzpatrick had a 73.0 career QB rating. In 2011, he's at 103.5. Harvard magic, indeed.
Given that Fitzpatrick braininess is running unchecked throughout the league, the only fathomable solution is a permanent ban. He's married to former Harvard All−American soccer player Liza Barber, so another generation of hyper−bred, well−rounded athletes is in the offing, and that's not what the NFL needs.
The world's greatest entity survives on beer, single−mindedness and beer, not TI−89s and intelligence. Everyone knows that Ivy League graduates belong in the front office, not on the field. After all, that very line is included in every single article ever written about Fitzpatrick.
It's time to put an end to the nonsense, to reclaim the NFL for its true owners.
The revenge of the nerds occurred in 1984. We don't need a sequel.
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Alex Prewitt is a senior majoring in English and religion. He can be reached on his blog at http://livefrommudville.blogspot.com or followed on Twitter at @Alex_Prewitt.
