Amazing MMQB article on Gronk (merged)

[patchick]

Check it out, a football article about football! Real, complex, strategic, detailed football. Awesome.

If we get everyone we know to click on it, maybe it will encourage more of the same?

 

[Fencer]

Didn't I read that he hasn't spent one cent of his salary and lives on endorsements, investing the rest?? That is a great long term strategy for building megawealth.. an option not available to most and a great one...

Yep. That's one the things I had in mind when I made my post.

 

[IllegalContact]

the dude's having a blast being a football player and the bennies that surround it

down to earth common sense with the rest of it

I had him pegged from the get-go......many around here kept alluding to the 'talking to' he was going to need from the coach from the owner, etc.......like he was going to need an intervention

 

[Soul_Survivor88]

Some good quotes in here

Rob Gronkowski, Football's Brainiest Tight End | The MMQB with Peter King

 

[ErniesPinkStripes]

Great article, thank you

Like this pic too, anyone wanna caption it?


"Your ass better be ready for Week 5."

 

[NormZauchin]

I liked Belichick's comment: "They don’t play to the same skill set you see athletically because they’re thinking too much."

 

[Jackson 2]

Great article, thank you

Like this pic too, anyone wanna caption it?


"Your ass better be ready for Week 5."

Never mind his ass, how about his hamstring?

 

[ausbacker]

When the Patriots traded for Bennett, my initial thought was "geez, the Running Backs are going to love this." Two Tight Ends who can both catch and block. For opposing defenses, it's going to be a nightmare when Brady, Gronk, and Bennett are on the field together.

 

[Froob]

Is there any doubt Gronk could be an all pro tackle?

 

[oldrover]

"Gronk like football!!! Football good!"

 

[RobertWeathers]

What a GREAT article. Thanks for posting.

I avoid MMQB b/c of King but Benoit did a great job with this piece.

 

[Gronk]

“Rob is a versatile athlete, but he’s also a versatile guy mentally. He can handle a lot of different assignments. Some guys can’t. Either they mentally can’t do it, or it’s just too much and their game slows down. They don’t play to the same skill set you see athletically because they’re thinking too much. That’s not the case with Rob.”

I'm sure BB's quote is referencing Ben Watson, who would fit this mold exactly. It's not that Watson wasn't a decent tight end here, but as a first round pick, we would have thought he had a higher ceiling, and he rarely seemed to showcase his athleticism. I'm not sure if people realized this about Watson, but he scored a FORTY-EIGHT on his Wonderlic test. That is freakin amazing. Tied for the third highest score ever, at any position. To put things in perspective, you can get into Mensa with a score of around 36 (top 2%). My wife scored a 40, which puts her around the 99.7th percentile; so if you had 1000 people in a room, she would be in the top 3. Ben Watson, at 48, would be above most physics theorists and somewhere in the freak intelligence category. I'm guessing someone like that would struggle in a complex, decision-based offense and might overanalyze. I don't think it's any secret the Saints deploy a more simplified system, based on the typical athelticism of their players and the fact some of our castoffs did well in NO. Ben Watson is one of them. Travaris Cadet is another guy who clearly couldn't grasp the offense here but is doing fine there.

Huge List Of NFL Wonderlic Scores By Position | WTS

Love this, because while I don't think that I'd necessarily want to retroactively call BB a genius any more than normal, but I think what Gronkowski has become is exactly what he was trying to envision when he drafted Watson...all the way back in 2004. It only started really getting talked about when BB got Gronk/Murderer on board in 2010/11 but that was a process long in the works. That there was something there with their passing game that could be augmented and improved by having a super-intelligent and physical freak TE to pair with what was then Brady's emerging insanely high FB IQ that could make them an unstoppable force offensively.

Loved Watson, not sure I could have imagined a TE like Gronk back in the day, and of course Watson's defining play of his career is chasing down Champ Bailey in a playoff loss (had that been called correctly/differently, or had NE won, it might have lived on more openly as one of the greatest football plays of all time). It's hard now to fathom a time that Brady didn't have Gronk because his presence has been so definitively important to the offense's success in the Brady 2.0 phase post-2008.

Also, great article.