Going into this weekend, John Beck may have been the most underrated player in this year's NFL draft. He was generally regarded as a second-day draft pick, but today at the NFL Combine he put up some amazing numbers. The most interesting number to me was this one:

Ball speed: 61.1 mph

This is a football, folks!

The reason this is interesting to me is that many announcers who covered BYU's football games this past year wondered whether Beck had what it takes to make the NFL throws. Of course, the people who repeated this evaluation had done some homework: they had listened to the other announcers. What they hadn't done is make an independent evaluation of Beck's abilities. BYU fans remembered a younger Beck throwing so hard that the receivers couldn't catch up with the ball, and all of this talk of Beck's "average arm" got BYU fans so defensive that they became a standing joke.

Fortunately for Beck, arm strength is measurable, and people are noticing.

Now, about those "measurables." How important are they? Well, if your goal is to get drafted, they are pretty darn important, but if your goal is to play good football, we all know that there is more to it. At the beginning of this past season, BYU fans were engaged in a nauseating discussion of whether Beck had "it." As far as I can tell, "it" is some intangible attribute that cannot be taught, but somehow means the difference between winning and losing. A player may demonstrate that he or she has "it" on a single play.

By the way, the announcer who comments on Beck's "amazing arm strength" is Todd Christensen, a BYU alum and NFL star with the Raiders. He also is the father of one of Beck's former receivers, so he knew better than to credit what so many other announcers were saying.

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