If you get a chance, you absolutely have to read the whole story that Jeremy Fowler of the St. Paul Pioneer Press did on Vikings' quarterback Christian Ponder. It goes into Ponder's rather strict upbringing as well as his emergence as a leader at Florida State. A very well-done article by Mr. Fowler.
Oh, and don't think that Ponder doesn't here the fools that are criticizing the fact that he was drafted where he was drafted. . .because he does.
They are silent while kneeling on the turf with their helmets beside them as he tells them he didn't care that McElroy was rated higher coming out of high school. Nor, he tells them, did he care that ESPN analyst Trent Dilfer ripped his accuracy under pressure and compared him to Elvis Grbac, who had only limited NFL success. Ponder does say he was ticked off that someone had graded him as a third- or fourth-round pick because of his injuries, but now here he is, proving someone else wrong.
"I know I can play at this level," he tells the players.
A lot of people have ripped the Vikings' selection of Ponder, and pretty much all of them can be placed firmly under the heading of "idiot," which is the category that pretty much everybody that hates the Minnesota Vikings falls into. Seriously, how dumb would you have to be to rip on a guy with this much talent, this much intelligence, and this much ability? You'd have to be pretty frickin' stupid, as far as I can tell.
Oh, well. . .the idiots will continue being idiots, because that's simply what idiots do. Meanwhile, we'll be watching Christian Ponder develop into one of the NFL's best quarterbacks and knowing that we were right all along. I know that I, for one, am very much looking forward to it.
EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that there is a second part of this article. Thanks to "Simply_Greatness" for passing it along.