How i'd like to know Vince Young

Two years ago I went to Pasadena to watch Michigan play Texas, and unfortunately I learned there isn’t a player more consistently defiant of 93 thousand people’s conception of reality than Vince Young. It wasn’t how I wanted it to go – Dusty Mangum kicking the game-winning field goal through the uprights I was sitting behind and all– but it was difficult to hate someone who was just so damn good at proving you wrong. Vince would do something superhuman, I’d smash my bag of kettle corn and kick my empty cup of soda, and each time it happened I thought it would be the last time. I’d never seen the kind of stuff Vince was doing – the kind that made Houdini look like one of those street-acts whose best trick always involved asking you to cut a deck of cards in half – but I never though it would keep happening.

In a way, the more he did it the more confident I became, because the latest disabling of my hopes only meant Michigan was that much closer to finally figuring him out. I thought to myself, you roll a die with nine sides that say “yes” and one that says “no,” every yes just meant a no was that much more imminent. He was supposed to be denied, solved, tackled, Vince was supposed to roll a no against Michigan. I knew probability, but the problem was I didn’t know Vince Young. It turned out the only side he rolled was “yes”, and it was the kind of yes that’s about 101% certain to rip your guts through your chest and probably break a few ribs in the process. He never did anything discretely, never defeated you with a surgeon’s care or premeditated diagram, and no one ever seemed to expect otherwise. But Michigan, Southern Cal – my damn ten-sided theoretical die – they still couldn’t stop him. My uncle was there with me in Pasadena, and every time Vince would make a play he’d lean over to me, “Un-friggin-believable; how does he keep doing it?” he’d say. And I think that’s really the best way to measure how good someone is at something, how often they redefine what you thought was impossible.

But in recent days Vince’s football talents haven’t really meant anything; a few numbers (a 6 and a 1 to be exact, the 1 just recently made relevant) and a plummeting draft-stock the only elements of a gaudy resume anyone seems to care about highlighting. It’s not that I don’t care that his score even at 16 is still pretty low, it’s that as the player I only know to be a peerless and unprecedented one-man domination, I just don’t want to recognize it, not yet at least.

I don’t know what kind of playbook Texas drew up for Vince and how well he handled the material cognitively, but his game was never based on throwing the ball and making coverage-reads anyway. Yes, he did it well when he needed to, but there's not a person who's drafting him in the top 3 because of how well he throws a button-hook or a square-out. He can run the ball, and god damnit he can do it as good as anyone; that’s what Vince Young is, and that’s the only thing I want to know him as. I like that he can’t throw a football the right way, that he knows how to stand in falling confetti as good as anyone (which is to say, he deserves to stand in falling confetti as much as anyone). I like that he didn’t win the Heisman Trophy too, because the only ballots that mattered were the two he submitted in Pasadena, and those had to mean more than some figurine anyway.

Vince's childhood is the kind that’s supposed to have more of an impact on his game than it has, and it’s as if everything else about him was just as impermeable. But how he handled the NFL’s complex schemes and linebackers who were about as fast as some of the DBs he played against in college, that was always going to be the issue with him, six, 16, or not. John Clayton and Mel Kiper and all the people who make their living talking about everything you think is too unimportant to, they were going to analyze that to death regardless. But I could deal with that, because eventually the blather of people who have nothing to blather about becomes a faint drone that I can ignore before it eventually disappears. Vince would resume being the guy who finally beat the team everyone hated.

Now I have some serious doubts about how good Vince can be in the NFL, but this is the guy solely responsible for ending Team Hollywood’s three-year sun-tanning in the media-spotlight, and anyone who isn’t at least proud of him for that should probably stop watching college football. So that’s why when I hear how this Wonderlic test is changing the way people think of Vince I get a bit nervous, nervous that it might change the way I think of him too. Because you see, there’s only one way I want to know Vince: Crushed kettle corn beneath my feet, uncle shouting incredulously in my ear, and not one in 93 thousand who have any idea if “impossible” even exists.