I'm on the run this morning, so let's hit the highlights:
- Sando has a full roster analysis in the News-Tribune. As you might have expected, there are very few elements of suspense in this year's roster battles, and Sando reflects that.
- Eric Edholm of ProFootballWeekly.com says the Seahawks will break the Super Bowl loser curse this year, which leaves only the Madden Curse and the Chunky Soup Curse to be debunked.
- Scott M. Johnson of the Everett Herald profiles Julian Peterson, in an inspirational story about the DB's triumph over a form of dyslexia:
Peterson went on to Michigan State, but struggled so badly in his first semester that he failed all but one class and got a GPA of 0.7.Besides validating my life's worth in spite of my SAT scores, this story also made search out samples of the Wonderlic test. Here's a link that leads to a 9-question sample test. I projected to a 44. I am smarter than Brian Griese.
He learned how to manage his time better and earned a 2.75 the next fall. But his low score on the pre-draft Wonderlic - reports have surfaced that he scored either a 7 or an 8 out of a possible 50 - suggested to NFL scouts that he might not be smart enough to play at the next level.
Six years later, Peterson says that he didn't even attempt to score well on the test and that he simply filled in the answers without reading the questions.
"I was like, 'Man, this hasn't got anything to do with football,'" Peterson said on Monday. "And so I just A-B-C'd it. Vince Young probably did the same thing I did... (The Wonderlic) has nothing to do with learning the football game. It was like an SAT or something. I'm not here for that. I'm here for the X's and O's."
There's also a big list of the Wonderlic scores of college quarterbacks over the past few years. The current Seahawks QB in camp with the best Wonderlic score? Travis Lulay, 37.
Terry Bradshaw scored a 15. Kind of low for quarterbacks, but perfectly explains why he broke into song with Paul McCartney at that Super Bowl pregame show.
- There's also a profile of Julian from Dave Boling of the News-Trib, with the eloquent headline "Freakish Peterson an enemy of mediocrity".
- The News-Trib says Gibran Hamdan loves Bill Withers. So he can't be that bad.