Chapter 2

10/19/12

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Chapter 2 (Pages 25-38) - The Market for Football Players

            Chapter 2 of The Blind Side gave more background information. The narrator talked about why left tackles are so important. The narrator also mentioned a college football scout named Tom Lemming. He traveled the United States looking for players for NCAA football. He has found many future superstars including Michael Oher, the protagonist in The Blind Side. The chapter also mentions his interactions with other future college and pro players. The narrator also gives more of a back story of Michael Oher. He was poor. He wasn’t known well in school, and the tape that Tom Lemming got to see was really fuzzy.

            A quote that I found from chapter 2 of The Blind Side that was relevant to Tom Lemming was, “In 2000, the U.S. Army High School All-American football game was born, and broadcast on national television. Lemming selected the eighty players for the game. Reggie Bush, Vince Young, Adrian Peterson, Dwayne Jarrett, Chris Leak, LenDale White, Brady Quinn: the game became a turnstile for future Heisman candidates and top NFL draft picks.” This mentions that Lemming found some of the best prospects that would go on to win major awards in college and play in the NFL. Since the NFL draft started, teams in the league were able to scout and draft players out of college to their teams. In the NCAA, there is nothing like that. College teams are forced to recruit high school players. However, there weren’t enough scouts from each college to find the best players in the game. Tom Lemming did them all a favor and wrote books ranking the best high school juniors and seniors. Colleges got copies of the book and wanted to see the players that had been ranked highest in the book. One of the players that Lemming found was Michael Oher.

            I play a lot of Madden. For the people who don’t know what Madden is, Madden is a NFL football video game that simulates on the field games and off the field management. Madden has a scouting system and you can figure out how good players are at certain skills on a scale of about 50-99 with ninety-nine being the best. This is different than what professional scouts use. For example, Lemming gave Michael Oher a ten out of ten on his size and nine out of ten in blocking. These are different systems but they both work for finding the best players for your NFL team.