Lee’s Cross-Training Could Payoff Big

2 comments so far April 8, 2008 by Steve Hanway

The Omaha-World Herald ran a nice feature recently on Zac Lee. Among the little-known background on Lee was that he has a strong baseball pedigree. That may seem irrelevant to football, but perhaps it’s not so trivial when you consider two other baseball player quarterbacks – Turner Gill and John Elway.

Lee, like Gill and Elway is a mobile quarterback. And when you think about fielding in baseball, you often see a player having to make a quick and accurate throw while on the run. It requires a strong arm and a lot of overall athleticism. It’s probably a big reason that Gill was more accurate than other option quarterbacks at Nebraska like Tommie Frazier, Eric Crouch, Scott Frost, Steve Taylor, and Gerry Gdowski. Gill was the recruit that Switzer agonizes about letting get away.

And Elway did things as a quarterback that you simply had to see to believe. The right-handed thrower could sprint to his right, and turn his left shoulder just enough to fire a pass on a dead run back across his body and to the opposite field, thirty or forty yards beyond the line of scrimmage. He took three teams to Super Bowls that way (before he had much of a team around him), by keeping drives alive late against the Cleveland Browns with his unbelievable ability.

That’s not to say that Lee will be Gill or Elway, but the kind of plays those two made seemed to have a lot to do with their baseball skills. And Lee has those skills as well. He's also supposed to have quite an arm.

Joe Ganz will be the favorite to play quarterback this year, but Lee could well be the difference maker that will ultimately propel Nebraska back to dominance. He can’t do it alone, but with a strong line ahead of him, a wealth of backs behind him, and a defense that’s sure to improve, he could very well make Nebraska a BCS contender once again.

» Enjoy this article?
Send it to your friend or get Husker news by email!

NextPrevious