Will Luck and Fleener recreate the magic?
Scott Kacsmar takes a look at other quarterback and tight end combos from the same college in the NFL and discovered that this grand experiment hasn't been attempted often and never were they selected in the first and second rounds. 33 QB/receivers combos were selected in history, 8 of those receivers were actually tight ends. None were all that successful either:
Out of the previous 32 cases, only six actually saw both the quarterback and receiver play for the team that drafted them.
Ouch! Scott lays out the specifics over at Bleacher Report.
That article is full of interesting trivia, and that's a lot of impressive combing through old records to come up with the author's data, but really, there's nothing to take from it other than a sense of what's happened in the past. None of the examples contain any element that's predictive of future success or failure, and none of the data demonstrates anything than the randomness of origin involved in actually pairing top receiving prospects with top QB prospects.
Todd said the most important thing: "(N)ever were they selected in the first and second rounds". Really, it's draft position that dictates the likelyhood of production, and if top prospects from the same school simply have never been teammates in the pros, then that right there is the reason there's no past history of success.
So, take heart Colts fans. There's nothing in the past that really bodes ill for the Luck/Fleener matchup. What could actually threaten it is the Colts having a crack at a first round prospect in a future draft. That's really the lesson of NFL history: It's not whether you were teammates in college, it's whether your production in college warranted you be drafted high. That's what's predictive of production.
