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Nice guys finish last? No. Nice guys finish 'bashed.'
Published: 8/26/2011 3:43 PM
Last Modified: 8/26/2011 3:43 PM

Oklahoma quarterback Landry Jones was featured in a story that appears on the section front of USA Today’s sports section.

The story, and all other stories written about Jones, cast him in an extremely positive light. He’s a good player. He does things right. He takes pride in being a leader. He talks about his faith. He hopes to be a minister.

The question in the aftermath is this: Should you start to worry for Jones?

And that leads to this question: What does a guy like Jones have to worry about? Too much love.

Consider: Peyton Manning was a poster child for everything right about college football while at Tennessee. Good guy. Great player. And, in my opinion, he didn’t win the Heisman Trophy when he was a senior because he was too obvious a choice. He seemed too good to be true, so voters didn’t pick him. Merry Christmas, Charles Woodson.

FYI, Manning is a good guy and he isn’t too good to be true. I needed a phone interview with him when he was selected as an Iba Award recipient a few years ago.

When Manning called my cell phone, I was hip-deep in covering a state high school track meet. It’s difficult to conduct a legit interview and take accurate quotes when you are simultaneously trying to chase down discus throwers from Ardmore near a medals stand. Manning offered to call me back at a time that was more convenient for me. How many other superstar athletes are going to do that?

On another Iba-related occasion, I called a retired Pro Football Hall of Famer to schedule an interview and he said we had to talk immediately or never, so I had no time to do prep work and it was a lackluster interview. Even more bothersome: The guy was one of my childhood idols.

Back to the good-guy subject: Also suffering from too-much-halo backlash, maybe moreso than anyone in college football history, is Tim Tebow. He was gushed over so much during his collegiate career that it became easy to poke fun at the gushers.

I fell victim to temptation (couldn’t resist) this morning and tweeted “Denver quarterback Kyle Orton missed practice, presumably to be with pregnant wife. SEC broadcaster (you know who) says Tebow deserves to be baby’s father.”

Is that fair to Tebow? No. I respect Tebow and I hope he gets a chance to show what he can do in the NFL. I respect him as a person, especially because the sports world needs all the good guys it can get nowadays. In fact, I feel sort of sorry for him because it’s not his fault that media types went overboard in declaring his greatness.

I don’t think Tebow is the best player in college football history (that person, whoever he is, should have been a lock to be taken with the first overall pick in an NFL draft – and Tebow’s collegiate center was drafted before he was).

I do think Tebow has as fine a resume as any player in college football history, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the best player in the history of a team sport. In fact, I don’t think Tebow would have been a first-team All-SEC quarterback if he had played one more season at Florida because there’s always a bigger fish and that fish’s name was Cam Newton.

To this day, Tebow is a lightning rod for commentary because of the overwhelmingly positive hype he received while at Florida. A national columnist teed off on Tebow for being vocal about his faith. During a recent CBS press function, former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason weighed in by saying, “He can't play. He can't throw. I'm not here to insult him. The reality is he was a great college football player, maybe the greatest college football player of his time. But he's not an NFL quarterback right now.
"Just because he's God-fearing, and a great person off the field, and was a winner with the team that had the best athletes in college football, doesn't mean his game is going to translate to the NFL."

As of now, nobody has anything bad to say about Landry Jones.

Will there eventually be a backlash because Jones is, so far, too good to be true and people can’t seem to stomach that? Maybe Jones can head it off at the pass by becoming a teensy bit of a bad boy. Maybe he can get a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on his ankle or make a public statement about Shannon Doherty being one of his role models.

That old phrase about nice guys finishing last is dead wrong. Check out what Manning and Tebow have done in their careers.

But it seems that, in today’s culture, nice guys finished “bashed.”

And that’s a shame.



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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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