Fringe Quarterback #1: Cody Fajardo

Hello! In the process of writing my preseason articles, I realized that I spent a lot of time discussing quarterbacks and their successes and failures. How could I utilize this skill during the regular season? When the Colts signed Josh Johnson ahead of practice squad QB Alex Tanney to back up Matt Hasselbeck for the last two weeks, I wondered if anyone who hadn't watched the Titans preseason would understand the move. So now I'm going to take low-level quarterbacks - free agents, practice squad members, perennial inactives - and watch their preseason film, then use it to determine if they have a future in the league.

First off, an apparent failure of a quarterback on my favorite team, one who remains unsurprisingly unsigned: Nevada product Cody Fajardo.

History: At Nevada, Fajardo succeeded 49ers started Colin Kaepernick as the starter. Much like "Kaep," he was a noted dual-threat quarterback, but unlike him, Fajardo lacked the necessary passing skills to get drafted this past spring. The Raiders picked him up and carried him through their training camp, but with Matt McGloin and Christian Ponder ahead of him on the depth chart, his chances of sticking with the team were incredibly slim. He would have to be exceptionally impressive in the preseason to even be in consideration for a spot on the practice squad.

Week 1: Given only a single garbage-time series with a 15-point lead over St. Louis, Fajardo completed a pair of wide receiver screens and was accurate on a halfback checkdown that was dropped by George Atkinson III (who proved vastly inferior to his Raider-luminary namesake). Fajardo showed decent mobility on a scramble. Ultimately, he wasn't asked to do very much.

Week 2: He didn't get a chance until the final drive of the game, down 20-12 to a Minnesota team that had completely shut down the McGloin-led offense. It was an important opportunity for Fajardo to prove his worth, one which he did not take advantage of. He once again showed his ability to evade pressure through several inventive scrambles, but didn't accomplish nearly enough in the passing game for a potentially game-tying touchdown. Fajardo forced a pair of ugly passes to Devon Wylie (another abject failure, by the way, this time a castoff from Kansas City who was only on the roster thanks to a tenuous Fresno State connection to Derek Carr), then an even worse attempt to Atkinson, who had a Vikings player standing right next to him, was unsurprisingly intercepted.

Week 3: Fajardo significantly sat out the entirety of the game commonly regarded as the principal tuneup for the regular season. He was cut two days later. Oakland tellingly passed on Fajardo for their practice squad even after Ponder was released, instead choosing to sign a very publicly terrible quarterback, Garrett Gilbert, who is best known for losing Texas a national championship game, then transferring to the illustrious SMU Mustangs football team.

Verdict: Fajardo's tape from Minnesota reveals a noticeable lack of decision-making skills. Mobility alone does not a quarterback make (hi, esteemed SEC Nation personality Tim Tebow!), and as a result, it's unlikely this inferior Kaepernick will ever be back in the NFL.

More of these to come, plus maybe even a new thing where I critique commentary teams! Stay tuned.

"American" Football Remains, Indeed, American

Basking in his team’s dominant 59-12 victory over Japan, IFAF World Championship MVP wide receiver Trent Steelman had this to say about the American team in a postgame interview: “We’re world champs. That’s what America does. We came in with the mentality that we’re going to teach the rest of the world that this is our game.”

One can forgive Steelman, who played quarterback at West Point, for his slightly excessive nationalism. But his disregard for other countries as part of the worldwide American football landscape is symptomatic of gridiron football’s general failure around the world.

The IFAF, the governing body of worldwide American football, hosts its own equivalent of the better-known FIFA World Cup or FIBA Championships every four years. Unlike its more storied counterparts, however, the IFAF World Championship has only been in existence for sixteen years. The tournament launched without much fanfare in 1999; the USA didn’t even send a team to the first two competitions, likely for the sake of competitive balance. Indeed, since their debut in 2007, the American teams are undefeated, in spite of being largely populated by sub-par amateur players; Steelman himself, the finals’ most exceptional player, failed to make the roster of the Baltimore Ravens after the Championship.

The USA’s IFAF domination indicates a wide chasm in terms of player skill. Excellent athletes in countries like Japan and France, which host some of the not-totally-incompetent international teams (though the USA did smash France 82-0 in their semifinal matchup), are not being raised to play on the gridiron. Most of them are bound for rugby, baseball, soccer, or even basketball careers.

There are football lovers around the world, but they’re the tiniest of minorities. Germany’s GFL, one of the more successful gridiron leagues, draws pitiful crowds (one of the top teams, the New Yorker Lions, brought in 2,250 for its latest game), especially in comparison to those of the German Bundesliga soccer league, for instance (league leader Bayern Munich has an average attendance of over 72,000).

The NFL does not respect these upstart leagues, who are effectively local small businesses whom the NFL seeks to replace with their iconic brand. This has manifested itself in the form of ventures like their failed developmental league, NFL Europe; the now-defunct American Bowl preseason game, held often in Tokyo, Berlin, and Mexico City; and the ongoing effort to gradually increase the number of low-quality regular season games played at London’s Wembley Stadium. Everything the NFL does in Europe and Asia indicates a lack of regard for anything but the success of the NFL brand. There’s no effort to build relationships with local leagues. 

Robert Huber, president of the American Football Association of Germany, put it well in a MMQB article: "You have to compare it to the Harlem Globetrotters in basketball. If they travel abroad, of course that will increase awareness for basketball. But that does not help the local structure, because everyone knows that's the Harlem Globetrotters and we will never play against them." This is in stark contrast to the actions of the Arena Football League, for instance, which in spite of being exceptionally strained financially has tried extremely hard to set up a government-sanctioned developmental league in China that heavily features Chinese natives alongside AFL castoffs.

Obviously, the world is not totally devoid of gridiron talent outside of the land of the free and home of the brave. The NFL has, admittedly, tried halfheartedly on several occasions to bring international players into the fold. A particularly interesting and potentially beneficial NFL initiative was the International Practice Squad Program, which assigned a number of non-American players to 16 teams’ practice squads.

A since-deleted ESPN article lists the 2007 assignees. While most were castoffs from NFL Europe who had been part of its own effort to incorporate so-called “national players” into the teams’ rosters, a select few were very much integrated into their country’s national American football cultures. Per the article, British linebacker and San Diego assignee Jason Brisbane, for instance, had led the London Blitz to a British American Football League championship and won a league MVP award. The article also stated that Sébastien Sejean, who was allocated to St. Louis, had played on the French team in the 2007 World Championship. In a remarkable display of carelessness, ESPN incorrectly referred to the Championship to as the World Cup in the article, which also spells Sejean’s name wrong.

Beginning in 2004, the initiative only produced a single player who actually made a team’s roster: Mexican guard Rolando Cantu, who saw limited action with the Arizona Cardinals in 2005 and has continued with the team in various front-office roles since. Otherwise, the players by and large washed out of the league.

It didn’t take long for the NFL to get bored of not producing significant results. The program was shut down in 2009, though the NFL supposedly still allowed for an exemption for an extra practice squad member for any team that wanted to employ someone from outside the United States. But when the Detroit Lions, four years later, attempted to use this rule to keep YouTube sensation Håvard “Kickalicious” Rugland on their roster, they were rebuffed by an NFL ruling stating that the rule was intended for NFL Europe. Clearly, in another example of NFL apathy toward actually cultivating international players, the league had left it in by accident, because it was silently removed sometime before this year. Vikings fansite writer Christopher Gates recommended that the team use the exemption to keep Polish project Babatunde Aiyegbusi around, only to discover, much to his embarrassment, that the newest collective bargaining agreement had simply omitted any discussion of the rule.

So as the situation stands currently, there has been no movement by the NFL to build relationships with leagues around the world, nor is there any remaining NFL program to encourage the development of non-American players. However, a recent IFAF proposal aimed to have gridiron football recognized as an Olympic sport, with provisions to begin playing it as soon as the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (where gridiron football is taken somewhat seriously).

While this proposal was ultimately rejected by the IOC, Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman later spoke out in favor of American football as a potential Olympic sport, providing at least some publicity to the IFAF’s fruitless efforts. If there is ever a breakthrough, the Olympics could be a fantastic way for gridiron football to show its merits on a worldwide stage without being subject to the NFL’s jurisdiction.

edit 10/4: added Robert Huber quote