Yeah, they typically do. Interestingly enough, DeMarcus Ware (someone mentioned him earlier) wasn’t really a man among boys in college at Troy, even though it was a small school.
He didn’t start as a freshman (most “Man-among-boys” do) and while he played well and had a lot of athletic ability, he didn’t really dominate at Troy. His senior season he did win defensive player of the year for the Sun Belt Conference with 10.5 sacks, but he didn’t really dominate in his small school environment.
Ware was drafted high because he had great size and athleticism, which we all know did translate to the pro’s.
Parsons, on the other hand, pretty much was a “man-among-boys” from the start… and he did that at the highest level of college football. By the end of his sophomore season at Penn State he was dominant. His final game in the Cotton Bowl was just ridiculous. His play was so dominant that it looked like someone was playing a video game using him.
That was the only time in my life that someone said, “He looks faster than everyone else on the field” and he actually really did look faster than everyone else. He was everywhere. Had he held on to the ball, he would have added two interceptions to his stat line to go along with his 2 sacks, 2 forced fumbles, 3 passes defenses and 14 tackles (and God knows how many TFL’s). That is simply absurd for one game. That is just about a season for some guys. Of course the stats don’t show how much he impacted the opposing offense either, which he undoubtably did as Memphis tried to do anything they could to slow Parsons down.
What made it even more amazing is that he did it as a true sophomore who had only played LB at any level for 2 seasons, including that one. Before the draft I heard one analyst on the NFL network say that he had gone back and watched all of Micah’s games at Penn State and that he could literally see Parsons improving by leaps and bounds from one game to the next. He said he has so much room to grow but that he was already a dominant player. He said that basically, every game was better than the previous one for Micah.
Now that is a man-among-boys… and he was doing it in the Big 10.
We can extrapolate out what his improvement would have been had he played another two years at Penn State… and logic tells us that Parsons would have been incredible against college competition with double his experience at LB. With double the strength training and double the coaching. With more maturity.
It would have been something to see.
Needless to say the college production was there, in spades, and his athleticism is off the charts. You can tell just by the way he moves on the field, but his testing at his pro-day more than verified what our eyes were telling us. He is an elite athlete at 6-3, 245 lbs. and is athletically rare in just about every way a player can be.
You like to see college production at a high level of competition… but you also like to see verifiable NFL type athleticism. Much of the time you have one or the other and you have to figure out if they’ll do it in the pro’s. What you love to see is both, and boy I mean Parsons has both.
So, when you have a guy that was so dominant in the 9th grade that he was offered a scholarship to Penn State as a high school Freshman. A kid that got 18.5 sacks against varsity competition as a Freshman. A guy that played at the highest collegiate level like a man-against-boys, and who tested among the best ever at his position, while having textbook size for that position… well, you feel pretty good about that guy making an impact at the next level.
Literally, the only thing missing from him as a prospect is that he didn’t play his Junior and Senior seasons to get more experience, which just indicates how much better Parsons can actually get.
Obviously, we don’t know for 100% certain that he’s going to play great on the NFL, but for a guy coming out of college (which they all do), he’s about as close to a lock as you can find. There is zero reason to look at Micah and think, “that guy might not make it”. It just doesn’t follow logically.
Add in that I feel very good about how he will be deployed by these coaches, and I have pretty high expectations for Parsons. Will he have some missed plays? Of course… but I think the guy is going to be very good, very quickly.
