This weekend, watching the draft, we learned that Brady Quinn falling to the 22nd pick was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Think about it for a second. What percentage of educated people watching the draft went into Saturday morning thinking Brady Quinn was a giant douchebag? Something like 97%, right? And that’s because it’s impossible to like some pretty boy, Notre Dame quarterback that the media has relentlessly shoved down our throat.

So what happens on Saturday? BQ ends the first hour of coverage making himself even more unlikable by mouthing, “Who’s that?” to his seriously underwhelming girlfriend when Levi Brown was drafted, only for the tides to change over the next three hours: he gets passed over again and again, the commish takes pity on him, the Browns trade back up for him, he loses about 15 million in guaranteed cash, his girlfriend becomes slightly more doable every time you see her on screen, and, all of sudden, BQ is a sympathetic figure without the pedigree of a top ten pick. All of sudden, we kind of find ourselves rooting for the guy. (And by “we”, we mean the collective “we” as in sports fans. Not the NextRound team. We still think he’s a douche. But then again, we’re pretty hardcore.)

We firmly believe that had BQ gone number 3 overall to the Browns, his NFL career would have gone something like this: 1) Hated man for roughly four years, called a homo relentlessly at every away game; 2) complete flame out and out of the league; 3) starts making calls to Jesse Palmer to see how he figured out that whole “Bachelor” gig.

What a change of fortune. Now if we only had video of Charlie Weiss making desperate, panting, sweaty phone calls to Romeo Crennel, begging for Romeo to trade back up for BQ, this whole thing would be settled in our eyes.

We also learned:

• That Keyshawn Johnson must have an ‘Annoyance’ on/off switch that no one told Michael Irvin about.
• Spurrier saying “click, clack” is somehow more awesome than we would have even given credit to.

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