FOOCH'S NOTE: Drummer, I concur wholeheartedly.

Okay, I know I'm asking for trouble here, but I think it's time we had an organized discussion about this. Opinions on intangibles range from the religious to the athiestic. The full spectrum of intangibles is at once ridiculously broad and surprisingly limited. Particularly in football, it seems as though there is no right answer. It's the eternal question of "Does Peyton Manning have fewer Super Bowl rings than Tom Brady because he's a choker or because his team had so many defensive problems for so long?"

So let's do this thing. I'll throw down a brief template, including a short picture of my feelings, and then I'll pretty much just shut up and let the discussion fly.

First thing's first: Stipulations.

1) This is NOT a discussion of STATS GEEKS versus REAL FANS, and anybody who makes a comment that takes the discussion in this direction leaves themselves open to good clean ridicule. Why? The short answer is because that's stupid. The long answer is longer, but basically boils down to the same thing. Don't be stupid.

2) That's actually pretty much it. Nobody sits in their mother's basement crunching stats all day based on box scores of games they never watched just to come on this board and talk about the equation that they invented which adjusts DVAR to account for defensive scheme. Just like nobody sits around all day watching reruns of the NFL's greatest games without being able to tell you why yards per attempt is an important stat for a quarterback. Well, maybe Mark Schlereth. But he's a mindless grit robot, and he doesn't count. I repeat: any comment which suggests that anybody belongs to either of these nonexistent groups (Mark Schlereth excluded) is open to ridicule. Don't be that guy.

Second thing's first... or... second, anyway: The nitty gritty.

Here are a few commonly referenced intangibles to open up discussion for. I'm not going to pretend to be objective here. If everything I write is as reasonable and middle ground as I can make it, nobody is going to be mad enough to call me stupid and go on to explain why I'm stupid. And without that, everybody would just think that I'm smart. And that's no fun.

CLUTCHINESS: Baseball people might tell you that there is no such thing as the clutch intangible, disregarding Bengie Molina. Then again, baseball people might tell you that A-Rod is to clutch as Rick Moranis is to being tall, and that David Ortiz eats clutch for breakfast so that he can poo it out with two down in the bottom of the ninth with the winning run on second. Opinions vary. I might tell you that A-Rod interviews are to being funny like Rick Moranis is to being funny. But that's beside the point. I joke here because we all know what clutch is. You either choke or come through in crunch time. You're either Michael Jordan or Jim Kelly. In fact, it's fairly well defined, which makes me scratch my head as to why it's an intangible at all. But it is, I think.

Me? I believe in it. I don't worship it by any means. If you put a gun to my head and asked me who I'd want to bat for me for one at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the game on the line, I'd say Albert Pujols. But then if you told me you'd shoot me in the head if I didn't pick somebody else, I'd say Alex Rodriguez. Why? Because he's the next best player in the game, and for one at bat I'll take my chances on the second best player in the game choking. But yeah, I do believe it exists. But anybody can choke at any given time, and I think it gets too much credit. Even a great quarterback misses his target 40% of the time. What's the difference between choking and losing out to the proverbial coin flip? I sure as hell don't know, but that coin flip gets in the way too much for me to look at any given play or any given game and give clutchiness more than a passing credit.

HEART: Heart means different things to EVERYBODY. Go around separately to 12 different people and ask them what heart is and you'll get 12 different answers. Guy one will tell you that heart has to do with wanting something so bad it gives you diarrhea. Guy two will tell you that heart has to do with being that guy in the locker room who pumps everybody up. Two completely different things. But then if you tell guy one what guy two said, he won't flinch before saying, "yeah, that's what I said." And he'll believe it. Now THAT'S what I call an intangible! Completely undefined and yet ultimately universal. It means nothing and everything at once. It's a beautiful thing.

It also exists.

It's also deeply overrated.

Not because it doesn't account for a difference in performance, but because at the NFL level there are so many guys playing with so much heart that with 100 random guys being graded on a scale of 1 - 10 for heartitude, 95 of them will score in the top five percentile, with a Randy Moss outlying the 1 - 2 range, and four other guys sitting somewhere in the middle. Virtually every player has an unspeakable amount of heart, whatever it is. The result is a big fat even-out-effect. It becomes vaguely negligible. It does NOT become completely negligible. Anybody can want it more on any given play, and that can be the difference in the game. But it rarely is. I mean, if you really think about it. There are other, more wildly varying factors at play.

And I'll round out a clean three with....

GRIT: Grit is that stuff between Chad Pennington's rotator cuff and the rest of his shoulder that makes him lead the Dolphins to a winning season. Grit is the stuff that makes Shaun Hill a better quarterback than Alex Smith. Grit is the stuff that lets a guy overcome the fact that he's not Randy Moss to put him in a position to almost, almost, ALMOST not give up that touchdown to the taller, faster, more talented Randy Moss. Grit is equal parts heart, dirt, smallness, adversity, David Eckstein, and gin, shaken over ice and injected directly into an ovum to create some new-age Doug Flutie that will take over some professional sports league roughly 34 years from now.

Grit is stupid. Don't talk to me about it.

Or better yet. if you think I'm wrong, go ahead and talk to me about it.

IN CONCLUSION:

This is the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even talked about the relative value of intangibles to things like stats or strength of schedule or scheme or supporting cast or etc. I've tried to create a jumping off point where this can start and, like a tiny snowball becoming a big snowball or something, grow into a fruitful and enlightening discussion on the value, merits, accessibility, and overall graspabableness of intangibles.

My ultimate opinion is many layered, but I can boil it down to a reductive and polarizing paragraph for the sake of giving groug a chance to call me buttface: intangibles are very real. They exist and they affect every single game of every single sport that has ever been and ever will be played. However, they are also a crutch. A lot of the time people just don't want to think very hard about something, and when a question begs them to, they defer to intangibles as an escape route. Is A-Rod a victim of bad luck and small sample size? No. he SUCKS! And he's not CLUTCH! You know what, both might have some truth, but I will always, always side with the person saying the former because it's a more critically considered point of view. I rarely ever side with intangibles in discussion because 90% of the time, they are being cited as a way to avoid having to cite something just as real, but more complex and often much more relevant.

But they do exist. Ryan Leaf? The guy had ZERO intangibles, and it ruined his life. See, I just deferred to heart and grit to very rationally explain a player's failure. It's almost never that easy, though. At least, not in my opinion.

Have at it.