RYAN LEAF: A SOB-STORY

I am watching ESPN, earlier, and, on the crawl at the bottom of the screen, I see that Ryan Leaf was arrested in Montana on charges of burglary and drug possession. I think to myself, Yeah, that's about right.

And the thoughts continued to his "legacy": Coming out of college into the NFL, who is better? Ryan Leaf or some dude named Peyton Manning? Well, that has been answered, eh? As a professional football quarterback, Peyton Manning had a better career.

Ryan Leaf has often been said to be the "biggest bust" in NFL draft history. I agree.

I was all ready to pile on. I remember his childish blow-up with a reporter (who was just doing his job). I remember the bazooka God gave Leaf...that he wasted. Hypocritically, I was all ready to say, "See? The dude is...not prepared to lead a team of NFLers."

Then I Googled Ryan Leaf's name.

His life has swirled into the toilet. In 2008, as a quarterbacks coach for Texas A&M, he had a problem. He was accused of robbing a player's home. It turned out that Ryan Leaf also had received about a thousand pain pills from pharmacies in the area...in about an eight-month span. In 2009, he plead guilty to eight felony drug charges. And, last year, he had surgery to remove a benign tumor from his brain stem.

I retract my statement. Dude needs some help. As a practicing psychologist, I think that much of his troubles may stem from being the odd-man-out in the Manning-vs-Leaf Draft Debate. I think, psychologically, to be nationally skewered and dissected takes a huge toll on a psyche. I think that his trials and tribulations in his short-lived NFL career threw him into a tail-spin.

I think I should not pile on.

In his defense, he had a friggin' gun for an arm. (And Swiss cheese for character. And oatmeal for a brain.)