Complete irrelevance

Ok, so with the start of the NFL season has come the swamp of football crazed sporting news. Since I am a huge fan of sports in general and pretty much watch ESPN exclusively (its a whole heck of a lot to pay for a couple of sports channels on cable, but well worth it), I have become immersed in all of it. And the thing that has struck me the most is the amount of NFL and NCAA football players with absolutely outrageous first names.

I'm not trying to dis the players or pick on their parents, but can someone explain to me the silent Q's and X's that somehow slip into a players first name. Did someone not learn spelling in school? Or is it something more? Is weird spellings and pronunciations that we've never heard before the key to football success these days? I had to find out.

So I randomly scanned the rosters of 10 NFL teams and 10 NCCA teams to see what I could find out.

NFL: Of the 10 NFL teams I found 35 distinct names - anything from Andra to J'Vonne to Ruvell. Yet the name phenomenon does not seem to discriminate for winners. Of the 10 teams I chose (some winners, some losers) I found that each had their share of unique first names; about 3-4 per team. And this is not counting the number of names I found with unique spellings. If that were factored in then the number per team would be closer to 10.

NCAA: Of the 10 NCAA teams I found 84 distinct names - from Averin to Kaither to Zarrell. But unlike the NFL, there is a disparity between good and bad. Good teams have closer to 10-12 unique first names while bad teams had 3-5. And if I were to account for all the unique spellings of traditional And this where I think I'm on to something.
1) younger parents are coming up with funkier names
2) if you want your college team to succeed just watch for a recruiting class with a bunch of names you can't pronounce
3) i wasted a ton of time looking at 20 football rosters and i'm not going to mention what time of day this was posted ;)

So the moral of the story is, if you want your kid to get a free education on a football scholarship figure out a new way to spell Andy (preferably with a silent Z) or just throw a bunch of scrabble letters on a table take whatever it spells, and come up with the pronunciation later. And who knows, they do stand a .066 % chance of making the NFL (which is better than normal football players). Thanks for wasting your afternoon with me!!!