When the Oakland Raiders travel to Minnesota on Saturday to take on the Vikings, Christian Ponder expects a rude welcome from the fans of his former team.
"Oh, I'm going to get booed," Ponder said, via IBABuzz.com. "I'm trying to figure out, we were talking about it in the quarterback room, what I should do when I get out on the field? Should I take a bow, or what? What's going to happen? I'm expecting some boos, but it's all fun though."
The problem is, the fan-athlete system is broken, especially when it comes to first-round picks who don't pan out. If Ponder indeed gets booed by the fans in Minnesota, it will be because the team's scouts, executives and head coaches thought he was a starting-caliber quarterback right away but he wasn't.
Ponder didn't force the Vikings to choose him with the No. 12 overall pick, and the team did so anyway after Jake Locker and Blaine Gabbert fell off the board.
Think about that for a second.
Ponder seems to have a fine sense of humor about the whole thing and one can only hope Vikings fans do, too. Maybe then we can start a tradition in which general managers get retroactively booed for poor decisions instead of the players who did nothing to put themselves in the crosshairs.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast continues with its fantasy extravaganza and takes you behind the scenes in Cleveland with Marc Sessler.
