No small thing

Everyone's talking about Kyler Murray now, but I keep seeing someone bigger. I keep seeing someone else with outrageous skills in two major sports, someone who might serve as a cautionary tale if this were a different time and the two major sports were different than they are.

I keep seeing Bo Jackson.

Who, once upon a time, was the greatest athlete of my generation.

Who, once upon a time, might have wound up in Cooperstown if he hadn't merely dabbled in baseball.

Who, once upon a time, wound up instead with his career cut short because he played pro football as well as baseball, and suffered a hip injury that ended both his careers.

I wouldn't want to see that happen to Kyler Murray. But it could, even if the NFL's current rulebook tends to treat quarterbacks like fine crystal, locked away in display cases with signs that read DO NOT TOUCH in Giant-E-On-The-Eyechart font.

Kyler Murray, see, could have chosen to play baseball, just like Bo Jackson. The Oakland As made him the ninth pick in the entire draft last year. He could have signed for significant dollars, did his time in the minors, wound up playing longer with less wear-and-tear on the body.

Instead, Murray chose the NFL. At a tick under 5-foot-10 (officially) or a good inch-and-a-half shorter than that (unofficially), he'll be the smallest quarterback to play in the league since Doug Flutie.

But you know what's even crazier than that?

The fact it might not be as crazy it sounds.

First of all, the size thing: Yeah, it's an issue. But if he's really a tick under 5-10, that makes him all of an inch shorter than Russell Wilson. And Russell Wilson has had himself a pretty decent career so far.

Also ... this is not your father's NFL. It's an NFL of jet sweeps and stretch plays and seam routes, and throwing underneath the coverage until the deep route comes open. It's an NFL where the guy who's going to own every passing record the league has (Drew Brees) probably isn't 6-1. And more and more, it's an NFL that values escapability at the quarterback position.

In other words, it's an NFL that rewards the skill set of a Kyler Murray. Last season, for instance,  Lamar Jackson, although half-a-foot taller than Murray, excelled with much the same abilities Murray has. The difference is, Murray has a significantly better arm.

So, not so crazy, the idea that this tiny person can excel in the NFL. Not so crazy he chose football over baseball, given the timing of his arrival.

Murray might make more money in the long term in baseball, but it's still baseball. It's still slow, plodding and too much wedded to the past. Even so transcendent an athlete as Murray, for instance, would start out riding the buses in the bushes, because that's the way it's always been done in baseball. And he'd do it at a time when baseball owners are standing on the brakes economically; even established free agent stars such as Bryce Harper and Manny Machado are finding it difficult to land new deals because ownership has become reluctant to sign players to the sort of long-term deals that used to be routine.

Plus ... football is still America's Game. And so Kyler Murray has thrown in his lot with it, risks or no risks.

Stay tuned.