I've stayed out of this thread for awhile because I think we can win with either recruit. Have to comment now that so many people are saying "I heard Kizer is viewed as a d-bag", etc. etc. I don't have a lot of connections but I talked with a couple of people from the team after reading this and they said it was the opposite. They said Malik became a prima donna once Golson left and that DeShone is very humble and respectful to everyone on the team. Basically it all depends on who you talk to.
Great post, really gets to the core of why I really hesitated to post what I did originally. It came up organically in the discussion of "who is a better leader?"... but I knew that what was a
football question was pretty quickly going to get warped. So I'm going to opine for a bit on the general discussion we're all having.
We went really quickly from "heard Malik is a better leader, some get rubbed the wrong way by Kizer's leadership style" to "Kizer is a douche"... and that's just not fair, and it's not right. First of all, I'm pretty uncomfortable talking about a kid's personality like that from the anonymity of the internet. Second, someone phrased it perfectly earlier when they said "he's no Jimmy Clausen."
There's a really big difference between analyzing who has the best leadership traits (similar to how we might discuss "who has the better deep ball?") and trying to dissect the popularity of a guy we don't know in a non-homogeneous group of people we don't know. It's not about someone being "nice" or a "cool guy" when you see them around campus... it's about who -- in practice and in games -- best inspires the other 84 guys to give maximum effort and execute to the highest of their ability. And that's just one variable in a complex equation that ultimately yields the answer to who should be starting in Austin, TX in week one.
It doesn't matter if Tim Tebow is the greatest leader ever if he can't run the offense and doesn't have a competent arm. It doesn't matter if Cam Newton "rubs some people the wrong way" because he is "cocky" if he's able to be a dominant force of nature on the field. So we're probably dissecting the leadership aspect a bit too much given that both Kizer and Zaire are by all accounts perfectly fine human beings, and in vacuum each would probably be more than competent leaders of the offense. It's not like one of the options is a Jimmy Clausen type that will inspire weekly team mutinies.
