NFL coaches and scouts give the Zapruder-film treatment to any game tape involving quarterbacks they might draft. They scrutinize expression and inflection in every potential quarterback's interview answer. Everything measurable gets measured. Perhaps no athletes in any sport get so thoroughly studied.

Why then do NFL teams let future Hall of Famer Tom Brady languish until the sixth round while spending high first-round picks on busts Akili Smith and Joey Harrington? Why will whichever quarterback — Georgia's Matthew Stafford or USC's Mark Sanchez — who goes higher be no kind of predictor of who will have the better NFL career? (if both aren't busts, that is) How can they get quarterbacks wrong, even early in the draft, as often as they get them right?

Myriad reasons, to which you can now add the proliferation of spread-option offenses in college football. But the annual tradition of teams blowing the call on the game's most important position, the players they theoretically know the most about, began long before colleges began modernizing the single wing.

Former NFL coach Steve Mariucci said there's a consensus on what teams look for in other positions so it's easier to identify the physical attributes. For example, Mariucci said, almost everyone wants an offensive left tackle who's 6-5 or 6-6, weighing 300 to 330 pounds with long arms. But successful quarterbacks come in all shapes and sizes these days. "The parameters of other positions are narrower," Mariucci said.

Also, he said, miss on a cornerback, you can shift him to being a nickel corner and he still might have a long NFL career. Miss on a left tackle and you can move him somewhere else on the line (Oakland did this with 2004 first rounder Robert Gallery). Miss on a quarterback, though, and, well, you've just got a quarterback bust.

"Forget the physical abilities," said former Oakland and Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden, a well-known quarterbackphile. "You've got to evaluate the intangibles — pocket presence, leadership. Those are things that are tough to evaluate on tape or in a workout without anybody rushing you."

As former Baltimore coach Brian Billick said Monday, all the busts — Ryan Leaf, Jim Druckenmiller, et al. — had physical ability. Yet nobody knows how they'll handle the money, the media and fan scrutiny, likely being the franchise's most prominent player. And there aren't many ways to project that.

According to Michael Holley's Patriot Reign, a New England scout got suspicious about UCLA's Cade McNown when they had a problem getting enough receivers for his workout. The scout accurately figured issues had mushroomed between McNown and his UCLA teammates and those leadership problems manifested themselves in Chicago after the Bears took McNown in 1999's first round.

The vicious cycle comes into play with quarterbacks, also. First round quarterbacks often go to bad teams. Bad teams often have subpar players and coaching staffs in flux. The surrounding jetsam and the flotsam sucks the quarterback down until he becomes one with it.

Former Houston general manager Charley Casserly insists quarterback David Carr, the Texans' first ever draft pick and 2002"s No. 1 overall, didn't develop partially because Houston's offensive line fell apart even before the franchise's first game. Carr got battered into NFL backup status. The same thing happened to 1971's No. 1 overall, Jim Plunkett, in New England before he revived his career with Oakland in his 10th season.

Back then, NFL teams had to translate wishbone quarterbacks to the NFL as the formation swept the nation. Spread option quarterbacks add another degree of difficulty to the draft.

The first quarterback taken in 2005, No. 1 overall Alex Smith out of Utah, and the first one taken in 2006, No. 3 overall Vince Young out of Texas, spent their collegiate lives destroying defenses out of a spread option offense. Neither will begin this season as a starter.

Also, you better believe longtime NFL scouts think they've seen this before. The Run 'n' Shoot boosted the numbers of University of Houston quarterbacks David Klingler and Andre Ware, two early 1990s first round flops for Cincinnati and Detroit, respectively. None of the University of Florida quarterbacks to come out of Steve Spurrier's Fun 'n" Gun had great NFL success.

Gruden said he wanted to take one of the spread option quarterbacks to add an element to Tampa Bay's offense similar to the Wildcat formation the Dolphins helped popularize last year.

But, he also said, "I just don't know how many hits a quarterback can take. I don't know that I've seen a quarterback other than Florida's Tim Tebow who can take the hits you'd take in the NFL."