You Should Be Embarrassed If You Didn't Make Second Team All Pro Safety

At safety, 9 players were named as second team all pro, after Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed received first team honors. Eight of them received exactly one vote from a single AP voter, and thus they finished in a giant tie. One of the plethora of safeties receiving a vote, Darren Sharper, didn’t even start this year and had less than 20 tackles and 1 pass defensed. He had to come off the bench to start in the wildcard game to replace injured fellow second team all-pro Malcolm Jenkins, and we saw how badly that went. I know Darren Sharper was a hero last year during the Super Bowl run, but that is flat out embarrassing.

As I argued earlier, voters need to select a second team. That would dilute the “idiot” votes so that they don’t actually have an impact. Of course, if voters can’t even be troubled to vote on the correct number of positions when selecting one team, how can we expect them to vote for a two deep roster?

According to the official results released (you can see the voting numbers here), three voters selected only one running back, one voter did not select a fullback, and two voters each selected only one outside linebacker and inside linebacker. We know Peter King was one of the voters that selected a single running back–this I can at least understand because it’s probably archaic to have two starting running backs since teams no longer run the wing T. Selecting three starting wide receivers would more accurately reflect the current game. But how does a voter fail to put two outside linebackers down, with so many good candidates?

That should be grounds for removal from future voting. If you can’t be troubled to turn in a reasonably filled in ballot, they need to find someone who can. With only fifty voters, we can’t afford people that don’t take it seriously.

Here are some other highlights or lowlights of the all pro voting:

• In addition to getting enough votes to be second team selection at running back, Michael Turner actually got one vote at fullback;
• There’s obviously confusion about where to vote guys based on defensive position, and the league should probably distribute official ballots with players assigned based on percentage of play data at certain positions (I’m sure it exists). Justin Smith got 1 vote at DE and 2 votes at Tackle. Cameron Wake got a vote at DE in addition to his votes at OLB. We saw that Peter King voted for Vince Wilfork at DE; he had 15 votes at DT.
• As always, interior offensive line is the position where reputation and being a past award winner matters most, and guard Jahri Evans and center Nick Mangold both repeated from last season. 

[photo via Getty]