Most of these armchair, jock-sniffing, sportswriter wannabes living in their mommy's basement that have never played a down of football and whose highest athletic injury risk is spraining their thumb on an XBox controller base their complete understanding of sports on physical talent of athletes and tactical schemes by coaching staffs. They are completely ignorant of any factor that can't be displayed on a status bar on the bottom of the video game or that isn't reflected in fantasy stats. They probably can't spell the word intangible and it isn't likely to be even an introductory member of their lexicon. Their definition of a leader was the first one to get Madden 2013. When they hear the word "drive", they wonder how many X-Men movies they can download to it.
in the tiny minds of these people, the sum of the whole is never greater than the sum of its parts. In their myopic eyes, putting the 11 most talented guys at each position on the field always produces the best team on the field. Performance doesn't completely correlate to talent (at least athletic talent) and there are a plethora of examples that prove it. Many of the most successful people in all areas prosper on intangibles when the most obvious and quantifiable factors suggest that they should be middling or even failures.
Dwight D. Eisenhower had a less than stellar record at West Point and ended up graduating in the middle of his class. He was denied multiple requests for positions in oversea posts prior to and during WWI until just before the end of the war. He did not make it "over there" however because the armistice was signed just before he was to leave. During the interwar years, his only active command was over a battalion at Fort Benning and most of his career was spent in staff positions under other officers. After WWII started, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall recognized the ability of Eisenhower and quickly he rose through the ranks, passing much more "talented" generals. He was disrespected by most of these as well as the British generals because of his lack of high level command experience. He wasn't the tactical superstar like Patton, the soldier's favorite like Bradley, or the commanding presence like Montgomery. He was the successful mediator that kept them all in check because he just had the right mix of the right stuff for the job.
McCarron had just enough arm, just enough accuracy, just enough mobility, just enough swagger, just enough command presence, just enough self-discipline, and just enough competitive spirit to make him the right fit for the position at Alabama. There are more talented QBs, but winners often have some quality that isn't obvious to the short-sighted and small-minded and that is why so many of those considered "can't miss" players fail.
For some reason I don't feel sorry for him...
