FanHouse

Cleveland Browns coach Romeo Crennel has forgotten more about personnel evaluation than I'll ever know, but when he claims that his own wide receiver, Kevin Kaspar, is similar to New England Patriots wide receiverWes Welker, well, he's just plain wrong. The two aren't similar at all. In fact, they couldn't be much more different.

As athletes, they're very different: Kasper is 6-foot-1, has great speed and lit up the scouting combine coming out of Iowa in 2001. Welker is 5-foot-9, is slow by NFL wide receiver standards, and had such bad times at the 2004 combine that many teams took him off their draft boards. (He signed with the Chargers as an undrafted free agent.)

As football players, they're even more different: Welker runs good routes, has good hands and is one of the NFL's most productive possession receivers, with 112 catches last season. Kasper doesn't run good routes, doesn't have good hands and as a result has bounced around the league (if he makes Cleveland's roster, the Browns will be his sixth team) and caught just 24 passes in his career.

The only similarity I can see between these two players is that they're both white wide receivers. Have we really made so little progress that in 2008, we're still labeling people as "similar" simply because of skin color? Apparently so.