Foles, Luck embody a different kind of QB

INDIANAPOLIS - Consider the quarterback.

In our mind's eye, in the image of him that we've conjured after decades of watching football and steeping ourselves in its mythology, he is John Wayne and John F. Kennedy and John Shaft, all in one - tough and cool and charismatic, solid as stone when everyone else has worry in his eyes, daring when circumstance demands it.

He grew up in a Western Pennsylvania steel town, or on the lonely West Texas prairie, or in a house whose backyard was a fetid southern swamp - anywhere that would shape and harden him into a man and an athlete capable of thriving in sports' most glamorous and demanding position. The quarterback has lived through some things, and because he has, he's the guy you want under center for your team.

That was the pretext for a controversial profile of Nick Foles that appeared in Philadelphia magazine earlier this year. Foles' father, Larry, is a self-made millionaire, a former truck driver who became a restaurateur and an entrepreneur, and when Nick was a teenager, Larry's wealth afforded his son the opportunity to devote himself to sports. Nick played both football and basketball at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas, and was an honorable-mention Pac-12 all-academic selection at Arizona.

Yet the article's thesis was that, because his background and childhood were rife with advantages, Foles might not possess the requisite fortitude to lead the Eagles to a Super Bowl.

If that thesis is true of Foles, a third-round pick in the 2012 draft, it would stand to reason that it's true of the quarterback the Eagles face Monday night at Lucas Oil Stadium. Andrew Luck was the No. 1 overall selection in that 2012 draft, and now he's regarded as the NFL's next great quarterback, and his upbringing and pedigree are every bit as privileged as Foles'.

Luck's father, Oliver, played quarterback in the NFL for four years before becoming an attorney, an executive with the league, and eventually the athletic director at West Virginia. As a child, Andrew Luck lived in London and Frankfurt. As a teenager, he played football at Stratford High School in Houston. As a collegian, he graduated from Stanford with a degree in architecture. As with Foles, there's no swamp to be found in Luck's personal history.

But contrary to all that legend-building of the past, it's those similar backgrounds that might make Luck and Foles the ideal modern-day NFL quarterbacks. An ESPN study earlier this year found that the NFL's 32 primary starting quarterbacks last season, Foles and Luck among them, came from zip codes with a mean income of $95,138. That income figure was more than 85 percent above the national average. More, 23 of those quarterbacks played high school football at public schools, particularly at "well-off districts" that "pour enormous amounts of public money into" the sport - a description that fits the environments that helped to form Foles and Luck as quarterbacks.

They are smart, and they play as if they've been immersed in the position's intricacies since they were boys, which they were.

"Obviously in mine and Nick's case, I guess it's worked," Luck said last week. "I do think the beauty of professional sports is that you get so many people from so many different socio-economic backgrounds and so many different places and different opinions and differing perspectives, but I realize that quarterback is maybe a little different position."

Luck's right. This is not to suggest that the key to success for any NFL team is to draft the first rich-kid QB it can find. As Foles said last week, "When you have great family support, it definitely helps. But I don't think that's for sure. There are quarterbacks who come into this league who didn't have good family situations, and I think it's just really that you've had great mentors along the way to help you along the path."

This is to say, though, that franchises throughout pro sports are forever searching for trends and data that might allow them to make better and more informed player evaluations. The professionalization of youth and high school sports has been a fact of life in our culture for a while now.

It shouldn't be all that surprising, then, that a kid who grows up amid a stable family structure - one that teaches him the value of work ethic, one that gives him the time and money to develop his talent, one that puts him in situations that are approximations of football's higher levels - might have an edge, however slight, in the race to create a new kind of quarterback myth.

@MikeSielski