Ryan Fitzpatrick SAT score 1580

Ryan Fitzpatrick’s 1580 SAT score may have gotten him accepted into Harvard, but it was his 2004 Ivy League MVP award and the fact that he was the first Harvard quarterback to rush for more than 1,000 career yards that earned him a spot in the NFL. Fitzpatrick, who graduated with a degree in Economics, became only the fifth QB in history to throw for 300-plus yards in his first NFL start.

There is a common myth that the average NFL player can’t spell SAT, let alone actually pass the standardized college entrance exam.

It’s a myth cultivated by pro football stars who tend to wander above their intellectual pay grade by doing stuff best left to others.

Like talking.

Not a problem for Ryan Fitzpatrick, the Buffalo Bills Harvard-educated quarterback and the fantasy world’s waiver wire wonder of the week.

Fitzpatrick is scary smart. The Buffalo QB rang up a 1580 on the SAT. It’s now called the Scholastic Reasoning Test, but still officially abbreviated SAT. Go figure. When he took the test, a perfect score was a 1600. My guess is that Fitzpatrick sandbagged those last 20 points to avoid the geekitude ritually hung on those who ace their college boards.

Note: Intentionally tanking a test question could be part of Fitzpatrick’s M.O. He did it on the Wonderlic, the yardstick used by the NFL to measure intellectual firepower. More on this later.

A combined SAT of 1350, a full 230 points below Fitzpatrick’s score, will get a student an honest look from nearly all of the nation’s top colleges and universities.

While a QB’s stellar standardized test scores won’t make him the next Terry Bradshaw (uh, okay, bad example), Fitzpatrick’s 2010 numbers could send fantasy football owners scrambling to begin digging around for third grade report cards as part of their draft day prep.

In his four starts this season with a winless team that would likely struggle to be competitive playing NCAA D-III ball, Fitzpatrick has thrown for 11 TDs and nearly 1,000 yards through the air.