Letters From Little Rock

We’ll know soon enough who the first round surprises are, but it will be a few years before we know who really blew this draft. Considering how tricky it is to predict the success of quarterbacks in the NFL you almost hate to see a team break the bank with one. I suppose it’s true of most positions, but it seems truer of Quarterback; you draft potential, not actual performance. That’s why quarterbacks like David Greene of Georgia–the winningest quarterback in NCAA history–is definitely not going in the first round and maybe not in the second or third rounds either. He is considered to have already reached the limits of his ability and even though that ability is rated pretty highly, it isn’t high enough to warrant staking the future of an NFL team on. David Greene is probably every bit as good as Eli Manning or Phillip Rivers, or Ben Rothelisberger. The NFL considered those players to still have room to improve and grow. This is nothing new in the NFL draft. For years it was a truism that if you drafted a player from Penn State you would get precisely the player you saw on tape and nothing more could be done with him; he would be well coached and usually possesses a good work ethic, but he would already have reached his maximum potential.

I bring this up in part because I think the same is true of Aaron Rodgers and Alex Smith and I don’t understand how they have leapt to the top of the draft board when nobody believes them to be among the best players in the draft. Maybe they are the top two quarterbacks in this year’s draft. Last year they might not have even gone in the first round. I think it is not just likely, but almost a certainty. On the other hand the top two running backs or the top two receivers of this year’s draft are certainly good enough to have gone in the top ten of last year’s draft. It just doesn’t make sense to me that you take a quarterback just to satisfy the desire of hometown fans, or just because you’ve got the top pick and a need at the position. Maybe they know something we don’t, but when I look at David Greene and Jason Campbell I wonder how they can possibly be second round players when two players who are pretty clearly products of quarterback friendly systems and lack their all around skills are considered neck and neck for the top spot in the draft. Is fear really that big of a motivator? Are NFL teams really afraid of being the guy who passed on the next Joe Montana or the next Tom Brady? Come to think of it even New England passed on Tom Brady until the sixth round of the draft. It just goes to show it’s a crap shoot anyway. And both Rodgers and Smith may go on to have fantastic careers as quarterbacks. I certainly hope they do. But I also hope they don’t act surprised if they throw more interceptions than touchdowns at a rate of two to one for the next three years. That’s what I think is likely to happen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at 3:15 am and is filed under NFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.