Perhaps there’s confusion on the meaning of “whiff.” Ellis may have taken it to mean “sniff” as if this was the first draft Reese has done, when Varlos really meant “whiff” like “swing-and-a-miss.”
In draft news, those fuckers in Houston stole Trindon Holliday.
Uh, oh. The Vikings drafted a QB, will Farve be too pissed at them to come back?
Ah, yeah, now I get it.
Yeah, VarlosZ, I’m wondering that too.
Hey, Tony Pike goes to the Panthers!!! Him and Clausen will have to duke it out for the starting gig. I wouldn’t even be remotely shocked if Pike starts the season ahead of Clausen on the depth chart. All in all competition at the QB position is always a good thing.
Is it just me, or do the Browns look suddenly better?
A lot of teams have had good drafts, the 49ers, the Seahawks, the Browns, the Bucs, even the Raiders actually did well. Who’s done bad besides the Giants? The Cardinals don’t seem to be doing too great, but not awful. The Patriots seem to have taken the trade-down idea too far.
Wow, the Panthers pick up another QB in Pike with a comp selection. The knock on Pike is that he’s too thin and isn’t an athlete. He was also kept out of games after he was supposedly fully healed – during their undefeated run.
49ers finally pick up a skill guy, Kyle Williams of Arizona State. Chicago baseball fans may know his father.
Myron Rolle, the anti-PacMan, just went to the Titans. Good for him, but I was kinda hoping that the Bears would scoop him up in the 7th round.
LOL. The Bengals took Dezmond Briscoe from Kansas, whom seems like a decent enough wideout, except…the Bengals, once a receiver-deprived team last season now have 10 WR’s and didn’t need another one!
Chad OchoStinko
Antonio Bryant
Matt Jones
Andre Caldwell
Quan Cosby
Jerome Simpson
Dezmond Briscoe
Shipley
Maurice Purify
Freddie Brown
Fear our depth!
Another Bears pick on the horizon. There’s really only two directions I want them to go. Either offensive line where there’s still some prospects who can develop at guard or right tackle, many of the same guys from the last round are still available. Alternatively they could get a speed/change of pace RB in Shawnbrey McNeal. He’d be an excellent toy for Martz and might fit as a KR, he’d give the offense something they lack in Forte and Taylor now.
Hmm, can Dorin Dickerson develop into a WR? The Bears definitely don’t need a TE but in the 7th round he’s athletic enough to be tempting.
Well, they went OL which is good. Don’t know much about this kid but what little there is online. Sounds like he’s very mobile which means there’s a decent chance that he could play OG and he’s a bit of a run blocking specialist, which the Bears very much need. I’m good with it.
Really wish we’d have gotten Shawnbrey McNeal but maybe we’ll be able to lure him in as a undrafted FA. There are probably going to be a few other OG/OT hybrids out there who you can try and draw in too for a look. undrafted FAs will be critical in this offseason with so few draft picks.
I’m not so sure, I thought they had an excellent draft, which is also the general consensus over at Sons of Sam Horn,the Boston sports forum of generally pessimistic sabermatic crazy overanalyzers. Plus they netted themselves another 2nd rounder for next year, giving them 2 first rounders and 2 2nd’s, including likely one of the top 5 picks overall.
Selvie finally goes off the board to the Rams. Good pick there.
I’m gonna go ahead and say that the SoSH folks are utterly and completely clueless on everything that doesn’t involve Red Sox from the 80s.
The Pats draft is so-so at best. McCourty was a reach. He might end up being OK but he’s primarily a Specialist and simply wasn’t worth that pick. The trading back was fine since the guys available at the back end of the 1st round all had a ton of questions, but I think the Pats got caught with their pants down when Pouncey, Gresham and Kareem Jackson came off the board before their pick. They should have used a few of those surplus picks to move up to get them.
Gronkowski is a terrible pick. The Pats would have been much wiser to trade that 2nd rounder to the Bears for Olsen. Gronkowski missed the entire season with a back issue. A back issue. This is an occasion where trading up was probably pretty unnecessary and I think it was a reaction to them getting scooped in the first round. They need a TE but that guy isn’t the right one, TE is an insanely deep position and they could have gotten a much safer player late. Hell, they could have had Dorin Dickerson as late as the 6th round and I think I like him more than Gronkowski in that system.
Cunningham and Spikes aren’t terrible picks but I think the Florida defenders in this class as a whole are really over rated. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran afoul of the Patriots way. Both guys really underachieved last season and the sheer number of drafted players on that unit should have led to the opposite impression.
I like the Price pick but they’d have been better off with Benn in round 2 or Decker in round 3 by trading up. That’s hindsight though, the Patriots habit of trading back and only trading up in panic was very obvious in this draft. They missed a ton of opportunities.
The Hernandez pick is fucking retarded in light of the fact that Gronkowski was taken in a trade up in round 2. If they love Gronkowski so much why make this pick? Had they taken Benn instead of Gronkowski I’d have loved this pick. As it is I’d lay money that Hernandez has the better career.
Drafting a punter in the 5th round simply isn’t going to win you any love from me. Mezko is very good and punters are very under rated, but I don’t think many teams were liable to draft him that early. All in all I think the pick will be great for them but I question the value proposition.
The late picks are a crap shoot, but a converted DT and TE aren’t usually ideal OL prospects.
Which, you can bet your bippy (as the late Ann Landers, of sainted memory, used to say) they’ll end up trading downwards.
The Patriots’ MO seem to be that if you can get five late-rounders for the price of half a first-rounder, you only have to have one of them work out before the math is in your favor. Which I can’t argue with as a strategy, though it tends to make the fans stabby.
I absolutely don’t understand why the Jets would trade Leon Washington for a 5th Round pick. The only thing I can think of is that they had to get rid of him one way or another to avoid making Tomlinson look slow.
I don’t think “trading up in panic” is a fair description. Damned if I can find it now, but I read an article once that described this sort of behavior as the result of a definite plan. The Patriots will have groups of players that they value approximately equally (only slight preferences between the various players within the tiers). Say New England’s pick comes up and there are five players in the topmost tier according their board. Their intent will be to keep trading down until there’s only one player in the tier left and then, if necessary, trade back up to get him. A perfectly sound theory when you think about it.
I’m not thrilled with the Eagles draft, but I don’t know enough about these fools to really say either way. The Eagles are going to end up picking 13 players, and I won’t be the least bit surprised if only 3 of them are on the roster in two years.
I liked their aggressiveness in going up to get Graham. He should see time right away. Nate Allen is a fine pick in the second round at a position of need, so kudos. The Te’o pick is a travesty. He’ll be an embarrassment and has zero chance to succeed. He probably should have gone into custodial sciences instead of making a mockery of the position (there, that should do for a reverse jinx). Trevard Lindley sounds like another ball-hawk, can’t-tackle corner, of which I think the Eagles now have eleven. I love the Kafka pick, he seems to fit the exact right type of profile that Andy Reid and company could turn into a very good quarterback down the road.
I’m underwhelmed overall. The team had only a couple glaring needs, and they addressed every one either by trade or the early picks… but I don’t see a whole lot of guys on the Eagles draft roll that jump out as someone who should have gone a round or two earlier than they did. I don’t see a lot of potential for hidden gems or great value.
It all depends how tightly you define the tiers. For this strategy to be sound you have to be damn sure that that group of “equal” players really are equal. In many cases there aren’t clearly defined tiers. This draft I think is filled with those cases. When you try to apply this theory to groups of players that slot in along a gradient as opposed to tiers you end up getting rat fucked. That’s what happened to the Pats this year and they didn’t get much for all their efforts in the first 2 rounds.
I think the Gradkowski move was a panic move. They might justify it by saying “he was the last guy remaining in a tier” but the end result amounts to the same thing, they traded up to get the least certain guy in a group instead of trading up to get the most certain guy in a group. It’s fundamentally flawed logic. Trading back re-actively is a good thing, trading back pro-actively opens you up to bad situations like this. Assuming the consensus view of what the Pats needs were is correct, it’s impossible to not see that the elite prospects at those need positions all got drafted right before their picks. That’s bad drafting when you let that happen when you have a metric ton of picks to use.
The one area of need the Eagles failed to address was depth along the offensive line. They have virtually nothing if either Peters or Justice gets hurt. Furthermore, the starters on the interior aren’t anything to write home about (save for maybe Herremans.) If there’s one thing they should be concentrating on this year its pass protection for Kolb. Its a lot easier to transition into a starter’s role if you aren’t digging your face out of the turf after every play. This was supposedly a deep draft for O-lineman and I think it would have been beneficial for the Eagles to add a lineman or two in the middle rounds, instead of drafting 28 defensive ends.
Nobody works the draft like the Patriots! Except the Eagles, with the added benefit that the Eagles have drafted players over the last few years who actually contribute to their team.
It somehow seems appropriate for the Lions to have the last draft choice. Mr. Irrelevant is Timothy Toone a slow ,small wide receiver. He will probably start.
They should have nabbed Blount. With Kevin Smith’s issues and Best’s tininess and concussedness they could have used another big body at the position. He’d have been a help around the goalline, in those rare occasions whee the Lions sniff it, and there’s a pretty good chance that he’d at least hold up to the pounding.