In what might be the best damn move the Bears have made in a long time they trade LB Jamar Williams to the Panthers for FS Chris Harris. The Bears screwed the pooch by trading Harris away in the first place, but it netted them a 5th rounder that became Zach Bowman, a starter and potential stat at CB if he can stay healthy and cut down on the aggressive mistakes. Harris blossomed into a very good Safety in Carolina. Jamar Williams was a very good LB who was coming into his own but he simply was never going to get a chance to start with Briggs and Urlacher in town and we had 3 backup LBs that all deserve more playing time. He was a valuable asset and they actually made something of him instead of waiting and losing him for nothing.
Hopefully Chris Harris isn’t on the wrong side of his career but for as good as Williams has been I don’t think there’s much chance of him becoming a Pro Bowler. This is a win-win for everyone involved and it takes the Bears one real strength and surplus and uses it to fix what was easily our weakest position. It’ll be interesting to see which FS/SS gets shown the door as a result of this because I hope both Major Wright and Quentin Scott make the roster, that means Bullocks, Payne, Steltz or Alafava will probably be going bye bye. I think I’d vote Payne or Steltz off the island without much hesitation and I wouldn’t miss Bullocks a bit.
Still thinking about the Giants’ Pierre-Paul pick.
Question: among 1st Round picks whose college football accomplishments were similarly negligible, what would the list of success stories look like? How about if it’s 1st and 2nd Round picks? I barely follow college football, so every year when draft time rolls around I have to play catch-up just to know a little bit about what’s going on.
I haven’t a clue, but from what I’ve seen linked to in SDMB threads, if he’s successful he’ll be the first.
I’m choosing to be optimistic. If you’re going to do a DE apprenticeship, the Giants are one of the better places to do it. If they can’t bring the guy along, nobody can.
Javon Kearse’s college numbers and player profile were pretty similar coming out of college. Kearse however wasn’t a JuCo transfer and played at a blue chip school. Having mediocre college numbers at the DE position is pretty common and excellent college numbers at the position tend to often be misleading.
Kearse seems to be the favorable comparison that people make, but I’m not he’s the answer to my specific question. Can’t find his college stats online, but from his Wiki:
So basically he had twice as many good seasons as JPP, plus a Freshman season that was at least passably accomplished, plus he red-shirted for a year with a major program. I guess we could argue about how much credit to give JPP for his JuCo experience, but my inclination would be to say “barely any” (worlds better than not playing football at all for those two years, of course, but still the worst possible form of apprenticeship for a plausible NFL prospect).
Compare Kearse’s Wiki to the NFLDraftScout article on JPP.
Kearse had 1 more sack, 9 more tackles while JPP had a nearly elite 16.5 TFLs. Both were all over the All-Everything lists.
True Kearse had 3 years of similar, but statistically mediocre, production but it’s not like JPP was some late bloomer. There’s little reason to think he wouldn’t have been similar in his Frosh seasons based on his production at JuCo.
If JPP were a one year wonder then it might be a bigger issue, but he wasn’t at JuCo because he wasn’t talented or polished enough. It was all academics. Odds are good he’d have started as a Freshman and might have matched Kearse’s early production.
I don’t think the comparison is perfect but they fit the criteria. Kearse is a guy who played bigger than his numbers in college and impressed at the Combine like JPP. He was a bit of a tweener and people questioned if he’d transition to the Pros. Does the guy need to have been a JuCo who transferred to a D-I and posted exactly 6.5 sacks to qualify in your comparison?
And in another net-positive move they trade Kevin Payne to the Rams for a conditional draft pick, probably a 7th rounder, to clear up that roster spot for Harris. Payne was always a wanna-be hard hitter who had a habit of lunging at runners and never wrapping up. He was a liability in coverage and you can;t afford to be a crummy tackler under that circumstance. We’re a dramatically better team today, and if Payne ends up starting for the Rams for one reason or another there might be a 7th or better pick to boot.
You may be right that Kearse is a close comp. Perhaps it depends on what the virtue of a longer, better college pedigree is for a prospect. That is, is it valuable because it gives scouts more information with which to make an accurate determination of his worth, or is it because of the experience and training that it implies? Obviously it’s both to some degree, but I guess I come down more on the side of training, and the hypothetical JPP who started three seasons for a Division 1-A program is not the same player as the one who did two years at JuCo and then played very well in 7 starts at the top level … and I’m not sure that that kind of potential isn’t the sort of thing you tend to lose permanently in the exchange.
Of course, I could be totally wrong about all that; I really know very little about the difference in training he would receive at his specific Junior Colleges as opposed to USF, nor can I speak authoritatively about the value of reps in JuCo games vs. those in Big East games.
How about highly drafted players (at any position) who only *started *at 1-A for a single year (or something pretty close)? Again, I could well be thinking about this the wrong way, but a lauded 3-year starter for the Gators isn’t the kind of comparably untested prospect I had in mind.
To play Devil’s Advocate let’s twist this around. From Kearse you had 3 years of tape and 3 years of stats. In those 3 years he posted consistently pedestrian numbers, never topping 7.5 sacks and maxing out at 54 tackles. A scout, especially one heavily invested in the merits of D-I game experience, might deduce that he was a player who’d completely maxed out his skills at the D-I level. That with 3 years of playing while showing little statistical improvement there’s a diminishing likelihood that those number could improve at the NFL level.
With JPP you could make the case that he’s on the upswing. That his first season at USF, where he posted better per-game numbers than Kearse’s final season, is actually comparable to Kearse’s fairly streaky middling freshman season and not his senior season. That with JPP posting good numbers in one season at the D-I level could be the start of a upward swing as opposed to a blip on the radar. A scout who believes in coaching up a player might argue that a player with one decent year has a higher ceiling (and lower floor) than a player who showed minimal growth over 3 seasons.
I think you need to make a distinction about why the kid was at a JuCo. There are probably a lot of JuCo transfers that weren’t scouted or recruited out of high school. Late bloomers and/or rehabilitated slackers and trouble makers who started to over achieve once the got out of high school. Those guys probably aren’t going to have NFL careers because they are simply not unstoppably gifted physically. There are other guys who have all the tools and would have started for dozens of D-I schools if not for academic/conduct issues that made them ineligible for the NCAA.
These guys in the latter group simply aren’t that much different from the guys that played for 3 years in a D-I program. Many of those JuCo programs are football factories and have top notch coaches and pricey facilities. A elite high school recruit who knows a D-I school is in his future if he can get a few college classes under his belt isn’t going to pick some backwater where his skills will atrophy. It’s true to a degree that seeing a guy play against elite competition for 3 seasons is informative and the attrition should make him better, but at a certain point when a transfer plays an entire season against that competition you’ve got enough tape to know he can compete with anyone.
Long story short, JPP isn’t some Hickory High player or former beer truck driver making it big. He’s a top recruit who had crappy grades, the NFL doesn’t give a rats ass about grades. In cases like those the difference between a guy who progress gradually at Florida isn’t very much different from the guy who progressed to the same level in one season at USF if they are both entering the NFL at the same apparent level in my book. Quarterbacks might be a special case though due to the mental aspect.
I don’t think his signing will amount to much, but my local paper’s article headline “Sicko chooses Cowboys” was one of the most unintentionally funny headlines I have seen in a while.
(sorry, no link. they did not post it to the website)
Sure, that’s plausible, but 6.5-7.5 sacks isn’t exactly pedestrian; that would typically put a player in the top 50 in 1-A (equivalent to top-12 or so in the NFL), and that’s against much tougher competition that the average college football player faces. Three years of good-not-great performance at the highest possible level of competition, in addition to (I assume) phenomenal scouting reports, seems like a different kettle of fish.
But if that’s the case, then there should be a fairly respectable list of NFL success stories who went the JuCo route – I mean, JPP’s situation is hardly unique; there are plenty of legit prospects who come out of high school without the grades/test scores to qualify for FBS. At least at Defensive End, there apparently haven’t been any successful players who went to JuCo since Leonard Little was drafted in '98 (and even he only did JuCo for single year before starting for three seasons at Tennessee, so he’s really not what we’re talking about here). (Via FO.) Is that just a small-sample quirk at the DE position in recent years, while players at other positions who played two years at JuCo tend to succeed about as often as their draft positions would indicate? If so, I’d be very happy to adjust my optimism on JPP upward.
Among Combine invitees and likely draft prospects, 7ish Sacks is definitely pedestrian. See Halmet’s list above. Comparing eventual NFL players to all NCAA draft eligible players doesn’t tell you much at all. Being in the top 50 is pretty poor when talking about draft prospects, only 45 DEs and DTs were drafted combined, being 50th means you aren’t even draft worthy if all you look at is stats. Stats don’t tell the whole story, or even half of it, but for the purposes of this argument JPP and Kearse’s numbers were equally unimpressive. That is what you were asking afterall.
I think you are dramatically misjudging the number of JuCo transfers. JuCo transfers of any kind are generally rare and become almost unheard of amongst elite programs. That there isn’t a respectable list of players who became NFL stars by going the JuCo route isn’t so much an indictment of the concept of JuCos being NFL caliber players as it is a reflection of the fact that there just aren’t that many JuCos period. The fact of the matter is that if you are a very good football player you will get into a University somewhere. Something has to really be up or a player has to have some very specific circumstances to not be able to get into a D-I school. In most cases it’s an issue of the player not wanting to go to one of the schools that want him. Michigan, Texas, UCLA, Notre Dame all have strict requirements, but there are a ton of very good programs that don’t. I don’t know if JPPs academics were so poor that he couldn’t get in anywhere or if he just couldn’t get into the handful of schools he wanted to get into. Whatever the story is, he’s a relatively unusual case.
Understand me, I’m not saying that I think JPP is going to be a star. I’m just saying that I don’t think the JuCo aspect is a very important facet of his evaluation. His performance in his most recent season pretty much nullifies everything he did prior. In the draft, scouts put about 90% of the value on the previous seasons output. Their first couple years are disregarded unless there’s a special circumstance. If previous years were a major factor in grading a prospect then Corey Wootton wouldn’t have been a 4th rounder.
So, if you ask me who a good comparison is for JPP I stand by the argument that Kearse is a very good one. Then again, there are probably 30 guys with his numbers from the previous season that are equal who flopped. I don’t think isolating players who just happened to spend a couple of seasons at a JuCo does much to inform the projection.
