For every team that succeeds with drafting people with character issues, there’s a Cincinnati Bengals. :dubious:
Right. You can’t just lump them all in together, especially when some of the so-called “character flaws” are more indicative of the personal obsessions of reporters and the cluelessness of fans than they are of any real problems with the player himself.
Dennis. Rodman. No.
What’s that supposed to mean? Every team takes chances on guys when weighing talent versus character.
As far as the Bengals are concerned, there are exactly FOUR players they drafted or signed that had any issues going into the draft or otherwise.
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Chris Henry (RIP). Yup, you got me. The one man crime wave that caused the Bengals to carry the “thug/criminals” label from 2005 until this day. His offenses were relatively minor, like getting caught with weed in his sock in the ghetto, driving without insurance, drunk in public, etc. Then he got into a stupid argument with his fiancee, jumped into the bed of his truck she was driving away in, fell, hit his head and died.
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Adam “Pacman” Jones. He’s a piece of shit and I didn’t want the Bengals to sign him. His emotions get the better of him on the field, but I have grown to like his fiery style of play. He’s an excellent punt returner, absolutely fearless. His transgressions with the law off the field are the worst of anyone the Bengals have ever taken on. Mike Brown thinks of himself as a redeemer, apparently.
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Joe Mixon. Yeah, he wrecked a girl’s face when he was 18 when she called him a nigger and shoved him. He reacted, and badly. We’ve all seen the video. But he was also basically a kid, and it was also four years ago. Should he have to pay for that crime in perpetuity? I can also guarantee you that if the Bengals hadn’t grabbed him in their slot in the second round, some other team would have in the same round, or no later than the third. He’s just too good to pass up, especially since teams do due diligence and interview these guys extensively. Mixon has been contrite and honest about his mistake.
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Vontaze Burfict. This is a reverse problem versus off field issues…Burfict was known for his personal fouls ON the field and has never been in trouble with the law as a Bengal. He was a projected first round pick, then got all those personal fouls, got out of shape, had a poor combine and tumbled out of the draft entirely. The guy is now one of the best LB’s in the league.
So, the takeaway here is that ALL NFL teams take risks and draft a motley assortment of ne’er do wells, thugs, egomaniacs, etc. If the talent is there and they can keep from running afoul of the league or the law, their play on the field is worth the risk.
And the Randy Moss thing is just ridiculous. He’s one of the best receivers OF ALL TIME.
I misread that post at first myself, but he said Lawrence Phillips, not Lawrence Taylor.
I also have to laugh at the notion that we ask the modern day equivalent of Roman gladiators to be choir boys.
Yes, Randy Moss, the one who Jerry Rice called “lazy”, the one who said
was absolutely known as a guy who coasted, your own lack of comprehension notwithstanding.
As a Pats fan burned by Aaron Hernandez, no, I wouldn’t. He was drafted with “character issues,” seemed to be shaping up, and then it turned out he was a multiple murderer and a paranoid, angry lunatic who represented a threat to everyone around him. Obviously most cases of “character issues” don’t turn out QUITE as badly as that one did, but you just never know.
True, and yet he was let go by the Vikings, the Raiders, the Patriots, the Vikings again, the Titans, and the 49ers.
Bill Belichick cut him in the middle of the season. You should call him up and tell him he doesn’t know football.
Actually, his first departure from the Vikings, his departure from the Raiders, and his departure from the Patriots, were all by trade. Though, the point still holds. When he gave a damn, he was unstoppable. When he was feeling unmotivated, he was a royal pain in the ass, and not worth his contract.
LOL.
If by “let go” you mean “traded for a first and seventh round draft pick, plus another player, after seven seasons of world-class numbers.”
Answer me this, and forget about personalities or coasting or whatever for a minute:
If you had asked the Minnesota Vikings front office in 1997 whether they’d be willing to pay a total of $34 million over seven years for a WR who would give them 9,300 yards and 92 touchdowns, what do you think their answer would have been? Do you think Jerry Jones would have taken those numbers for that price, if he could have his pick over again?
I’m not arguing that Bellichick made the wrong decision. At that time, and under those particular circumstances, it was probably a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I have no particular desire to defend Moss as a person, either. It doesn’t change the fact that, in his three full seasons as a Patriot before the one in which he was cut, he put up over 3,700 yards and 47 touchdowns in 48 games.
I’m just wondering—and this is a serious question—whether you have done the calculations to assess whether or not he was, in fact, worth the money he was paid?
I’m asking because i truly don’t know; i wasn’t in the US for some of that time, and as a general rule i don’t follow salaries for football the way i do for baseball. I have a pretty decent sense of which baseball players are and are not earning their money, but i’m not that invested in football.
I would reiterate my question from before: do you think that Minnesota (or any other team, for that matter) would have been willing to pay about $34 million for Moss’s level of production in the 7 seasons from 1998 through 2004? Forget whatever you think about his personality, or about his laziness, or any of that stuff. Was his aggregate performance for that team worth the money he was paid?
What about for his other teams? His two-year performance in Oakland looks pretty mediocre, but he was playing on a team that went a combined 6-26 over those two seasons. I guess it’s possible that Moss was to blame for all of that, but it seems likely that other factors might have been at work also.
While he was tearing it up in New England, the team went 37-11 over three full seasons. Of course, with Tom Brady under center, you could argue that you maybe don’t need a generational talent like Moss because Brady can make all of his receivers look good. But his 2007 performance suggests that when Moss and Brady were both firing, they were basically unstoppable.
Nope. I’ve long held the opinion that it’s better to have the No. 2 person than the no.1 guy with all sorts of drama, on the rationale that dealing with them drags everyone else’s performance down and wastes a lot of leaderships time. Back in the day I longed for Phil Jackson to boot Dennis Rodman and find a less-good rebounder that was mentally stable.
You forgot to mention Cedric Benson.
Maybe it’s unfair to keep beating up on the Bengals though. They’re only the third worst team in the NFL when it comes to racking up player arrests in recent years (behind the Broncos and Vikings). And the Bengals keep racking up playoff wins despite all that troubled talent. 
LOL.
By “let go” I mean “allowed to leave”, while in his 20’s, no less. Just like all the other top-10 receivers in all-time yardage were not, with the exception of that other notable magician of team chemistry, Terrell Owens.
I mean that the Vikings, and all those other teams, calculated that they were better off shopping his production than keeping it, even if it meant no compensation at all. LOL.
LOL. That’ll be a long minute.
LOL.
In 1997, they’d say yes, I feel sure. Almost as sure as I feel about how they’d answer the question of keeping him, in 2005.
LOL.
Actually, I was wrong about Belichick waiving Moss. Instead, he traded him (along with a seventh-round draft pick, yay) mid-season for a whopping 3rd round draft pick.
Moss then spent about a month in Minnesota before being waved, after publicly calling for the head coach to be fired.
LOL.
My original post mentioned that Moss was a risky pick. But Jerry’s not usually a guy afraid of a risk, so sure, he’d take him, knowing the production that was to follow.
Or maybe not? Notably, he passed on Moss again, when he had a chance to pick him off waivers from the Vikings. In fact, no team except the Titans made an attempt to claim Moss, less than a year after he’d completed a 1,200 yard season.
LOL (are you beginning to see what an annoying rhetorical device “LOL” is, and how it poisons the well of civilized discourse?).
His market value will have to suffice. I’d say that he was worth the money in Minnesota and in New England, when he was motivated.
He was drafted in the first round, and was traded (in spite of remarkable production) for a first and seventh. Next he was traded for a fourth, then traded for a third, then released outright, then released again, and then released again, despite never averaging below 15 yards per catch.
This kind of thing didn’t happen to Jerry Rice, and - getting back to the OP - it’s understandable how risk-averse teams might pass on him in the draft.
Thank you for, in two short paragraphs, precisely making my point for me. It’s very accommodating of you.
You’ve managed to demonstrate that feelings about “character” are, in many cases, particularly the case of Randy Moss, completely disconnected from the thing that actually matters, which is actual performance on the actual field in actual football games.
You note that Moss was let go in his 20s, while other top-level receivers were not. And yet, with the notable exception of a couple of years in Oakland (when he was, as i noted, part of a miserable team with a winning percentage of .188), he continued to produce at elite level, providing his team with almost 80 yards per game and almost exactly one touchdown per game over three seasons in New England. The Patriots, the most successful football team of the last two decades, were willing to take him on, and he completely vindicated their decision. Sure, they ended up letting him go, and i’ve also said that this decision was perfectly reasonable at the time. But up until the time he became a perceived liability, there is absolutely no doubt that he was an asset to that team.
I’ve never once argued that Moss was a person of outstanding character; i was simply noting that beliefs about his alleged coasting or laziness or ego or whatever can easily be countered by his actual on-field performance. Especially when, with the exception of his last year in New England, we really have little but speculation and rumor about whether his attitude had any detrimental effect on the teams he was playing for.
As i said earlier in the thread, i think that there are some character issues that should preclude selection, but nebulous assertions about laziness or coasting are not among them, especially when the person subject to those character criticisms actually performs better on the field of play than, conservatively, about 98 percent of the competition.
LOL.
Seems an awful lot of NFL GM’s disagreed with your analysis.
Yep, and all they missed out on, in this case, was a decade of one of the top five receivers in football history.
Your position in this discussion is quite bizarre. You continue to suggest that the decision of various GMs not to sign Moss somehow vindicates your argument that his character issues were a problem. And yet, in deciding whether his character issues were an ACTUAL problem, rather than a perceived one, you seem willing to focus only on the decision of GMs not to hire him, and not on the actual performance that he turned in on the actual football field. You even concede that he was worth the money paid to him in Minnesota and New England, teams where he spent the vast majority of his career. And yet the fact that GMs refused to sign him is still, in your opinion, apparently the main criterion we should use in answering the OP’s question.
Your position is a bit like pointing to people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, and using their refusal as evidence that vaccines don’t work. “Look, the GMs didn’t sign Moss. That clearly shows that his character flaws made him a risky proposition. Forget his 15,000 yards and 150+ touchdowns; it’s the perception that matters.”
Well, OK then. Given a choice between a 15,000 yard/150 TD guy with a reputation for ego and coasting, and an 8,000 yard/50 TD guy with a reputation for grittiness and hard work and American values and loving puppies, i’ll take the first guy every time. You can have the second guy, and we’ll see how our teams go on game day.
But I was actually thinking of Taylor, who had all kinds of drug problems (and was one of the greatest defensive players of all time).
Ouch, baby. Very ouch.
You’re able to apply a tremendous amount of hindsight to that analysis. When Moss was coming out of school, he was obviously very gifted, but he also obviously had question marks related to his character and motivation – as evidenced by the fact that he lasted until the 21st pick in the first round. In 1988, there was obviously an open question as to whether his talent would ultimately outweigh his attitude.
And, yes, obviously, armed with the knowledge of what his career actually shaped up to be, a GM who had passed on him in 1998 would have likely regretted doing so.
As I noted earlier, when Moss cared to actually give it his all, he was nearly unstoppable. But, the fact is that he also pouted his way off of four teams (Minnesota, Oakland, New England, and Minnesota again).