Yesterday I talked about how no one knows where Stanley Jean-Baptiste is going to go in the draft. Same with Spencer Long. Today you'll get more of the same.
Below we have an article by Chris Brown of Essential Football fame that explains the conundrum NFL teams face when they're trying to select a NFL quarterback.
Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Johnny Manziel are all first-round talents with fifth-round flaws. So, who’s going to be drafted first? And who’s going to be the best pro? Your answer probably says more about you than it does about the kid you pick.
One of the things that amazes me about NFL general managers is their ability to to ignore multiple years worth of game film - Brown points that out in his article - and make their decisions (apparently) upon what happens at the combines.
The same goes for NFL fans, too, at least those that don't watch college football.
It's as if the NFL is a universe unto itself, and that's exactly what the NFL wants. Every offense in the NFL is pretty much the same, every defense pretty much the same, but if there's a wrinkle in either the context is framed in such a way that it was invented by the NFL - those football players you're watching didn't even exist before the NFL and didn't run those plays in high school or college, and don't suggest for a moment that high school or college football is even football because it's not.
If there's one good reason to watch the NFL draft tonight, it's to watch where those three quarterbacks end up, and what stupid ass insipid crap that the NFL wonks have to say about each of them.
Oh, and if Chris Bierman is around, it's always fun to watch how out of it he is these days. What is not fun is watching Mel Kiper Jr and Todd McShay because whenever I see Kiper all I can think of is how much his head looks like a giant penis and why would I want to listen to an angry, talking penis?
(Maybe we'll be surprised by Jean-Baptiste getting drafted high, but I doubt it.)
Anyway, on with the rest of the news!
A deep review of the 2011 recruiting class | sports.omaha.com
Sam McKewon reviews the 2011 recruiting class....
The Nebraska football and rifle programs were honored by the NCAA on Wednesday with Public Recognition for high achievement in the Academic Progress Rate (APR). Both programs were among the top 10 percent nationally among all squads in their respective sport.
We're good at academics. The football program was one of only 13 programs to be recognized. This is not shocking, it's something we already knew, but it's nice to have it reinforced year after year. Gee, if only other programs were like us.... (or alternatively, you could take the perspective that if we want to win championships we should be recruiting more stupid criminal types).
In revamped NCAA, questions on how full scholarships will work
And yet, even as the notion of enhancing athletic scholarships is now viewed as inevitable amid sweeping changes to the NCAA structure, the last 30 months of discussion have produced remarkably few details about what a so-called "full cost of attendance" benefit would look like or how much of a dent it would put into athletic department budgets.
To be fair to the people who run universities, these are complex issues. There is no standard for a way that a university should operate, anymore than there is a standard for how all private companies operate. Do they have to meet certain requirements, yes, but the way in which they meet those requirements (like calculating something you'd think would be simple, like cost of attendance) are all different.
Having said that, universities are nearly universal in sucking badly at handling complex issues, at least from an operational, decision-making standpoint. They're all full of consensus builders who would rather assemble a committee or task force to make recommendations so that no one in particular has to take the blame for bad decisons.
Ergo, it will take another 30 years for this to straight itself out.
SBNation.com will be having a live NFL Draft show tonight and we will have an open thread!!!!