Thursday, April 13, 2006

Biggest Question Mark in the NFL Draft?

It's most certainly not Vince Young's style or Matt Leinart's head or Reggie Bush's size. It's quite obviously Jay Cutler, who I predict will go down as one of the worst draft choices in NFL history if he goes at the top.

5 Comments:

Blogger D. Ling said...

You right on the money man, Cutler has bad news written all over him. Everyone's falling in love with his arm but scouts reacted the same way last year in regards to Alex Smith and Aaron Rodgers. We all know how that ended up.. Smith was aweful last year and supposedly his hands are too small to grip the ball and Rodgers couldn't even get off the bench. Come to think of it I'm thinking Cutler is going to turn out just like Kyle Boller has in Baltimore, terrific tools but ....
You think about it and if Cutler is so good then how come Vanderbilt was garbage until this year? Cutler has one good season and then all of a sudden he's come from off the map to a quarterback mentioned in the same breath as Leinert and Young... give me a break.

9:33 PM  
Blogger Todd Martin said...

Absolutely. And it wasn't even like Vanderbilt was good this past year. They went 5-6 (after a 4-0 start). While I suppose that's better than the 6-29 record he posted for the rest of his college career, those aren't exactly the most inspiring of stats. It's like they're giving him points just for surviving. This thing has disaster written all over it.

5:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're both giving Vince Young too much credit and probably not giving Cutler enough.
In my opinion it is Young that does not have the prospect to be a good NFL QB. He doesn't have the accuracy, arm strength, speed or proper mechanics to flourish. People put too much stock into quite possibly the most overrated college performance ever in the National Title game. It was a good game, but consider the competition. He played a pretty bad college defense, which makes it roughly six billion times worse than the worst of NFL defenses. He put up good numbers in his career and his team won, but you could say the same about Florida QBs and that hasn't worked out too well, either.
I'm not sure about Cutler yet, but I do think you guys are falling into the draft trap. People spit so many stats and numbers out that it becomes mind-numbing after a while and frustrating to listen to. When football people get high on a guy like Cutler who didn't have a highly-touted college career and they sour a bit on someone like Young who fans are familiar with, there tends to be a backlash against the player who got less pub and TV time because fans can't identify with him. This is a billion dollar business. There is something to this system of scouting for the NFL draft. It isn't full-proof, but there is a reason that football people like Cutler right now and while it doesn't guarantee that they're right on, without seeing much of Cutler in college (tell the truth) or seeing his workouts either privately or at the combine, how can you really judge him.
Don't knock the one good season at Vandy either. The same could have been said for Carson Palmer when he came out of USC. Look how that turned out.

8:42 AM  
Blogger Todd Martin said...

Good points. First off, I have my doubts about Vince Young, and I agree with many of your points there. But I can see him being a special player in the NFL just like I can see him not panning out, so I can more than understand why he would go high in the draft.

I think there's a draft trap too. I just think the draft trap is scouts falling in love with a guy's workouts, starting to overrate him, and other teams feeding into it because they want a sucker team to draft him high. That is Cutler. I'm not a mark for stats or college football success particularly, so I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. But I haven't been what I'd seen of Cutler either. By contrast, Ben Roethlisberger looked like a leader and a winner at Miami of Ohio when he was in college, even if he didn't have the program to give him the creds in that department. I understand your point as well about Carson Palmer, but Cutler's "breakout" season was nowhere close to what Palmer did.

9:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aaron Rodgers was stuck behind a still effective Brett Favre so you can't criticize him for being the #2 quarterback. Remember the Niners were considering him at number one and he slipped all the way to 21. That makes him the biggest steal ever in draft history; of course, that doesn't mean he'll pan out.

1:44 PM  

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