Sunday, April 25, 2010

Wrapping Up the Steelers Draft - 2010

You know, I am a football fan, and I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable one at that, but I have to tell you that before this weekend, I had never heard of any of the guys that the Steelers drafted this weekend. Not one of them. I would venture to say that I am not alone in this regard.

I did no research to make the following statements, but I am betting that my ballpark figures won't be too far from wrong. I will venture to say that of the 10 guys the Steelers drafted that roughly half of them will never make a significant contribution to the Steelers. If three or four of them become solid starters within three years, this will have been considered a successful draft, and if one of them becomes a Pro Bowl caliber player, then it will be a wildly successful draft. The same is probably true for any NFL team.

I guess that my point is that no event demands such saturated media coverage and hype in such an inverse proportion to its actual worth.

Don't get me wrong, I hope that Maurkice Pouncey and the rest of the class of '10 are holding Lombardi Trophies aloft in the near future, but can we see how that actually, you know, play football in the NFL before we roll out the hype machine?

One cliche that always comes to light during the NFL draft is that a team drafts a guy in the second round and the team says "we couldn't believe he was still there; we had him projected as a mid-to-low first round pick." Well, this year the Steelers trumped that. Jonathan Dwyer, a RB from Georgia Tech taken in the SIXTH ROUND was said to be projected as a first or high second round pick. Wow. How could 32 teams be so wrong as to let this guy fall to the sixth round???

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