The 2008 NFL Draft

I was busy on Saturday with a wedding and picking my mother up at the airport, so I spent Day One of the NFL Draft trying to pick up the signals of various sports radio stations between Washington DC and Martinsburg, WV broadcasting the draft.  No existing players (Shockey, Taylor, Johnson) were traded, but teams swapped picks right and left to reposition themselves.  I spent part of Day Two flipping between the ESPN and the NFL Network coverage to take in the differences when I wasn’t watching the Wizards lose to the Cavaliers.  So for my spambot readers, my takes on what happened:

Washington Redskins - I’m not as bent out of shape about the Redskins burning their first three picks on two WRs and a pass catching TE.  Thomas Boswell in The Washington Post and Steve Czaban and Andy Pollin on Clear Channel’s Sports Talk 980 were quite angry about the moves, particularly the repetition of filling needs, or spending a higher pick for depth only.  If one of those picks had been in the first round (the Redskins traded their first round #21pick to move back), I might be as upset.

Michigan State WR Devin Thomas and Southern California TE were decent “value” picks where they were taken.  I would have preferred Notre Dame DT Trevor Laws in place of Thomas, but whatever.  It’s worth noting that two guys I would have liked to seen drafted by Washington, Clemson DE Philip Merling and Laws, were drafted two picks and one pick, respectively, ahead of the Redskins spots.  Perhaps this is what passes for Plan B for them.  The selection of Oklahoma WR Malcom Kelly was gratuitous, but well, these are the Redskins.  I’m just happy they didn’t trade all the picks for old kick return specialists.  Even this is a great improvement.

The only Day Two picks I want to talk about are Georgia Tech P Durant Brooks and University of Hawaii QB Colt Brennan.  The Redskins just resigned their meh quality P Derrick Frost, but he’s disposable.  My real hope if Brooks beats out Frost for the job, is that Brooks can kickoff.  Ever since Chip Lohmiller appeared in a McDonald’s commercial and his career fell apart, the Redskins have had neither kicker nor punter capable of consistently deep kickoffs.  PK Shawn Shuisham’s kickoffs are dreadful.  During the short time Frost had
the kickoff job he was a little bit better, but his mediocre punting degenerated into bad.

I don’t like Brennan as an NFL QB.  I dislike his arm strength and decision making.  The decision making can be fixed and combined with his mobility (which should not be confused with actual running ability) that might make him a serviceable CFL QB.  It’s not a guarantee though, June Jones’ previous disciple at Hawaii, Timmy Chang, was quickly benched after starting for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats last year.  A 34.7 QB rating (on 89 attempts) will do that to you.  If all Brennan does is hold a clipboard, do good work on the scout team and get the Redskins a player from the British Columbia Lions in a few years, it’s OK.  What, NFL and CFL teams can’t trade?  Ohh, maybe not.  In all seriousness, I wouldn’t be surprised if former Maryland QB Sam Hollenbach, currently on the roster as a minicamp arm, beats out Brennan during training camp.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers - First rounder CB Aqib Talib (University of Kansas), fourth rounder DT Dre Moore (University of Maryland) and sixth rounder LB Geno Hayes (Florida State) are typical athletic Buc reloads for the defense.  I have no other comments of worth.

WR Dexter Jackson of Evil Appalachian State was the Bucs second round pick.  He’s the classic 5′9″ kick-returning, reverse running, screen pass catching, Hell-on-Earth-with-the-ball-in-space guy.  The Bucs need all kinds of competent WR help, so if he can do any of that at the NFL level (embarrassing last year’s bewildered University of Michigan team is only a start) he’ll have been a good pick.

As speculated before the draft, the Bucs got University of San Diego QB Josh Johnson in Round 5.  I didn’t know that San Diego’s program had jumped up to Division I-AA, but against that competition Johnson put up insane (68.8% completion rate, 113TDs to 16 INTs) numbers and had the best 40 yard dash time (4.55 seconds) and vertical leap (33.5″) of any QB at the combine.  Interestingly, Johnson was not listed as a top performer for the 20 yard shuttle run or the three cone drill.  Anyway, the downside for Johnson is that he is in Tampa and might get forgotten along with the three other youngish QBs nominally on the Bucs roster.  One of the draftheads on TV said Gruden knows how to develop QBs.  Whom has he done that with since ascending to HC?  As a HC, Gruden’s best QBs have been Rich Gannon, Jeff Garcia, Brad Johnson and Brian Griese, all veterans with previous success.

Back to Johnson, he may be a bit scrawny (height is 6′3″ but weight is anywhere from 198 to 213 lbs.) and he’ll have to adjust from playing “low” I-AA ball in the Pioneer League.

Stupid Jets - Ownership, coaches, management changes, but for the fourth time in sixteen years the Jets saw fit to spend a first round draft pick on a TE, Purdue’s very fast and formerly (IIRC he was 6′1″ at the combine, now he’s 6′3″?) very short Dustin Keller.  It was the 30th pick, so at least it wasn’t a high pick, like Kyle Brady with the 9th pick back in 1995.  The Jets got modest, if useful play out of the TE spot last year from Chris Baker, so adding the second coming of Byron Chamberlain (20 more catches, 3 more TDs, 200 more yards?) doesn’t seem worth a first round pick.

Anecdotally, I remember driving up to New York at the end of the Jets appalling 1996 season when it was obvious the number one overall pick (ultimately Keyshawn Johnson) was headed their way.  WFAN wise-guy host Steve Summers said the obvious choice was “the All-American from Rutgers, TE Marco Battaglia.”

Better Run Bastards Up North (Ravens) - Ozzie Newsome is a Hall of Fame TE and a great GM.  His main inability is (in conjunction with “genius” ex-HC Brian Billick) finding QBs.  After spending the 19th pick in the 2003 draft on a QB who should be a H-back, Kyle Boller, the Ravens reached a bit to get the University of Delaware’s cannon-armed Joe Flacco.  Flacco is very talented, but will have to make a multi-level adjustment to NFL defender speed, and my worthless gut instincts thought he was a second rounder.  Hue Jackson, once upon a time saddled with the thankless job of OC for the Steve Spurrier Redskins, gets to “coach up” Flacco to the NFL game.  In the meantime, some combination Kyle Boller (probably too slow these days to be returning kicks) and Troy Smith (anonymous Heisman trophy winner) will hold things down in Baltimore, meaning handoff and pitch to Willis McGahee.  Flacco is growing, I think ESPN.com College Football had him at 6′4″ at the end of the season, ESPN.com Scouts Inc. had him at 6′6″3/8 for the draft and now NFL.com and the Washington Post have him at 6′7″.  How long before he starts challenging Mark McGwire’s brother Dan (6′9″) for tallest QB to play in the NFL?

The Purple and Black Birds also drafted two interesting safeties, Notre Dame’s Tom Zbikowski in round three and University of Cincinnati’s Hideki Nakamura in round six.  Zbikowski was previously mentioned on this blog as a guy I thought graduated two years ago.  He’s a pretty good punt returner, a ferocious hitter and I think a Golden Gloves boxer and minor league baseball player.  Nakamura I only saw once last year and I can’t recall anything special about his play.  I’m a humorously sad that he’s not some Japanese guy who hopped off a plane to play football in Cincinnati, but just some guy with a Japanese father who grew up in Ohio.

In the Navy Army - Finally, the Lions used a seventh round pick on West Point S Caleb Campbell.  Campbell is large (6′2″ 223lbs.), fast (4.5 allegedly) and the U.S. Army is giving him an exemption from service to play in the NFL.  It’s actually described over at Campbell’s NFL.com draft profile as a reserve recruiter assignment with an option for buyout.  The deal sounds vaguely similar to that given by the U.S. Navy to David Robinson for the NBA and Napoleon McCallum for the NFL.  The theory is that Campbell’s on field work, if he makes the team, will help Army recruiting enough to compensate for his absence in the actual officer corps.  He’s the subject of piece on ESPN’s maudlin E:60 news magazine, which I’ll have to watch some time.

NFL in Toronto

So back at the beginning of the month, the Buffalo Bills announced they had reached a deal to play some games in Toronto. The deal was for a total of eight games, three preseason and five regular season, to be played starting this year through 2012, at the building formerly known as SkyDome, the Rogers Center. This caused some transborder anguish.

Buffalo Bills fans have been haunted by the grumblings that the Bills might move to Toronto for a while now. Even down here in Washington, DC I hear this. Since Jim Kelly’s arrival the Bills have done well attendance wise, but team management just grouses about western New York’s population not growing and its economy struggling. I have no idea if the latter is true, but it seems probable. Then the bridge talk begins about how running a NFL team is ever expensive and the need to think out of the box to new sources of revenue, like that huge, rich city up the QEW.

The Bills’ Canadian partners are Rogers Communications, which owns the Blue Jays among others things and Maple Leaf Sports, which owns the Maple Leafs and Raptors. The football team that currently plays at the Rogers Center, the CFL’s Argonauts, gets a small cut in the deal, with their season ticket holders getting in the priority pool for Bills game tickets. Bills fans are also in said pool.

I don’t know what Canadian football fan opinion is, but I have better things to do than troll around fan boards and other football blogs to gauge this. I’d guess hostile, as the hardcore CFL fans are often flinty about the NFL and rather a lot of Canadians seem to regard Toronto as a foreign city, sort of the way rather a lot of Americans feel about New York. The CFL commissioner issued a neutral public statement on the matter while noting that the CFL and NFL were working on an agreement between the two leagues. The Argonauts are obviously on board, but the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, who are actually closer to Buffalo, have opted out of letting their season ticket holders in the priority pool, pending the two leagues reaching an agreement.

I’ve always been hostile to regular season overseas games by North American sports leagues, not so much for the games themselves, but because it leads to boring crazy talk about “eventually setting up eight NFL teams in Indonesia” as part of growing revenues in a globalized marketplace. The NFL, NBA and MLB do this once a year mostly to pump up their overseas merchandise and TV revenues, but also to give off an aura of international importance and forward thinking. It wouldn’t do for a league executive to say “We hope to sell more t-shirts and jerseys, building up to a game that would be an occasional local novelty. There isn’t sustained interest in our sport here (or there’s a local version of it) but there are enough people here with money who want a cool-looking shirt to wear. Like those people in U.S. wearing EPL or Bundesliga jerseys.” Always, there needs to be a throw away line regarding setting up a local division of the league in whatever market is being emphasized (recently it’s been Ma and Pa Wong’s Old Country, China) that will compete against the parent league. Only once in many years of buzzing about overseas marketing have I heard a sports talking head concede that this was part of a long, long term plan that may never result in, say a true baseball World Series with the New York Yankees playing the Nippon-Ham Fighters.

I shouldn’t care, it’s not my money that will be spent on marketing these endeavors and I inevitably turn the radio or TV off when the discussion comes about. The NFL isn’t a public entity and most football journalists aren’t going to use their resources to investigate, but I wonder if they really make money on the various exhibition and regular season games played in Mexico, Great Britain, Germany, Sweden and Japan? I know NFL Europe was heavily dependent on papering the events with free tickets to American military personnel in Germany. They’re no longer with us.

As for this, I really like the CFL and want to see them continue. The CFL regular season has a partial overlap with the NFL season and I doubt the Argos and Bills could co-exist in Toronto. As much as I like the idea politically and philosophically, it’s probably impossible for people in Buffalo to form some kind of public-trust that will run the team and keep them there like the Packers in Green Bay, or the Blue Bombers in Winnipeg. I find myself in the odd position of hoping the games fail.

The Plague is Up North Too!

So David Asper is the Executive Vice-President of Can-West Global Communications. Asper is offering to take over the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, a community owned team, I guess, like the Green Bay Packers. He would like a new stadium built (the current one is 54 years old) for the Bombers and his proposal is to split the cost three ways between himself, the Province of Manitoba and the Canadian Government.

Oh please.  American sports team owners grouse about their team’s stadiums and arenas not turning enough profit and demanding the government help them, often entirely, pay for a new one. Upon moving into the new arena or stadium, the team insists on getting the bulk of the parking and concessions revenue and if the government owns the facility, deeply discounted rent.  Apparently, a prospective Canadian owner wants in on this as well.

I don’t read deeply on the CFL.  From the handful of articles I’ve read on the internet over the years and talking to actual Canadians, the CFL is modestly popular nationwide, with its core popularity being in the Western provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  The league has only recently started to get its head out of financial troubles and that might be partially due to the NFL giving them a loan.

My point is that this doesn’t seem to be the type of organization  that could get a way with asking the government to help them with infrastructure, yet here we are.  I could understand if an NHL franchise tried that.  Maybe they have?  Perhaps the Blue Bombers are popular enough (they are in Manitoba) that Asper thinks he has a shot with that?  The Canadian Government’s Treasury Board President (if Wikipedia is correct, his job is to allocate government resources) is not pleased with the amount of cash expected from the government.  Best of luck to the Province of Manitoba and the Canadian Federal Government in making a would be private entity pay for its own stadium.

In other Blue Bomber news, the team hired a guy named Dan Daniel to be their secondary coach. I’m easily amused.  Also, all-time CFL TD leader Milt Stegall, who has been in the CFL ever since the Bengals jettisoned him back in 1992, will be coming back for another season with the team.