Doug Farrar on Brian Orakpo

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Originally Posted by Ruhskins

Funny how people don't give the FO praise for picking Orakpo. Most people will say "well they didn't get Sanchez so they settled for Orakpo." Orakpo is going to be a pro bowler and this was a great pick up by our FO. I do hope that this success we're seeing in the preseason carries on to the regular season. We struck gold (and it was about damn time).

Well, what we have here is a case of the front office going out of their way to EARN their lack of credit.

Every indication says that they actively tried to trade the pick that they used on Orakpo and simply failed. Mark Sanchez would have to be a pretty good player to be better than Orakpo, and he might be, but while we don't know what the team's final offer was to move up, we know it's something that likely would have done the trick had there been no competition.

Now remember, if I had been the one in charge of the draft, we would have had Oher instead of Orakpo. I had them rated about equally, and the offensive player would have been my preference, but Orakpo certainly appears to be the rare, scheme-neutral defensive player I was talking about.

So in that light, if Orakpo ends up defensive ROY, and the Ravens OL has to swallow it's ups and downs, kudos to the FO. Until then, they are sort of to blame for making it look like they lucked into a pick that other teams simply passed on.