Quote:
Originally Posted by jdlea
Yeah, that is a really good point. I don't think there were too many players on ND's offense, Quinn and Ryan Harris excluded, that I would want on my NFL team. I'm a ND fan, but I didn't think they had a ton of talent on that team
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My personal opinion of Ryan Harris isn't even that high. I didn't think he had a very good senior season at all.
I don't think there was any position that ND was better at in 2006 than they were in 2005. They stupidly benched their best CB last year, All their LBs graduated and they were playing converted LBs all year, the DL stayed consistenly dominant, the OL regressed, and the offensive skill positions pretty much all maxed out their college potential in 2005.
Which brings me back to Quinn. Quinn reached the summit of the college game back in 2005. As in theres no way he could have been more dominant as a senior. The stats show he regressed a tiny bit, but I believe thats nothing but variance over a 13 game sample. I see Quinn as a constant from 2005 to 2006, and I would go as far as challenging the credentials of a scout who didn't see it this way.
The nature of college football is that many, many Quarterbacks will reach the games highest point every year. So how do you seperate the busts from the NFL prospects? Theres a simple theory I have to do so. I believe that in every QBs college progression, they will have a point at which they will max out (production wise), due to limitations of their own teammates, coaches, opponents, whatever. They can't get any more productive at the college game, because the people around them will not allow it. As the saying goes, "you're only good as your weakest link".
Scouts tend to see this as a red flag if a guy stops improving. But its my fundamental belief that the quarterback really is still improving all along, he just can no longer produce at a higher college level. He is however, bettering himself as an NFL prospect all the while.
So while JaMarcus Russell and Troy Smith had great final seasons in college, how can we be sure they ever reached the pinnical of the game? What if the talent around them at LSU and OSU respectively had allowed their games to reach so much higher than they had achieved, but due to Smith's graduation, and Russell's choice to leave school, a scout has no idea how this will translate to the NFL.
While its possible that Russell did plateou at his peak production last year, its unfair to ask a scout to be sure of this. It's hard to really quantify how much talent he had at LSU, so the correct scouting move is to leave Russell as an incomplete (and not use the first pick in the draft on an incomplete raw talent
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Smith is not a prospect for many of the same reasons. We don't know how much better he would have gotten with another year in college, nor do we know how good the 2006 OSU QB was supposed to be.
sf69, you may now completely dismiss this as garbage so you dont have to reply, and Matty...happy to oblige.