+ 1 to everyone who has bothered to post in this thread. My thanks.
Especially since I know, and you all know, that what I say about individual college players is worth no more than the paper the original post is printed on.
I am not a draft expert. I would never pretend that I’m an expert on college football players. To my mind, the only people who are those things do it as a full time job.
I don’t hang out with the right people. Almost all of the people who are experts work for NFL or NCAA teams. The very few experts who aren’t -- the Mayocks and Kipers -- hang out almost constantly with those team experts via pro days and Blackberry. And even those I would never want making real personnel decisions for the Green Bay Packers. (Everyone remember’s how well Matt Millen panned out as an NFL executive, right? And Millen had far better information about player possibilities than Mayock and Kiper, much less any of us. ) The needed kind of expertise is not even just a full-time job, it’s 50/60/70/more hours/week job with lots of travel and really big Rolodexes. It’s a job that takes years of practice.
Anyone else is either a fan, a hobbyist, a pretender, or some combination thereof. Everyone else is guessing on information that is seriously, woefully, incomplete.
I don’t pretend to be anything other than a fan who, for a couple months a year, eats up third- and fourth- and fifth-hand information about prospects, and then puts that information together with my fanitude, with my beliefs about the Packers system and needs, and with my beliefs about what would make players a good fit for that system and needs. I really care about what other teams might do when I believe their choices might affect Packer options, strategies, and tactics. For a couple months a year I give my gut feelings and those l0w-quality information sources free reins, vent and cheer and piss and moan and opine strenuously about a couple hundred prospects.
And for the rest of the year, I could care less about college football. And I could care less about players 45-90 on other pro teams. For me, college football only is interesting at draft time. For me, I care about other teams only insofar as they are playing the Packers, affecting the Packers won/loss record, or are rivalry teams like the meatheads down south or the silly guys in purple and yellow.
Draft discussions are, for me, the kind of things guys (of whatever gender) do when hanging out in bars. Sometimes we’ve got a bit too much alcoholic lubrication. Sometimes we talk out of our ass. And, virtually always, we let our hobbyist pretensions, our fandom, or both, lead us into claims that should never be persuasive to any serious expert on college prospects.
I’ve always liked bars. I like that kind of social interaction. Now that I’m a geezer, I can’t hang out at bars the way I used to, but thankfully there are places like online chats providing a really good substitute. But whether its a bar or a chatroom, it’s not the kind of talk that I use to worry about “being right” all that much. It’s a place to get loud and obnoxious, and claim certainties that no mind with an ounce of reflective ability should ever truly believe are certainties. A place where you can set aside the damn job, make gratuitous comments about sex and Sage Steele, about politics and the pinheads of Washington, and about the stupidity of Viking fans and one’s fellow humans.
A place where you can hang out with other people who like to do the same things.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)