OT: Gee thanks Matt Millen - ineptness that is worse than you thought
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/Draft-Busts-of-th…-?urn=nfl,235522
OK - I know this article is using some anecdotal evidence, but basically they call out 23 first round "busts" from the 2000-2009 drafts. Well guess what? The Lions get a staggering 21.7% (5 out of 23) of the busts in an entire decade. Holy sh*t! I knew Millen was bad at drafting, and as stated above, this isn't very scientific, but this is a whole new level of drafting ineptness. This may be the worst decade of a single team drafting in NFL history.
Also David Terrell gets a nod on this list.
Anyways, this should make the new regime seem even better when they draft Suh tonight.
There should be a distinction between players who had injuries derail their careers, and players who just shouldn't have been drafted where they were in the first place. If I remember correctly, Charles Rogers had more than 100 yards receiving in his first game as a Lion. Then he broke his collarbone, and it snowballed from there.
I'm not sure if the "bust" label should necessarily be applied to guys who are bitten by the injury bug.
Fiutak at Fox Sports makes the case that one should never, except in rare circumstances, ever even draft a QB in any round that the rate of QB failure is just too high to justify the risk and expense:
http://msn.foxsports.com/cfb/story/never-ever-draft-a-qb
The most salient quote of the piece:
"...a team has roughly a 10 percent chance of a quarterback pick being worthwhile if it’s made after the first round. Expand it to the first rounders, and going by recent history, and a team has roughly a 16 percent chance of being right and it has about a 0.05 percent shot of drafting a quarterback who will lead the way to a Super Bowl. Out of the 148 quarterbacks drafted from 1997 to 2008, only four (Brady, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning and Roethlisberger) won a Super Bowl for the team that made the pick (0.027 percent)."
Although he never comes out and actually says it, he is arguing that for all but the rare exceptions like Payton Manning every team should simply have QB's come to them as undrafted free agents, try out, hang around and learn as back ups and see what happens...basically the Kurt Warner story across the board or perhaps the Tom Brady scenario, though he did go in the sixth round.
I think you can make a pretty good case not to draft quarterbacks in the upper rounds, but that Super Bowl stat is crap. Between the 1997 draft and now, there were 12 Super Bowls. The maximum number of quarterbacks who could have won a Super Bowl for the team that drafted them is therefore 12.
This is the picture you see...
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| From Twisted Martini |
this picture is so full of fail that it actually crosses over into the realm of "win"
Maybe Kiper didn't realize that Butler couldn't take an iron onto the field with him.
I can see taking Rogers at #2, but there were waaaay too many warning signs with Mike Williams. The guy had one year of collegiate experience, and had sat out an entire season after that before the draft, and IIRC wasn't in the best of shape at the time of his workout. There were enough red lights there to light half of the whorehouses in Amsterdam.
...but there is no way that Millen could possibly be worse than I think he is.