hef
Veteran
alot of this backs up why imo we should not take lefty if he's their @ 6 although i strongly believe he has the goods to be a star in the nfl but i also thought leaf did to, now i'm not saying leftwitch will be the next leaf or even the next bledsoe i'm just saying that imo that we can't afford to take that big of a chance i think we should build our team up at every other position and then give josh a chance, it worked for new england why not us, sorry for the length of this story but it's pretty good.
take my opinion for what it is, and that is just an opinion.
and by the way i never mentioned suggs name so lets not make this a suggs/ leftwitch argument please
So you want to select a franchise quarterback in this weekend's NFL Draft? Here's all you need to know about the state of affairs at the game's most high-profile position:
Of the first 30 Super Bowls, 24 were won by teams with homegrown starting quarterbacks that the clubs had drafted. It breaks down to an even eight out of 10, or 80 percent, in each of the Super Bowl's first three decades, and there were 13 different quarterbacks who accounted for those two dozen NFL championships. Names like Starr, Namath, Staubach, Griese, Bradshaw, Stabler, Montana, McMahon, Simms and Aikman highlight the star-studded list.
But in the past seven Super Bowls, only once has the winning quarterback been drafted by the team he led, and that came from the most remarkable longshot of them all, New England's Tom Brady, the former fourth-stringer who was an unheralded sixth-round pick by the Patriots in 2000.
In fact, in the first 10 years of the free agency/salary cap era (1993-2002) -- a period in which the NFL has undergone dramatic structural changes -- Brady is the only quarterback who has been drafted and gone on to lead that team to a Super Bowl title.
Even the best of the NFL's recent first-round quarterbacks haven't done it. Drew Bledsoe, Kerry Collins and Steve McNair all have made it to one Super Bowl and lost it. Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper or any of the other 13 quarterbacks who have been selected in the first round since '93 have failed to get that far.
That distinction alone belongs to Brady, who at 24 became the youngest quarterback to win a Super Bowl to boot.
Boom or Bust
QB Team Pick
1993
Drew Bledsoe Patriots 1st
Rick Mirer Seahawks 2nd
1994
Heath Shuler Redskins 3rd
Trent Dilfer Bucs 6th
1995
Steve McNair Titans 3rd
Kerry Collins Panthers 5th
1996
None
1997
Jim Druckenmiller 49ers 26th
1998
Peyton Manning Colts 1st
Ryan Leaf Chargers 2nd
1999
Tim Couch Browns 1st
Donovan McNabb Eagles 2nd
Akili Smith Bengals 3rd
Daunte Culpepper Vikings 11th
Cade McNown Bears 12th
2000
Chad Pennington Jets 18th
2001
Michael Vick Falcons 1st
2002
David Carr Texans 1st
Joey Harrington Lions 3rd
Patrick Ramsey Redskins 32nd
All in all, it's not an inviting track record for teams like Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Baltimore, who are either certain or likely to take the first-round quarterback plunge this weekend. Especially since the specters of first-round failures like Rick Mirer, Heath Shuler, Jim Druckenmiller, Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith and Cade McNown still loom heavily on the NFL landscape -- not to mention some teams' salary-cap ledgers.
Why has the first-round quarterback decision become the most agonizing one that an NFL team must face, turning head coaches, general managers and personnel men into quivering masses of hesitancy? Because it's an accepted canon in today's NFL that roughly half of all first-round quarterbacks will wash out before they step up, and those odds aren't nearly good enough when you're dealing with the contract a first-round quarterback commands.
Is it any wonder that some quarterback-needy teams will pass on the position in the first round -- the Bears at No. 4 likely will fall into that category this year -- given that recent Super Bowls have been won by the likes of Brady, Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer? Such is the doubt-first, ask-questions-later backdrop for 2003's probable first-round quarterbacks -- USC's Carson Palmer, Marshall's Byron Leftwich and Cal's Kyle Boller.
"This quarterback class looks pretty good," Ravens head coach Brian Billick said. "It looks pretty broad based across the entire draft. But I don't care how good an evaluator you are and what your track record is, you draft a guy in the first round, it's a crapshoot. It's 50-50. And that's the thing that will concern most teams. ... When one of us is wrong, we're kind of all wrong, and that tells you how iffy the evaluation of the quarterback process is."
Almost the entire NFL was both iffy and wrong when it came to Brady in 2000. According to notes kept by Brady's agent, Don Yee, here's what league talent evaluators were saying about the University of Michigan product as he prepared for the 2000 draft:
"A priority [undrafted] free agent … Maybe a good third quarterback … He'll never make it in the league ... No frame. No arm. No zip on the ball."
Brady may have lacked zip on the ball, but he had a ring on his finger by the close of his second season in the NFL. And the rest of the league had egg on its face. Brady was the 199th selection in 2000, a compensatory, or "sandwich," pick for the Patriots, and his sixth-round signing bonus was all of $38,000.
"Brady's the interesting one to me," said Seattle head coach Mike Holmgren of the recent run of unexpected Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks. "It's like one of those movies. ... [And Warner is] the poster boy for perseverance. It goes to show you can find guys. When they say you can't find quarterbacks, that's baloney."
With the draft again upon us and another crop of first-round quarterbacks about to enter the league, Brady's story reminds us that while it's easy to fall back on evaluating a passer's measurables -- his size, his speed, his arm strength -- the real trick is to somehow correctly gauge his intangibles. The qualities that can't be seen or charted, but more times than not make the difference between success and failure.
What's a quarterback's leadership quotient? Does he have the perseverance to withstand the inevitable heat and criticism that will come? Is he creative and resourceful on the field, making the most out of the least? Can he grow into a role of responsibility and maturity beyond what he can handle today?
Those are some of the factors -- rather than their height, weight and 40 times -- that helped separate a Manning from a Leaf and a Bledsoe from a Mirer. They probably helped make Dilfer the NFL survivor that he became, and contributed to Shuler's short, undistinguished professional career. As it turned out, the light-framed Brady had the goods, but it took an unlikely chain of events to present him with the opportunity to show them off.
What's apparent in the free-agency era is that there has never been less patience in the development of quarterbacks or a greater sense of urgency to find out quickly if a first-round pick "has it." After all, with coaching staffs and rosters both turning over at an unprecedented rate, and the salary cap representing a ticking time bomb of sorts, the pressure to win now has accelerated most quarterback decisions.
"You have to commit body and soul to that kid [in the first round]," Holmgren said. "A lot of times a coach isn't going to be able to hang on long enough to see it happen. If you have to play the young guy, the team is going to struggle."
Those free-agency era realities, some believe, lead talent evaluators to put too much weight on the qualities they can see and quantify in the scouting process and not enough on the more difficult art of analyzing a quarterback's intangibles. With so much at stake, the measurables seem to grow in importance every year, maybe because they're safer to cling to and more definable than the nebulous other half of the equation.
Call it the "Leaf factor," but San Diego's monumental misjudgment in 1998 -- a pick that most NFL teams would have made given the opportunity -- has become every franchise's nightmare scenario and influenced the scouting of all subsequent first-round quarterbacks. But maybe not for the better, in that the first-round success ratio continues to hover around 50 percent.
"That's a part of it," Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis said of the boom-bust quality of taking a first-round quarterback. "There's no question that goes through [our] mind. But you don't go into this thing to fail. If you do the research, the character, the background all the way through ... you've got to feel like you've done the right thing."
But again and again, it comes back to patience with young quarterbacks, and that's in short supply in the N(ot) F(or) L(ong) world in which first-rounders find themselves. Prior to free agency, teams could afford to stick with a young passer for a time, nurturing and developing his game. As we have found in recent years, many quarterbacks are late bloomers. But free agency and the salary cap simply aren't designed to reward quarterbacks who find themselves later in their careers.
Anything more than a year spent watching from the sidelines is seen as a luxury these days, with the notable and successful exception of the Jets' handling of Chad Pennington, who apprenticed in both 2000 and 2001 before his boffo starting debut in 2002.
"You give a coach, any coach, a player for two years, let's say," Billick said. "You're going to have a pretty good idea. You're not going to be wrong too often, whether that guy is a player or not, with the exception of the quarterback position. Until a guy gets there and does it over an extended period of time, you're not going to know.
"Whether it's opportunity, whether it's maturity on their part, all of a sudden they hit it. Some never do. It's just one of those positions that's very unique."
This year's quarterback class is considered the deepest since five passers went in 1999's first round. But there are no sure things. The best scenario might be if Palmer goes to Cincinnati, Leftwich goes to Jacksonville and Boller goes to Baltimore, all of which would have veteran starters ahead of their prized rookies.
"You'd like to take two years and school him," Rams head coach Mike Martz said of drafting a first-round quarterback. "Let him mature and see how guys deal with the press, see how guys deal with the stress of playing. See how guys prepare, first and foremost. To me that's the way to let a top-notch player develop at that position."
But chances are, in two years we'll be describing Palmer, Leftwich and Boller as either hits or misses. And there will be a whole new crop of first-round quarterbacks tempting teams to roll the dice on the league's latest 50-50 proposition.
The real mystery remains why the odds have to stay that low.
Don Banks covers pro football for SI.com
take my opinion for what it is, and that is just an opinion.
and by the way i never mentioned suggs name so lets not make this a suggs/ leftwitch argument please
So you want to select a franchise quarterback in this weekend's NFL Draft? Here's all you need to know about the state of affairs at the game's most high-profile position:
Of the first 30 Super Bowls, 24 were won by teams with homegrown starting quarterbacks that the clubs had drafted. It breaks down to an even eight out of 10, or 80 percent, in each of the Super Bowl's first three decades, and there were 13 different quarterbacks who accounted for those two dozen NFL championships. Names like Starr, Namath, Staubach, Griese, Bradshaw, Stabler, Montana, McMahon, Simms and Aikman highlight the star-studded list.
But in the past seven Super Bowls, only once has the winning quarterback been drafted by the team he led, and that came from the most remarkable longshot of them all, New England's Tom Brady, the former fourth-stringer who was an unheralded sixth-round pick by the Patriots in 2000.
In fact, in the first 10 years of the free agency/salary cap era (1993-2002) -- a period in which the NFL has undergone dramatic structural changes -- Brady is the only quarterback who has been drafted and gone on to lead that team to a Super Bowl title.
Even the best of the NFL's recent first-round quarterbacks haven't done it. Drew Bledsoe, Kerry Collins and Steve McNair all have made it to one Super Bowl and lost it. Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper or any of the other 13 quarterbacks who have been selected in the first round since '93 have failed to get that far.
That distinction alone belongs to Brady, who at 24 became the youngest quarterback to win a Super Bowl to boot.
Boom or Bust
QB Team Pick
1993
Drew Bledsoe Patriots 1st
Rick Mirer Seahawks 2nd
1994
Heath Shuler Redskins 3rd
Trent Dilfer Bucs 6th
1995
Steve McNair Titans 3rd
Kerry Collins Panthers 5th
1996
None
1997
Jim Druckenmiller 49ers 26th
1998
Peyton Manning Colts 1st
Ryan Leaf Chargers 2nd
1999
Tim Couch Browns 1st
Donovan McNabb Eagles 2nd
Akili Smith Bengals 3rd
Daunte Culpepper Vikings 11th
Cade McNown Bears 12th
2000
Chad Pennington Jets 18th
2001
Michael Vick Falcons 1st
2002
David Carr Texans 1st
Joey Harrington Lions 3rd
Patrick Ramsey Redskins 32nd
All in all, it's not an inviting track record for teams like Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Baltimore, who are either certain or likely to take the first-round quarterback plunge this weekend. Especially since the specters of first-round failures like Rick Mirer, Heath Shuler, Jim Druckenmiller, Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith and Cade McNown still loom heavily on the NFL landscape -- not to mention some teams' salary-cap ledgers.
Why has the first-round quarterback decision become the most agonizing one that an NFL team must face, turning head coaches, general managers and personnel men into quivering masses of hesitancy? Because it's an accepted canon in today's NFL that roughly half of all first-round quarterbacks will wash out before they step up, and those odds aren't nearly good enough when you're dealing with the contract a first-round quarterback commands.
Is it any wonder that some quarterback-needy teams will pass on the position in the first round -- the Bears at No. 4 likely will fall into that category this year -- given that recent Super Bowls have been won by the likes of Brady, Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer? Such is the doubt-first, ask-questions-later backdrop for 2003's probable first-round quarterbacks -- USC's Carson Palmer, Marshall's Byron Leftwich and Cal's Kyle Boller.
"This quarterback class looks pretty good," Ravens head coach Brian Billick said. "It looks pretty broad based across the entire draft. But I don't care how good an evaluator you are and what your track record is, you draft a guy in the first round, it's a crapshoot. It's 50-50. And that's the thing that will concern most teams. ... When one of us is wrong, we're kind of all wrong, and that tells you how iffy the evaluation of the quarterback process is."
Almost the entire NFL was both iffy and wrong when it came to Brady in 2000. According to notes kept by Brady's agent, Don Yee, here's what league talent evaluators were saying about the University of Michigan product as he prepared for the 2000 draft:
"A priority [undrafted] free agent … Maybe a good third quarterback … He'll never make it in the league ... No frame. No arm. No zip on the ball."
Brady may have lacked zip on the ball, but he had a ring on his finger by the close of his second season in the NFL. And the rest of the league had egg on its face. Brady was the 199th selection in 2000, a compensatory, or "sandwich," pick for the Patriots, and his sixth-round signing bonus was all of $38,000.
"Brady's the interesting one to me," said Seattle head coach Mike Holmgren of the recent run of unexpected Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks. "It's like one of those movies. ... [And Warner is] the poster boy for perseverance. It goes to show you can find guys. When they say you can't find quarterbacks, that's baloney."
With the draft again upon us and another crop of first-round quarterbacks about to enter the league, Brady's story reminds us that while it's easy to fall back on evaluating a passer's measurables -- his size, his speed, his arm strength -- the real trick is to somehow correctly gauge his intangibles. The qualities that can't be seen or charted, but more times than not make the difference between success and failure.
What's a quarterback's leadership quotient? Does he have the perseverance to withstand the inevitable heat and criticism that will come? Is he creative and resourceful on the field, making the most out of the least? Can he grow into a role of responsibility and maturity beyond what he can handle today?
Those are some of the factors -- rather than their height, weight and 40 times -- that helped separate a Manning from a Leaf and a Bledsoe from a Mirer. They probably helped make Dilfer the NFL survivor that he became, and contributed to Shuler's short, undistinguished professional career. As it turned out, the light-framed Brady had the goods, but it took an unlikely chain of events to present him with the opportunity to show them off.
What's apparent in the free-agency era is that there has never been less patience in the development of quarterbacks or a greater sense of urgency to find out quickly if a first-round pick "has it." After all, with coaching staffs and rosters both turning over at an unprecedented rate, and the salary cap representing a ticking time bomb of sorts, the pressure to win now has accelerated most quarterback decisions.
"You have to commit body and soul to that kid [in the first round]," Holmgren said. "A lot of times a coach isn't going to be able to hang on long enough to see it happen. If you have to play the young guy, the team is going to struggle."
Those free-agency era realities, some believe, lead talent evaluators to put too much weight on the qualities they can see and quantify in the scouting process and not enough on the more difficult art of analyzing a quarterback's intangibles. With so much at stake, the measurables seem to grow in importance every year, maybe because they're safer to cling to and more definable than the nebulous other half of the equation.
Call it the "Leaf factor," but San Diego's monumental misjudgment in 1998 -- a pick that most NFL teams would have made given the opportunity -- has become every franchise's nightmare scenario and influenced the scouting of all subsequent first-round quarterbacks. But maybe not for the better, in that the first-round success ratio continues to hover around 50 percent.
"That's a part of it," Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis said of the boom-bust quality of taking a first-round quarterback. "There's no question that goes through [our] mind. But you don't go into this thing to fail. If you do the research, the character, the background all the way through ... you've got to feel like you've done the right thing."
But again and again, it comes back to patience with young quarterbacks, and that's in short supply in the N(ot) F(or) L(ong) world in which first-rounders find themselves. Prior to free agency, teams could afford to stick with a young passer for a time, nurturing and developing his game. As we have found in recent years, many quarterbacks are late bloomers. But free agency and the salary cap simply aren't designed to reward quarterbacks who find themselves later in their careers.
Anything more than a year spent watching from the sidelines is seen as a luxury these days, with the notable and successful exception of the Jets' handling of Chad Pennington, who apprenticed in both 2000 and 2001 before his boffo starting debut in 2002.
"You give a coach, any coach, a player for two years, let's say," Billick said. "You're going to have a pretty good idea. You're not going to be wrong too often, whether that guy is a player or not, with the exception of the quarterback position. Until a guy gets there and does it over an extended period of time, you're not going to know.
"Whether it's opportunity, whether it's maturity on their part, all of a sudden they hit it. Some never do. It's just one of those positions that's very unique."
This year's quarterback class is considered the deepest since five passers went in 1999's first round. But there are no sure things. The best scenario might be if Palmer goes to Cincinnati, Leftwich goes to Jacksonville and Boller goes to Baltimore, all of which would have veteran starters ahead of their prized rookies.
"You'd like to take two years and school him," Rams head coach Mike Martz said of drafting a first-round quarterback. "Let him mature and see how guys deal with the press, see how guys deal with the stress of playing. See how guys prepare, first and foremost. To me that's the way to let a top-notch player develop at that position."
But chances are, in two years we'll be describing Palmer, Leftwich and Boller as either hits or misses. And there will be a whole new crop of first-round quarterbacks tempting teams to roll the dice on the league's latest 50-50 proposition.
The real mystery remains why the odds have to stay that low.
Don Banks covers pro football for SI.com
