I really hope not.
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I've been waiting for the Josh Cribbs to replace Jacoby thread personally.
I thought about Stallworth for a minute. But he's not even the type of WR we need most. He's a speedster, not a tough catch guy.
Cribbs has a solid knee injury, he won't be replacing Jacoby. Unless Oakland negotiates an injury settlement, he'll be filing a grievance against them for releasing him while injured.
I get your point, but that's a bit of a stretch.
For starters, Minnesota's defense last year was 14th in the league. The Ravens D ranked 6th, 6th, and 10th in the three full years of the Boller experiment.
Secondly, Ponder just came off his first full season where he completed 62% of his passes for 2900 yards with 18TDs/12INTs for a 81.2 rating. Boller never came close to anything like that.
Ponder is still in the bottom 1/3rd of all starting QBs in the league right now, but he'd really have to regress this year to be Bollerlicious.
Sorry to triple post here...but LOL
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com...-play-smarter/
:grbac:
No. Brown is UDFA. Different matter all together, and I'm sure you know better.
Draft picks represent substantial investments, and for WRs our ROI is horrible as we all know.
UDFAs are essentially a $1 lottery tickets. Low-risk across the board. If you lose out, no biggy. Nothing much was expected.
Historically, we've lost money, and more importantly, opportunities to take other prospects with our poor investments at the position. Other teams have as well, it's a tough position to project and develop. Yet, come game day (those that count and those that don't) we so seldom have seen signs of life from our WR draft picks. They either can't crack our historical average depth chart and/or they are extreme under-performers. Mellette looks good vs. 3s, and that's only encouraging b/c of where we've been with position and who we have onboard, but let's not kid ourselves here.
Speaking of undrafted rookie wide receivers, it looks like Da'Rick Rodgers is on the outside looking in for one of the six WR slots on the Bills. Everything I'm reading says that they are quite pleased with how he's performed, but he's got on the wrong side of the numbers game there. I know a lot of people here, myself included him, had him mocked to us in the 3rd/4th round, so I wonder if he'd be interested in pursuing.
Good post, but let me add that it's not just our ROI. It's a league-wide phenomenon. No position has a higher "bust factor" than WR. We always talk about how the one chink in Ozzie's otherwise-impenetrable armor is his inability to draft a WR. This is a common chink for even the best.
We've discussed the whole "was Mark Clayton a bust?" issue to death it seems. I've always argued that, although initially it seems he was, he actually was not, mainly because he wasn't even one of the five biggest busts of that 2005 draft class. The scale of expectations is so low at that position that Clayton probably shouldn't be considered a bust.
Look at the success the Patriots and their legendary QB have had producing results from their WR draft picks.
2010: 3rd Round- Taylor Price. 5 catches/80 yards in his career. Out of football after 3 seasons.
2009: 3rd round-Brandon Tate- 37 catches, 643 yards in four seasons. Only lasted two years in New England. Now with the Bengals. A very capable return specialist, but as a WR, a failure.
2008: 5th round-Matthew Slater- 1 catch in 5 NFL seasons. Good special teams player, but again as a WR, contributed nothing.
2006:2nd round (pick 36)- Chad Jackson- 14 catches/171 yards. After his rookie season, only played 6 more career games.
2004:5th round- PK Sam- 0 career catches.