Quote:Where are the decent low cost veteran QBs that have the potential to legitimately aid in a SB run nowadays? Holmgren also had Favre and Hasselbeck, how often was he desperate for a QB?
Just look at the rosters of NFL teams. Lots of backup quarterbacks are low-rent guys. "Legitimate Super Bowl QB" was not a criteria that Holmgren used when choosing his backup QB. The criteria is usually more along the lines of "he won't blow my team apart if I have to play him for 3-4 games." If a guy can legitimately aid in a Super Bowl run, he's probably not your backup.
Quote:You reach cause you don't have one. Let me ask you this. When you go somewhere, say a theme park, and you desperately need and want a bottle of water, do you say oh hell naw I'm not buying this $3 water I'll wait another 5 hours and drink from that nasty fountain at the other end of the place or do you suck it up and drink your cold rejuvenating water. You either pay more upfront with the odds being better it will actually be good water, or do you allow yourself to be thirsty as hell, and get the sucky water? Probably bad analogy but whatever.
That is a highly entertaining analogy to describe the Gene Smith model of running a football team. "I desperately need a defensive tackle, and there's this one here staring me down at the tenth overall pick, so I'll reach like crazy for him here instead of drafting a higher-quality guy at another position here and addressing tackle later on when there's better value available."
Quote:You liked Gabbert, and bashed people who identified early that Gabbert wasn't any good with the Jags.
There's this entertaining fallacy on message boards--not just this one--that liking a player early on automatically disqualifies you from acknowledging down the road that said player sucks. I was a fan of Gene Smith's early work, and was one of those "one more year" guys in 2010. That worked out well. I also believed that Gabbert deserved a clean slate in 2012, as the jacked-up nature of his "ascension" to the starting job when he was woefully unprepared for it should have been treated as a redshirt year. Even before this season, I was of the opinion that we didn't have any better options available (take that, Geno lovers) and might as well let it roll with Gabbs, knowing that we had a backup in Henne who couldn't possibly be any worse. Conversely, I hated the Blackmon pick from the start for a multitude of reasons, including the Soward-like tendencies that ended up landing him an indefinite suspension.
Here's the thing: GMs admit their mistakes all the time. It happens when a big-name free agent is cut after the first year of his deal, or a first-round bust is traded away after his rookie year. Even Caldwell's already admitted a mistake by cutting Mo Mass in camp after giving him as significant a deal as any Jaguars free agent got this year. I don't get the attitude on message boards that you're never allowed to be wrong. Everyone's wrong. If someone's man enough to own up to it and say that, yeah, well, Gabbert sucks, Gene Smith set the franchise back by five years, and taking Mojo in the third round of my fantasy this year was a stupid, STUPID idea, why is that then held against them?
Quote:To answer the OP's question:
If you KNEW Tom Brady is a bonafide superstar in the making, can be your franchise QB for years to come, etc - you pick him with your very first pick.
Because he would have been the top player on your board. You don't know where he is on someone else's board, so you don't let him slip away, ever.
People that say "you should wait if most GMs think he's a later round pick" are being silly. IF you have evaluated him to be on the top of your board, chances are someone else has also. You take him as early as you can.
Nobody knew that Brady would be a superstar. Most draftnik sites wrote him off completely as a guy who wouldn't last a year. If we were to rewind to 2000 and tell everyone that Brady would win three Super Bowls and mature into one of the greatest QBs of all time, Cleveland would probably have rethought that Courtney Brown pick. If, though, you rewound to 2000 and didn't tell anyone that, just left Brady to be drafted in a position commensurate with his talent and potential, he'd probably fall all the way to the end of the sixth round again. You've chosen a very extreme example here. Sometimes you're smart, and sometimes you're lucky. As it relates to Brady, there was a lot of luck involved.
