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Draft Day roulette NFL teams step right up this weekend, take their chances
Posted: Friday April 16, 1999 06:09 PM
By John Donovan, CNN/SI ATLANTA -- In the end, once you take away all the stopwatches and psychological evaluations and draft board shuffling, the NFL Draft is just one big crapshoot. Problem is, even at the beginning of the draft, it's a big crapshoot. The 1999 NFL Draft, the Annual National Football League Player Selection Meeting -- whatever you want to call it -- finally gets under way Saturday. Thirty-one teams, starting with the new Cleveland Browns, step up to the telephone Saturday, hoping months and years worth of research will result in Lady Luck shining on them. It just doesn't happen like that. Draft Day disasters are a dime for a couple dozen. And there are least a couple dozen players in the league today who still are waiting for that Draft Day dud tag to be laid on them once and for all. "My philosophy, my personal philosophy, is that I would trade away things in the future to get something now," said San Diego Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard. It was Beathard, remember, who rolled the dice last season, trading away a bunch of draft picks to move up the draft order so he could take quarterback Ryan Leaf. He was a huge bust his rookie year and he's a real question for this one. "Where I've made the mistake, I think, sometimes," Beathard said, "is the guy wasn't quite there like I thought he was, and maybe [I] went against what some of the guys said." The hardest part for fans to accept is that even sure things aren't sure things. In 1995, the Cincinnati Bengals traded up to the No. 1 spot to get Penn State running back Ki-Jana Carter and paid him more than $7 million in a signing bonus. What they got was a player whose career thus far has been riddled with injuries. "It's all a guessing game," admits Carter, who missed all of '95 with a knee injury and is recovering from a broken wrist that put him out of virtually all of last season. "Look at [Denver Broncos running back] Terrell Davis. He was a sixth-round pick." Saturday's draft shapes up to be a watershed for the quarterback-needy NFL. This year's freshman class has more quality quarterbacks than any in recent memory, topped by the probable No. 1 pick, Kentucky's Tim Couch. There's also Syracuse's Donovan McNabb, Oregon's Akili Smith, Central Florida's Daunte Culpepper, UCLA's Cade McNown, Washington's Brock Huard, Tulane's Shaun King, Kansas State's Michael Bishop ... the list is a long one. It has some experts comparing this group to the class of '83, which produced three possible future Hall of Famers: Former Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly, Denver's John Elway and Miami's Dan Marino. "I think this is really the best group that I've seen in the league, maybe since I've been in the league -- 20 years," said Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Tony Dungy. "I think it's better, as a whole, than the class of '83 because there are more guys." Said Dennis Green, coach of the Minnesota Vikings: "I think there are 15 players in my opinion that can come into the NFL and play quarterback at some stage in their career. And that's more than we've had in a long time." This draft is an historic one for more reasons than the number of quarterbacks. McNabb, Smith and Culpepper all are African Americans, as are King and Bishop. This figures to be the first time in draft history that three black quarterbacks will be taken in the first round. "Maybe," said Dungy, "this will finally be the year that puts us beyond that, where we don't even talk about black quarterbacks, we just talk about quarterbacks." The new team in Cleveland, dormant since losing the Browns to Baltimore after the 1995 season (where they were renamed the Ravens), picks No. 1. The resurrected Browns evidently have settled on Couch as the man to jumpstart that storied franchise. But they're also entertaining offers, from anyone who wants to talk, to trade the pick. One of the No. 1 suitors is Mike Ditka, who is willing to trade the New Orleans Saints' entire set of draft picks, plus some next year, to move up to No. 1 and pick Heisman Trophy-winning running back Ricky Williams of Texas. The pre-draft maneuvering began in earnest Thursday when the St. Louis Rams traded a couple lower picks to the Indianapolis Colts to get Pro Bowl running back Marshall Faulk. That leaves the Colts, who pick No. 4, without a marquee back but with a shot at Williams -- if New Orleans or some other team doesn't work a trade to grab him first. There will be the normal storylines of Draft Day: Rumors of trades, maybe real trades, players dropping down the draft boards, unheralded players shooting up the boards. Character issues. Last year, several teams shied away from Marshall receiver Randy Moss because of his shady past. He dropped to No. 21, where the Vikings picked him, and he became the NFL's offensive Rookie of the Year. "The Randy Moss thing made everyone think twice about drawing general conclusions," said Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers, "or deciding that character's more important than anything else." Some picks will be no-brainers. Some will look like they've been made without use of a brain. "Don't reach," said Colts general manager Bill Polian. "Don't reach for a player because you have a need. That's the biggest mistake you could make." This is the last draft of the '90s, a decade that began with an Illinois quarterback by the name of Jeff George being tabbed as the No.1 pick by the Indianapolis Colts. It will end, most likely, with a quarterback going No. 1 again. In between, at least for the No. 1s in this decade, it has definitely been more miss than hit. The nine No. 1s in the '90s have played a combined 43 years in the league. Only three of the selections have made a Pro Bowl, and only one of them (New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe) has been named to more than one. That's how iffy this whole draft deal can be.
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