Mackenzie - Congrats on your excellent call re Dion Jordan. I was hoping for the best but you were correct. Two questions:
(a) What was it about Dion that made you so certain that he was a likely bust? You seemed certain right from the start.
(b) Jeff Ireland was actually quite conservative in his drafting for Miami over the years - he rarely moved up, he avoided playmaking divas, etc, but he bet big on Dion. Does this mean that Jeff was too enamoured with his metrics and wasn't looking at the actually college performances?
(a) If a guy who is picked in the top 10 is "raw" he needs a pretty good excuse for his lack of polish. Any of the following will suffice:
1. Born in a foreign country and has had limited exposure to football, <4 years (Ezekiel Ansah, Margus Hunt)
2. Played some JUCO, had one year or less of FBS football caliber coaching prior to being drafted (JPP, Cordarrelle Patterson)
3. Must have taken time off to play some other sport only to come back to football 5 years since he had last played football in high school (Jimmy Graham)
4. Maybe a position change, but it better be later on in your college career (Ryan Tannehill, Braxton Miller).
If you're a redshirt sophomore, i.e., Greg Robinson, that kinda counts, although I'm still nervous. In any case, if you've been playing football since you were a kid and your fundamentals are still crap, you either work really hard and never make any improvement (Manuel, E.J.), or you don't work hard (Gholston, Vernon). Jordan fell into one of these categories, in some ways category 1 is worse than category 2, I didn't know him personally and couldn't evaluate his work ethic, but it didn't even matter, he's been playing football for far too long to have such poor fundamentals. I've only heard of one guy who had great physical tools but was bad in college because he was really raw and didn't have a legitimate excuse for being raw who turned into a good NFL player. I think his name was Cameron Wake.
(b) I don't know what was going through Jeff's head. But part of me suspects Jordan was kinda a product of the media. I remember, prior to his senior season, no one had him as a first round pick. NFLDraftScout, ESPN, Bleacher Report, you name it, all had him in the mid 2nd to early 4th round. And he made no discernible improvement and somehow rocketed into the top 5. I think what happened is that some scout, probably one who works for the Patriots, who had Dion Jordan in the 3rd round, called Todd McShay on the phone and said "Dion Jordan is in the top 5 of my draft board." And he called a few other outlets. Maybe it wasn't just one scout, maybe it was a GM (my money is on Ozzie Newsome), maybe it was multiple scouts or a combination of scouts and GMs working for different, smarter teams who all started hyping up Jordan to anyone who works in the media whose job title features the word "analyst" somewhere. And the media bought the hype. So did Jeff Ireland. Jordan was the perfect type of prospect to fool the media because he legitimately had an incredible physical skill set that he did not know how to use. And the media drueled when looking at his 40 yard dash time and his height, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, you've got Jaime Collins, who is 2lbs heavier than Jordan, runs a 4.64 40 compared to Jordan's 4.60, has arms as long as Jordan's, and set an NFL record for best vertical jump at the combine for linebackers (a 41.5 inch vertical at 250lbs. Absolutely ridiculous), and, oh, wait, he was actually really productive at the college level. Granted, he played for Southern Miss, but still, he was awesome. Ireland bought the hype. Belicheck bought Collins, and wow, he's a good player.
