Mickey

It is not either-or. You need both. And the plain fact is that good lineman are easier to find than good quarterbacks. So if you have an opportunity to get a QB, you take it. Buddy said it best, the teams that have a good QB are winning and the ones that don't, aren't. Once in a blue a team is so good elsewhere that all they need is a caretaker QB but that is rare indeed. This is why it is so frustrating to lose good players, you just end up with too many holes to fill. I like Clausen and though I think the odds are long that he will still be there when we are on the clock, if he is I'll have no problem taking him. I could live with the team thinking that he isn't the guy just as well but in my view, they'd be pulling another Oher if they were lucky enough for Clausen to still be there at 9 and then pass on him. If Clausen is there, it will likely be because another OT was taken instead ahead of us. I can't see using the 9th pick in the draft for the 4th or 5th best OT with the second best, maybe even the best QB in the draft still on the board.

Do you think Trent does not have drive, the desire to win or a good work ethic? How about Fitz? None of that good guy crap matters if you don't have the talent to go with it. Tebow's running was a huge part of his game, without it, he isn't half the QB he was in college. In the pros, with 4.7+ speed, he isn't going to have that club in the bag anymore. Never ran a pro style offense, awful mecahnics and so on. Another three years down the tubes before we declare the experiment a flop and draft a real QB. I am hoping the Bills are throwing up smoke on Clausen and Tebow, hoping that Clausen falls to them.

1 year and 14 days from the end of the Tebow era.

Agreed. the opportunity to land a QB like Clausen doesn't come around all that often. We just missed out on Rothlesburger for example. I don't think we can let that chance slip by hoping that we will get a guy next year. Maybe we win 7 games in 2010 and are once again picking too late to land a quality prospect. Solid LT's are hard to find as well but not as hard as QB's.

I like the older app, ver. 1, they called it dannywuerffel. It never really caught on though.

The 4.3 was an anecdotal comment by Jerry Rice about how fast he ran in pads in practice. Young's days in the sun were before the internet and fan obsession with the draft so there isn't the abundance of info on his particulars that we have on players today. Not only that, he signed with the USFL before the NFL draft so he wasn't on any of the lists you can still dig up for that draft. I backed off that and revised it to 4.5 as that was the closest I coudl find to an offical 40 time for him though there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that he was even faster than that. I can see why those who made the foolish comparison seized on the minutiae of Young's exact 40 time rather than address the real point, that Young was a lot faster than Tebow will ever be thus any notion that Tebow will have as much success on the ground in the NFL as did Young is unwarranted. If you can't win the argument at hand, start a new one you can win.

You and your precious "reasonableness", go away! We'll have none of that here.

Yeah, who would choose a 6 time pro bowler plus the best LT in the draft over a rookie QB? Of course he took the deal, it filled two holes on the roster instead of just one. Let's make it simple. trade = proven winner at QB, best Left Tackle in the draft no trade = possible franchise QB that will need a year or two to hit his stride, still need a left tackle And from this you deduce that JC must suck? Brilliant.

His fellow players elected him captain. He played hurt and brought his team back in the 4th plenty of times. He accumulated great numbers playing for a fairly mediocre team against top competition under the biggest microscope in college football. This guy is no Ryan Leaf. By comparison, Leaf played in relative obscurity until he rocketed up the draft boards in his senior year.

I think you need both in this league, a good line and a good QB. Sure, every once in a blue a team rises with a caretaker QB but those are exceptions, not the rule. I think it is a lot easier to find a talented lineman overlooked in the draft than a QB. There is a huge amount of focus on QB's, it is pretty tough for a good player to get entirely overlooked. It is also a position that features individual skill. A good QB can shine through even on a bad team. Take Peyton Manning's rookie year. The Colts were terrible that year, just putrid. Even so, it was clear they had their franchise guy. There are plenty of examples of later round QB's being successful as well but playing the odds, I would rather have to find a decent right tackle in the 6th round or free agency than a franchise QB. Heck, each team in the league had at least 2 starting tackles, that's over 60 guys. Teams are lucky to have even one legit starting QB. We don't have one. How many legit starters at QB are out there, 20, 25?

A bad quarterback, a QB who is not starting material, is a waste at any price, I don't care if its a 7th round pick, its still a waste. If you lose a game because your QB stinks, would it really be of comfort to say, "well at least we only gave up a 5th rounder for him..."? Its not as if Campbell is an unknown quantity. He has had an opportunity to show he could be a productive starter and he hasn't done it. Maybe you think he has some talent that just hasn't come out yet and if so, I could understand taking a gamble on him but I just don't think that is the case. The point is to get a QB that can win games. As fans, we get a too caught up in assessing personnel based on what is essentially an exercise in economy. Using that criteria, trading a 6th round pick for a 5th round pick always makes sense. Based on that criteria, unloading a CB who is a B level player who is demading a B+ level salary and replacing him with a C level CB who is drawing a D level salary makes sense. You trade a guy asking more than he is worth and start a guy who is playing better than his salary. Brilliant, right? But you lose games. You lose games. And you end up scratching your head because going back over it, all the presonnel moves you made seemed to make perfect sense. You didn't overpay anyone and you got some guys to play over their heads. But even so, you lost a lot of games. Winning is the goal, not economy. Sometimes those things are related, sometimes they are not.

Wow, looks like Clausen is ours...if we want him. I would have no problem with that pick provided the brain trust thinks he has a reasonable chance of being the guy. I sure don't like the idea of taking the 4th or 5th best OT at 9. Very interesting.

Because what would Jerry Rice know about how fast Steve Young is? The point I was making is that Young was way faster than Tebow. If you disagree, please, prove me wrong, that Young, listed at 4.5, apart from Rice's anecdotal comment about what he did in practice, is not significantly faster than Tebow who runs a 4.72 and, in the Senior bowl, couldn't get out of his own way.

I don't hate Tebow, I just hate his 40 time. Do you always react this way when someone disagrees with you? Did I call you stupid? Did I personally attack you? Most listings have Young running a 4.5 but Rice once claimed he ran a 4.35 in practice, in pads. Point is, Young is way faster than Tebow and if you want to claim otherwise, find me a link or someone, anyone who would agree with you that Tebow has speed anywhere near what Steve Young had in his prime. Or are you too busy serving as an example of the exact overbearing, over the top, rude, viscious, childish and reactionary posting that makes having a civil discussion with fellow fans a virtual impossibility at TBD? A model of civility you are not.

Young ran a 4.3 40 in pads. Tebow runs a 4.72 in shorts. There is no comparison.

You make it sound as if he played on a crappy team that only won because of his magical power to will a team to victory. Cut the whiny melodrama. He played on a dominant team and fit their scheme perfectly, a scheme by the way that would never work in the pros. A huge chunk of his game was running the football, that isn't going to happen in the NFL. There are plenty of QB's out there who don't have to undergo major fixes just to be draftable above the 5th round. If Gailey can do well with mediocre QB's, imagine what he could do with a good QB. The last thing a team that has been this bad for this long needs to do is to gamble by picking the most controversial QB prospect in the last 10 years a round earlier than even his biggest fans think he'll be taken.

I agree, we need to pass on this guy.

I do not like Tebow, I do not, I do not. I would not draft him, I would not, I would not. I would not draft him in the first, I would not draft him in the second or the first, I would not draft him in the third, second or first. I would not draft him to play QB, I would not draft him to play RB. I would not draft him on the first day, I would not draft him any day.

That only works if we have a very crappy year, crappy enough to be picking high enough to get Locker or Mallett.

In 2004 the top passer rating Stefan Lefors. In 2005 it was Rudy Carpenter. In 2006 it was Colt Brennan. In 2007 it was Sam Bradford. In 2008 it was Sam Bradford again. In 2009, Clausen was third, a whopping 2.8 percentage points behind Tebow. Of course, Clausen wasn't playing for a national championship caliber team. Lefors is playing for the Winninpeg Blue Bombers. A not unlikely destination, eventually, for Tebow.

Fiedler and Thigpen sucked. Stewart had two good years and lots of bad ones. He lost his job to Tommy Maddox. Is that what you are hoping for us, a guy who might, maybe, be as good as Jay Fiedler? Nothing is for sure in the draft but there are a lot less riskier picks then Tebow who, so far, crapped out so bad at the Senior Bowl that he chickened out of throwing at the combine. Not exactly proving the skeptics wrong is he?

Which is why he won't be there at 9, unfortunately. This is another year where we are drafting just a pick or two too late to get the player we need.

But then he'll be accused of orchestrating a government take over of professional football in furtherance of his nefarious socialist plot to eradicate all human life on the planet.

Over the years I have seen guys like this come and go by the dozen, great college careers playing for stellar programs that simply don't have NFL level skills. All those accolades prove only that he was a good player on a good team. I have seen him play and I'm sorry but I just don't see the skill. A lot of the plays he made were with his feet, he is built almost like a fullback, but that skill is going to be useless in the NFL. Take that away from him and he becomes very average. For a team with an established starter with relatively few holes on the roster, this guy would be worth a gamble and the development time to basically rework his mechanics from the ground up. But for a team like the Bills, a team that can't possibly afford yet another QB disaster, that has a roster full of holes? Why on earth would we take gamble on a guy like that? Tell me why the risks with Tebow are less than with Clausen, McCoy or LeFevour? Tell me why he would be more of a sure thing in the second round than the OT's, LB's, WR's, C's and DT's that will be there early in the second? And really, I don't want to hear that he is just such a gosh darn nice guy. That doesn't get it done in the NFL. Trent is a nice guy, dedicated, disciplined, etc. Heck, even JP worked his butt off. It didn't matter. I don't care if he won the "Best Human in the World Award" for 4 straight years. If he can't read a defense or look off a corner he is going to fail in the NFL.

Jim Kelly was very highly thought of going in to the 1983 draft, far more so than Tebow. Who is touting him other than his fans around here? Everything I hear is that he is a nice guy but won't make it in the pros. Its always a shame to see a guy with a great college career run up against the limit of his abilities and I hope he is the exception. The risk of a bust are just too high with this guy.