Whitner in rare company

[Scraps]

Using that logic it makes just as much sense to say we should have taken Marques Colston at #8, and he was selected 4 picks before the draft ended.

 

Second guessing a pick based on the fact that in hindsight a whole season later you think someone else would have been a better pick is pointless. We got a guy who looks like he'll be a good player at an important position in our defense and at a spot that was a position of need for us. I'll watch him develop, and judge him after 3-4 years in the league, just as I would any other 1st round pick.

 

There were people criticizing this pick the moment it was made. There were people arguing for Ngata before the draft. It is not so much hindsight as you make it out to be.

[Bill from NYC]

We got a guy who looks like he'll be a good player at an important position in our defense and at a spot that was a position of need for us. I'll watch him develop, and judge him after 3-4 years in the league, just as I would any other 1st round pick.

 

Not to speak for anyone else, but I don't think that anyone would disagree with the above.

 

Going into the 06 draft, the Bills had multiple needs. They spent most of their most vital resources on the secondary, and it looks as if doing so could very possibly continue in 07, despite a 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 2 UFAs.

 

Here is a scenario to consider.....take the best secondary players of all time and put them on the Bills. Now, take the best OL of all time and put them on the Bills. Which team do you think would produce the most wins?

 

Levy saw fit to not only to do the above, but to also "promise" Nate that he wouldn't apply the franchise tag in 07, which serves to further the probablity of prolonging our ride on the "draft and lose 1st round corners carousel.

 

Levy did seem to do pretty well with his day 2 picks, and I am fond of the coaches he has hired so far, but I fail to understand why he is beyond reproach. (NOT aimed at you, just speaking in general!!!)

[BuffOrange]

It bothers me that so many people talk about how great our draft was, and use Whitner in the argument. You can argue for a lot of players making this a good draft, but Whitner is not one of them (at least for now).

 

Since 1990 170 players have been selected in the top ten picks of the NFL draft. Of the 170 players 7 played either safety position in college. That’s 4.1% of all the top ten picks in the last 17 years. The list includes Mark Carrier, Troy Vincent, Roy Williams, Eric Turner, Sean Taylor, and this years additions in Michael Huff and Whitner. The first four guys on the list have played in a combined 13 pro bowls, and not a single one of them had less then two pro bowl appearances. Taylor looks like he should certainly add to that list if he keeps his head on straight.

 

The point is not that Daunte Whitner can’t become one of these guys. It’s that drafting a safety this early is VERY rare, and in the cases teams did it they found pro bowl caliber players for at least a few seasons. It seems like the barometer for Whitner is if he’s a good player he was a good pick. If I drafted a good kicker in round 1 would it be a good pick if that kicker wasn’t great? Whitner is not a good pick until he shows he can play at a pro bowl level. I’ll give him time to do that, but just by making this decision Marv got himself in an uphill battle.

 

This is of course correct.

[IDBillzFan]

This is a freaking message board. With the draft approaching this is relevant. Do you think it’s at all possible given the power of foresight we should have drafted Ngata? If even a part of you thinks that then it’s relevant that our GM did something almost no team does to bypass selecting him.

I wouldn't personalize it, Mike. I am no guru when it comes to Cover 2 defense, however it seems to me that the way this defense is being built, a 340-pound defensive tackle is too big. Plus, I'm one of those guys who never likes spending time sitting around a campfire wondering what woulda, coulda, shoulda happened if once again I were ruler of all the world.

 

Instead, I take comfort in knowing that in the first year on the job with a new coach, our pass defense...with rookies abound...was tied for seventh in allowing the least amount of throws over 20 yards. And the average of all over-20-yard completions was a paltry 26.2 yards -- the lowest in the NFL. (According to Sporting News.)

 

So I wonder...even if we did have Ngata, what good would it be if we're getting beat over the top all the time. Plus, since we're in the world of make-believe, you lose Troy Vincent to injury, have no Whitner, and who is your safety now???? That's right, the guy who we'd be bitching about because we didn't take a safety with our first pick.

 

That's the beauty of hindsight and the reason I never mess with it; you can spend all day finding things that are easy to pick apart. Fish in a barrel.

[Pyrite Gal]

Not to speak for anyone else, but I don't think that anyone would disagree with the above.

 

Going into the 06 draft, the Bills had multiple needs. They spent most of their most vital resources on the secondary, and it looks as if doing so could very possibly continue in 07, despite a 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 2 UFAs.

 

Here is a scenario to consider.....take the best secondary players of all time and put them on the Bills. Now, take the best OL of all time and put them on the Bills. Which team do you think would produce the most wins?

 

Levy saw fit to not only to do the above, but to also "promise" Nate that he wouldn't apply the franchise tag in 07, which serves to further the probablity of prolonging our ride on the "draft and lose 1st round corners carousel.

 

Levy did seem to do pretty well with his day 2 picks, and I am fond of the coaches he has hired so far, but I fail to understand why he is beyond reproach. (NOT aimed at you, just speaking in general!!!)

Speaking generally, I do not think anyone says that Marv is above reproach on this or that the 06 draft selections were perfect. I think classifying praise for the Marv led teams work in this extreme way is an incorrect reading of this praise and misses the point of the posts.

 

I say this as one who is definitely impressed by the results achieved by the Bills with the 06 draft. I think the facts of assessment of this draft are these:

 

1. FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT AND CAPITALIZED TO EMPHASIZE ITS IMPORT OF THIS FINDING, ITS TOO EARLY TO MAKE A REAL CONCLUSION AND SO FAR ITS SIMPLY SO GOOD BUT WE WILL SEE.

 

2. Despite only 1 of the 1st three picks where solid or immediate starters are usually found being what I would call a solid starter (which I define as they started all of their games and are probable starters in 07 pending off-season acquisitions) this draft worked out well for the Bills because this draft produced at least 3 players and actually likely 4 positions with solid starters. Whitner and Simpson not only started a majority of games but likely unless some unfortunate injury occurs will be our starting safety duo for years. Quite frankly if before a draft occurred your crystal ball told me that if I stuck with my current GM and braintrust, that their choices in 7 rounds would yield two safeties that would start for me for years and the rest busts or journeymen and instead I could take some other GM assigned to me at random from the league's braintrust, I'd stick with what I had as getting two solid starters and some role players strikes me as not a bad outcome though certainly not the best ever. The interesting thing is that actually the Bills appear on track to even better than that. Yeah the first day results could have produced more, but the 2nd day produced so much that simply focusing on what could have been better and ignoring or downgrading what actually produced well from the entire draft comes off as mostly whining about the glass being 1/4 empty rather than noting it is 3/4 full.

 

3. Further, the most impressive thing about us getting 3 solid starter players (Whitner and Simpson cannot conclusively be called good players after a mere one season but the early tea leaves are pretty good and though the jury is way out on Pennington he appears to almost certainly be the starter at RT with the Bills looking to upgrade with new likely OL starters being sought at G rather than at T- the final solid starter is the DT position where though Williams has had this job from Day 1 of 06 our run problems make getting a new starter at DT a real possibility, yet if this occurs while it may be from drafting a player like Okoye it also may simply be through the braintrust producing more output from draftee McCargo, so pending this off-season I think you can count the 06 draft as producing 3-4 solid starters but we digress) is that a key point is that these solid starters did not simply gain these roles because the 05 guys they replaced were so bad or cap casualties, but the 06 team was actually significantly better than the 05 team.

 

The bottomline to me is that what do folks really have expected the Bills to produce from the 06 draft in order for them to have felt good about it? Clearly the real results achieved (all 9 players chosen made the regular roster as it is not unusual to have at least 1 guy make the PS or even get cut outright, 7 of the 9 contribute to this team by getting game starts in 06, 4 of the 9 start a majority of the games) and again most important is that all of this contribution from the 06 draftees was to a team which significantly improved in results over the year before.

 

Marv is far from beyond reproach as the 06 team did not even make the playoffs, but saying that the results produced by this draft were good or even very good is not the same thing as saying he was perfect.

 

I think folks trying to depict pleasure as gushing or trying to depict saying he was very good as claiming he was perfect are the ones being extreme here.

 

The Bills produced very well from the 06 draft and we hope and demand they not only do as well in the 07 draft, but since the draft is not the only way and in many cases not even the lead way you produce a winner, they need to do even better this year. If they go deep in the playoffs then I will gush.