Alabama Football: Some things about the NFL Draft make no sense
By Ronald Evans
Most Alabama Football fans love the NFL Draft. One reason is the celebration of so many former Alabama Crimson Tide players having their dreams become a reality. Another is the NFL Draft is an example of the dominance of the Alabama Football program. What Nick Saban has built is unparalleled and the Draft is one of the proofs of that claim.
The NFL Draft is a massive media event and an extended advertisement for the game of football. It is also a cash cow for media companies. The actual process is complicated enough that fans are open to an avalanche of evaluations of players and predictions of what team, will draft what player, in what round. Since the last NFL Draft, there have been untold numbers of partial or complete Mock Drafts published. The Mock Draft terrain is as fertile as the podcast landscape. There are so many mocks, some of them must be spawned solely by computers without any human intervention.
Still, when a favorite player is mentioned we are driven to soak up all the information available. That’s a heavy workload for an Alabama Football fan. The need for an occasional respite from it begs a question. Are most of the evaluations and predictions just guesses?
In a previous occupation, Ben Jones knew something about college football.
Reminder: No one knows anything about the NFL Draft.
— Ben Jones (@BW_Jones) April 21, 2021
Not you.
Not sports writers.
Not even NFL scouts, coaches, GMs.
No. One.
If you could predict with 60% accuracy whether a 1st round QB would be a bust or not, you'd have a skill worth millions of dollars. https://t.co/pb82winAJW
I have a hunch Jones might be on to something. At the least, there are a bunch of talking heads who are mistaken, when they claim to know what will occur in an NFL Draft and how the players selected will do in their NFL careers.
To convince me otherwise, I need some questions answered.
- How can it be that Mac Jones is over-valued because he was surrounded by so many great Alabama Football offensive players …. and at the same time … DeVonta Smith is too small; Najee Harris is too slow; Alex Leatherwood and Landon Dickerson are just average and Jaylen Waddle is fast but unproven by not playing against shutdown corners in college?
- If Mac Jones won the O’Brien, Unitas and Manning awards because of the Alabama Football system he played in, do no NFL teams have pro-level, offensive systems as creatively designed and meticulously executed as did the 2020 Alabama Crimson Tide?
- How is it that former Alabama Football players are too worn down by Nick Saban to last in the NFL when guys like Dont’a Hightower, Kareem Jackson, Mark Ingram, Julio Jones and many others far exceed the average length of NFL careers?
Incredulous Alabama football fans have probably heard all these claims.
Next. Saban keeps showing Tide players NFL cash. dark
Provide me with satisfactory answers to the questions and I might give more attention to the voluminous punditry. Otherwise, I’ll just wait and watch another NFL Draft when former Alabama football players make a bunch of NFL teams better.