I don’t feel confident enough to predict what the
Browns will do with the 12th pick in the first round of the NFL draft
next week¸ and I don’t believe that anybody who was present at Phil Savage’s
press conference on Tuesday would have anything more than a guess. There are a
couple of reasons for this. As Savage pointed out, the Browns have three major
areas of needs to fill---pass rush, rush defense, and the ability to score
points.
That sounds pretty simple, and I am sure that a
blueprint for any NFL team would have those three areas at the top of their
list. But the twelfth spot is tough to predict, because there are so many
variables above them. At this point there are not obvious, clear-cut picks for
the teams above the Browns, and you can expect even more jockeying for position
on draft day.
But one thing remains clear after listening to Savage
and director of player personnel Bill Rees, and that is they don’t believe that
the purpose of this open dialogue is to send up smoke screens. Savage and Reese
talked about at least 6 or 7 players at every position, which made me believe
that all of them are on their board of around 130 players. When the draft
takes place, I am confident that if you check the notes of what was said during
the press conference, you will find every player that they took was mentioned on
Tuesday.
Half the fun of taking part in conferences like this
with the previous regimes was trying to figure out what they left out and what
they really meant when they did say something. Until this is proven otherwise I
have to assume that Savage is completely open and honest, at least as much as he
can be.
It is
quite refreshing.
Despite all of the hype surrounding the NFL draft, I
will repeat what I said a couple of weeks ago. In the best case scenario, if
this year’s draft turns out to be very successful (we won’t know for three years
or so), it still won’t be nearly have as much impact as the free agency signings
made by the Browns in this off-season. No matter which players they pick in the
first two rounds, they won’t come close to having the impact of LeCharles Bentley, Ted Washington, Willie McGinest, or Joe Jurevicius.
Times
have changed. Free agency used to be used to fill in the pieces of the
puzzle. Now, the draft serves that purpose.
Savage talked about the possibility of having Chaun Thompson playing a significant role at linebacker this year. Thompson, out of
West Texas A&M, was the second round pick of Butch Davis in 2002. That is
interesting because Savage would have never used a high pick from a player from
the Lone Star Conference.
I have never understood why players from major
conferences and high profile teams don’t get the edge just for the fact that
they played in front of 100,000 and national television audiences on a weekly
basis. Common sense would dictate that a four-year body of work, which can be
documented from year-to-year tapes, would play a bigger role than a couple of
workouts at the Senior Bowl or the NFL combine.
That may not be the case at all times, but it sure
seems that a guy from Ohio State, Michigan, or Southern Cal would be able to
adapt to the playbook and external pressures a lot easier than a guy from West
Texas A&M.
This year it is possible that there could be six or
seven Southern Cal players taken in the first round. The wild card is running
LenDale White, the all-time leading scorer in school history (quite a remarkable
feat), who shared the ball with Reggie Bush. According to Rees and Savage, if
you can just make sure he can get to the game at the right time, you’d have a
heck of a player. That is about the most negative thing that anybody heard
about any player during the press conference.
White
could go anywhere from the tenth pick through the last pick of the first
round. Variables like White, and trades are reasons that predicting the
entire first round is almost as tough as picking the NCAA basketball
tournament.
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Les Levine is the host of 'More Sports & Les Levine',
which can be seen M-F from
6-7pm and 11-midnight on Adelphia Channel 15 in northeast Ohio,
and ‘Cleveland Rants’ is seen and heard after Indians games on
FSN Ohio
and WKNR. Les is
also the lead Sunday columnist in the Lake County News-Herald and Lorain Journal.
E-mail
msandll@aol.com or
www.leslevine.com |