Drafting!
By I find reading Matt Taibbi to be a deeply frustrating experience. He has enormous strengths as a writer, including a gift for metaphor. His weaknesses lay mainly in an inability (or unwillingness) to provide helpful context to the details that he supplies. These strengths and weaknesses are on glaring display here:
Unlike the NBA, where phenoms like LeBron or Kobe are spotted as young children and whose draft stock often remains more stable than that of young football players, the NFL is a sport where overpaid GMs regularly miss by a mile. They allow MVP-caliber players like Tom Brady or Terrell Davis to fall through their fingers all the way down to the bottom rounds, by which time the Mel Kipers and Todd McShays have talked themselves hoarse and millions of fans are still paying close attention, praying for aSeabiscuit-type miracle ending. It’s no coincidence that ESPN plays up draft-malpractice stories like The Brady 6 as they get closer to the event.
None of this is quite wrong, but if it’s possible to have a less informative paragraph about the contrast between NBA and NFL prospect projection without being outright false, I’d like to see it. NFL prospects are harder to project than NBA prospects for a lot of reasons, including differences in how systems interact, and in how the human body matures. Virtually none of this has anything to do with the acumen, or lack thereof, of “overpaid” NFL GMs and scouts.
Taibbi also tackles the Mariota-Winston competition, with unsatisfactory results. As far as I can tell (and I’ve been following this fairly closely) there is no human professionally associated with the NFL who cares that Winston runs a much slower 40 than Mariota. And then Taibbi tries to shoehorn the competition into a ready-made storyline:
In years past, there have been several controversies involving highly rated African American quarterbacks and draft experts. Longtime Pro Football Weekly writer Nolan Nawrocki, whose face is certainly on the Mount Rushmore of draft analysts and who is known for his Tolstoy-length, book-style draft reports, infamously blasted Newton as having a “fake smile” and for being a “con artist” who “comes off as very scripted and has a selfish, me-first makeup…”
And thus began SubtextBowl 2015. Get ready for a ton of Winston-Mariota hype chock full of loaded dog-whistle language, some of which will probably be below the belt. Winston is clearly the more gifted passer, but Mariota, a talented Hawaiian often celebrated for his consistency and quiet leadership, is already being showered with the laudatory overachiever clichés normally reserved for white wide receivers, who in the draft are always compared to Wes Welker and inevitably described as “gritty,” “hardworking,” “coachable,” “blue-collar,” “humble,” and possessing of a “high football IQ.”
Again, it’s not as if this is quite wrong; it’s just not particularly applicable to this story. The ghost that’s haunting Jameis Winston isn’t Cam Newton, it’s Johnny Manziel. It’s kind of ironic and deeply unfair that a pro-style African-American quarterback is suffering from the sins of a dual-threat white QB, but there you go. Mariota is a better fit for the stereotypical African-American dual-threat quarterback who can’t transition to the NFL, although it’s interesting that people haven’t brought up Tim Tebow more often. And for what it’s worth, all the reports on Winston that I’ve seen thus far have indicated that he performed very well in team interviews.