Bottom of the Bird Cage 4/21

It’s the 111^th day of the year.

It was on April 21, 1836 that Sam Houston led forced of the Republic of Texas to a decisive victory over Mexican General Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto near what is now LaPorte, Texas. There’s no truth to the rumor that the Texas army wore helmets with an outline of the state of Missouri on the side. Also this day in 1918, the great German fighter pilot ace Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron” was shot down and killed over Vaux sur Somme in France.

And on April 21, 1910, Mark Twain died in Redding, CT. He was 74. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, Twain became one of America’s favorite authors, especially with his characters Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. He was quite a philosopher. Here are my favorite Twainisms:

• Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read.
• The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
• Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.
• If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uniformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
• If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

From the New York Times:
Ozzie Newsome thought he was a draftnik during his Hall of Fame playing days, even interrupting a round of golf during Ken Stabler’s charity tournament one year to call back to Cleveland to ask whom the Browns were drafting that day. Then Newsome retired, and the first day of the rest of his career proved one thing: he knew a lot about playing tight end and almost nothing about the draft.

His very first day as a low-level member of the scouting department came in the spring of 1991, when the Browns, then under the rookie coach Bill Belichick, were convening their draft meetings. Newsome walked into a room filled with members of the personnel department and was stunned.

“I was overwhelmed with all of the information, how they were describing the players,” he said. “All I knew was names. It was like, ‘Whoa!’ I was really intimidated by the whole process.”

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The Ravens have done a very good job of identifying talent in the draft and then getting those players in the house and getting production out of them. The thing that has held Baltimore back for most of this decade was the quarterback position. They may have solved that last year when they picked up Joe Flacco. Now, they must start to rebuild that Ravens defense which has gotten old and lost players to free agency.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Kevin Colbert put the heat on himself and his troops in the scouting department yesterday with one bold statement. “We need for it to be a special draft,” the Steelers’ director of football operations declared.

He stated they hoped to get ultimate starters in the first three rounds, contributors in rounds four and five, and potential practice squad players in rounds six and seven and as free agents after the draft.

The chances of that occurring would seem to be long because of a twofold whammy — many scouts have declared this draft a weak one, and the Super Bowl champions select at the end of the round.

Or, perhaps that’s a good thing. The Steelers have a nice track record when they draft late. The previous time they were scheduled to draft at No. 32, they traded to move up in the first round and selected wide receiver Santonio Holmes at No. 23 in 2006. They chose Heath Miller at No. 30 in 2005. They moved up in 2003 from No. 27 to No. 16 and picked safety Troy Polamalu. They drafted guard Kendall Simmons, a long-time starter, at No. 30 in 2002. And in 1998, with the 28th pick, they drafted guard Alan Faneca.

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The Super Bowl champion is always sitting and waiting on draft day, unless they want to get busy and make a move up the board. However, that hasn’t happened much even though trading picks is now a 50 percent possibility. Of the 10 previous Super Bowl winners, seven ended up making that last pick of the first round. Two made moves up the board, as the Steelers went from 32 to 25 to draft WR Santonio Holmes in the ‘06 Draft and the Patriots jumped to 21 in the ‘02 Draft to select TE Daniel Graham. One team, the Tampa Bay Bucs in the ‘03 Draft gave up that last pick in the first round as compensation for signing head coach Jon Gruden.

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
The consensus three top quarterbacks in the National Football League draft will have to surmount their backgrounds in order to make it big. So will Nate Davis, the rifle-armed prospect from Ball State.

It’s a roll of the dice draft when it comes to quarterbacks. For the first time since 1990 it’s an all-underclassmen board atop the position, a scenario that doesn’t bode well for the half dozen clubs trying to find one. “It is a risky business,” said Eric DeCosta, director of player personnel for the Baltimore Ravens. “There’s a statistic out there that a key indicator of (quarterbacks’) success in the NFL is career starts. You want someone with experience.”

Instead, teams have been studying a pair of third-year juniors, Georgia’s Matthew Stafford and Kansas State’s Josh Freeman, and Southern California’s Mark Sanchez, another junior who spent a fourth season redshirting. Since the NFL granted admission en masse to underclassmen in 1990, 43 quarterbacks have been selected in the first round. Sixteen of the 43, or 37.2%, have been underclassmen.

Of the 16, eight could be categorized as busts: Andre Ware (1990), Todd Marinovich (’91), Tommy Maddox (’92), Heath Shuler (’94), Ryan Leaf (’98), Tim Couch (’99), Rex Grossman (’03) and Alex Smith (’05). The most successful of the 16 have been Ben Roethlisberger (’04), Drew Bledsoe (’93) and Michael Vick (’01), whose career was derailed by a 23-month prison term for dog-fighting conspiracy.

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It’s interesting that I’ve not heard or read much from Chiefs fans complaining about the team not drafting and developing a winning quarterback in the last 30-plus years. I suppose picking up Matt Cassel for a second-round pick now qualifies for those concerned about the pedigree of the team’s starting quarterback. As this story details and has history has shown us, it’s a 50-50 shot on quarterbacks in the first round. Actually, it can be broken down even more than that:

• 25 percent complete and total busts.
• 25 percent played but were not good.
• 25 percent played and were average to good.
• 25 percent ended up in the Hall of Fame or won a championship.

Based on Cassel’s performance last year, the Chiefs move to get him and out of the quarterback roulette only made sense. If the team is successful, no Chiefs fan alive will care that Cassel was drafted and developed by another team.