The top offense in the nation can be fielded with just 2 great players. Brady/Moss. Montana/Rice. Namath/Sauer. Offenses can strike anywhere, like a hot knife through butter. Defense is more like a fishing net pulled across the entire field capable of stopping the hot knife anywhere it strikes. If there's a hole in your net, a good offense will attack it all day long. And most likely win the game. It's probably equally hard to field two offensive super stars as it is to field 11 great defensive players. So I guess is depends on who your HC is as to which way the team gets built. edit: .....and which players you 'luck' into
Starting with the Ravens 2000 Super Bowl win this is the breakdown of homegrown 1st and 2nd round picks starting for the winning team by position: QB - 8 RB - 6 TE - 7 WR - 13 LT - 10 LG - 3 C - 3 RG - 4 RT - 4 DE - 10 DT - 10 ILB - 4 OLB - 12 CB - 11 S - 13 Safety and WR are the two positions picked most often early on by a team that eventually wins a Super Bowl. So the Jets had a classic choice to make in the 2014 draft with needs at both positions. One of the things that might have guided their decision is the tendency for Super Bowl winning teams to have an All-Pro or Pro Bowl safety. 12 safeties have made the Pro Bowl or All-Pro in years their team won the Super Bowl. Only 4 WR's have made the Pro Bowl in the year their team won and only one was All-Pro. That tells us something about the relative value of having a star safety or a star WR.
Noone knows yet if Pryor is the better pick over Cooks. The need was equally great on both sides of the ball. Like I said, I wanted Cooks bad and he would've been the best offensive player on this team from Day 1. That said, if Pryor pans out and is an impact playmaker on D then I think the pick of him is every bit as good as if the Jets went with Cooks. Revisit this thread at the end of their rookie years and then you have a real body of work to make a judgement.
I think the point with WR's and safeties is that the time to revisit the thread is in 3 years or so. Whatever their individual accomplishments the job is to win a Super Bowl and history tells us that if Pryor manages the feat it will be in a starring role but if Cooks does it he will likely be in a complementary role. Nonetheless, whoever wins the Super Bowl in the 3 year period will likely be the better pick even if his stats don't show it. Cooks has the slight leg up right now because he is playing with Drew Brees. Pryor on the other hand is slotting into one of those classic defensive builds that have propelled teams like the Patriots, Ravens and Giants to the heights. It'll be interesting to see who gets a trophy first.
It sure will be. Yet if neither gets a trophy in their first 3 years then I think you need to go to the next set of criteria to judge them off of. This next measurement will be how much they impact their respective teams in terms of helping them win games, get to the playoffs and how far they advance. Stats will tell part of the story as well but winning games will be the ultimate decider.
With our defensive line - getting a free range ENFORCER that can generate turnovers can make us very dangerous. I think I would take that over a receiver in a run first offense.
The evidence suggests that teams drafting WR's early and winning Super Bowls are either getting a good complementary receiver out of the deal, who makes the team collectively harder to cover, or they're trying to get a specific resource for a great QB. The Colts did both with their pick of Reggie Wayne in 2001. They made Marvin Harrison harder to cover because he now had a guy with #1 capabilities opposite him. They also got a great resource for a great QB they already had under contract. Marvin Harrison, who was one of the #1's in the study watched his team languish for several years after they picked him. Then they got Peyton Manning up to speed in 1999 and the great WR pick of 4 years earlier suddenly became a hit. If Calvin Johnson had been followed up by a great QB pick similar things would likely be happening now.
What about who was the better, more dominant player in college? Doesn't that count for anything on draft day?
Like I have said, it's not about how they will end up performing. Cooks may very well be the better player. I am saying that Idzik addressed the right position with that pick and made the safer bet. A good safety is hard to come by...WR steals can be found in later rounds. You can always bring up Calvin Johnson/Dez as examples against my argument, but I wasn't talking about those type of players. Brandin Cooks is nowhere near close to being like those guys. The chances Brandin Cooks could help this team more than Calvin Pryor are slimmer in my opinion. WRs aren't as involved since most of the time they are trying to get open. They get the ball a couple times a game if they're lucky. Impact and instinctual guys like Calvin Pryor are relevant every single play that they are in. That's just the nature of the position.
Please don't put Pryor's name in the same sentence as those guys. They've proven their worth. It's just not fair to expect a rookie to live up to those lofty expectations. Let's see what he can do against the pros before we anoint him "the next big thing." One other thing that those guys have that Pryor doesn't have. Great cornerbacks to work off from. I suspect Pryor will be making a lot of mistakes, trying to compensate for his teammates' shortcomings.
Noone knows if Idzik made the better or safer pick yet, that's the whole point of my post. It doesn't mean jacksquat if Pryor is the safer pick because of the position he plays. You can make that straw man argument about any position on the field. At the end of the day it comes down to one thing....Production. If Cooks blows it out and has a great rookie year and Pryor is just average or injury prone and doesn't see the field then guess what? It was a shitty pick by Idzik. That's reality. You're talking about strategy and not dealing in what they have done on the field. This whole argument will be answered once the real games begin. And Safety steals can be found in the later rounds too. Bob Sanders was an All-Pro and he wasn't drafted in the first. Same goes for any position. It's not about if it was the right pick or not. It's about what that pick does once the season begins. Brandin Cooks is a beast. That was well known coming into this past draft and he's done nothing to change that based on early reports out of Saints camp. If you want to get really technical about this, Cooks has outperformed Pryor to this point of their careers. So Cooks to this point would have been the safer pick. I don't care what offense he's in or what team he's on, he has produced and that's the major criteria for measuring a guy's impact on his team. The hole at WR was equally as big as CB coming into last draft. Idzik chose to go defense and no surprise there based on drafts under Rex. Now Pryor has to prove Idzik right.
Of course that is one of the criteria involved. If a scouting department and FO doesn't take this into account as part of their draft process then they're just blind or delusional. Production is the number one criteria. Like I said below, this question will get answered fairly quickly once the real games begin. Anyone can hide behind excuses like this player is a better fit for their system or that position is harder to come by. Those are both secondary to what a player does on the field.
I liked the Pryor pick but at the same time we haven't seen him play yet,its way to early to make this argument
I'd gone with Cooks. And I'm not just saying this because he has looked awesome in camp. The game has changed and rule changes are turning out to be very favorable towards smaller, speedy receivers like Cooks and not so favorable towards hard hitting safeties. All this stuff about the past doesn't mean anything anymore because the game is much different than it was even 5 years ago. Even if Pryor pans out and is awesome back there, he's going to have a problem with penalties. I don't think you should invest in hard hitting safeties in a league where virtually any contact in the secondary now, pre or post catch, results in a 15 yard penalty. I honestly think they have the right idea with a guy like Antonio Allen back there. He is the finesse coverage safety that will be more effective and more common going into the future of this league. Cooks is a very polished receiver as well. He would've been a great complement to Decker and his abilities to run after the catch would've been nice to have on this team.
Sean Payton, a guy with more credibility than Rex Ryan or Idzik (or any of us) when it comes to how to run a successful NFL offense, apparently thinks differently. Our salary-cap manager pretending to be a GM was staring for 16 games at an impotent offense entirely devoid of playmakers that, simply put, could not score points. So what does he do? He spends 2 of his first 3 picks on defensive players, 1 of which might be good while overdrafting in the 3rd round a kid he probably could have landed in the 6th round who, due to a serious shoulder injury, was able to put together all of 2 games of senior year tape and is now done for the year and if by some good fortune recovers in time for 2015 will not have stepped on to the field for meaningful action in 2 calendar years. In the process he passes on a legit playmaker in Brandin Cooks and a freakish talent like Kelvin Benjamin. The offensive player in round 2 he does choose is a plodding stiff who racked up meaningless catches and yardage in a paint-by-numbers spread offense which threw the ball 50 times a game and in which he was often left completely uncovered to run through swaths of open grass. Idzik wants to be some kind of Seattle East, to be cheap with Woody Johnson's infinite supply of fiat cash, and to do some things to make his defensive-side-of-the-ball-obsessed coach happy. Other than that, he has no clue what he's doing. He certainly does not know how to identify talent. And I don't want to hear about Milliner or Sheldon Richardson. By the time Idzik was hired, all the hay was already in the barn for the 2013 draft. The scouting and prep work had all been done, and as Idzik himself admitted, he was spending most of his time in the building just getting acclimated. This time around, he personally scouted his pets Pryor and Amaro, attending their games and even going so far as to make multiple visits with them. Pryor and Amaro, at least, were his hand-picked guys. I'm reserving judgment on Pryor. (Hey, let's hope turns out to be the next Ronnie Lott.) But I was never impressed with Amaro before the draft, and nothing's changed. In my opinion the Jets would be better off promoting a scout who evidently has some real chops like Jeff Bauer (as opposed to Teflon Terry Bradway) to the GM seat and letting guys like Idzik (and Tannenbaum, before he got promoted and then went on to violate all reason and the principles he had espoused previously) do what they do best, which is manage finances.
The NFL changed so much that kam chancellor didn't had no positive influence in the outcome of the superbowl
