It is that time of year once again when the NFL holds their legal slave auction they call "The College Draft". This is when all 32 teams pick the fastest and strongest of the estimated 2.8 million college football players around the world in seven rounds.
Each team immediately, after draft weekend, holds a press conference where they both try to explain their head scratching pick to the assembled media, while at the same time telling the same media how this might just be the best draft of all time for them, and that they absolutely love every guy the selected, even the one with a drinking problem and 46 separate assault charges against him.
Most football people will tell you that you really can't judge a draft until at least five years has gone by. This is primarily to take the focus off their current years horrible selections knowing that nobody is going to look back in five years and write about it.
Clearly they never met me.
I decided to do just that today and what a trip down memory lane it turned out to be. For those without a calculator handy, five years ago was the 2017 draft and let's take a looky loo at who the Bears selected.
The Bears traded up, giving away draft pick they needn't give away because absolutely nobody was going to pick Mitch Trubisky before the Bears turn came up. Here he is taking too much time to release the ball before he wildly overthrows it to a receiver running the wrong route anyway. This draft pick put the Bears about seven years behind the rest of the league as we continue to be punished for having another bad GM. Grade F---.
Things got better in the second round when the beloved selected, from Ashland College, the tight end they didn't need if they had just kept Greg Olsen. His name is, give me a second here, Adam Shaheen. Wasting more draft picks they traded a 2021 7th round pick to select him. Good news, they traded him in real life before his pick was used, in 2020. Grade F.
Their first fourth round selection wasn't Eddie Jackson from The Food Network, or Eddie Jackson from Queensryche, but Eddie Jackson from Alabama. He turned out to be the golden nugget of this draft. 10 interceptions, two sacks, 252 tackles in 76 games, and a two time Pro Bowl selection. Maybe the Bears should only draft in the fourth round because their other fourth rounder was...
...Tarik Cohen from North Carolina A&T. He had one and a half decent years before he was injured and released this past March. As it is so Bears, he was injured one week after signing a three year extension and never played another game. Grade B+ and C.
Speaking of never playing a game, the final selection for the Bears in 2017 was the can't miss guard from Kutztown College, the great Jordan Morgan. Here he is on the sideline wondering what he is going to do to earn a living tomorrow when he is cut. Grade INC.
Wow! What a draft put together by the previous Ryan pretending to be a GM. We all knew this was a total clusterfuck when he traded draft choices for a guy literally nobody else wanted. Then to prove how smart he was, he picks four other guys from colleges nobody ever heard of and smugly sneers at the press when they dare to question his sanity.
I may not make it five more years because my sports teams keep taking ten years off my life every week so in case I'm not around would somebody please check on this years picks for me to make sure it wasn't as bad as 2017?