On to the Goal

Congrats to former Florida tight end Cornelius Ingram who signed a four-year $1.9 million contract with the Philadelphia Eagles. Ingram, who received a $1830,000 signing bonus, can now focus on compeating to be the Iggles’ number-two tight end.

That’s a happy ending to what was initially a sad story. I will always wonder what could have been for the 2008 Gators with Ingram on the field — I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of “historical greatness” — but I’ll settle for a national championship and a pro contract for C.I. Well done, sir.

Photo via the Houston Chronicle

Cartoon via XKCD

The 2009 NFL Draft has come and gone, and the consensus opinion seems to be that it was pretty much a disappointment for the Gators. I suppose that’s a natural reaction when the University of Connectiuct has more players selected on the draft’s first day (four) than Florida did in all seven rounds (three). Here’s the complete list of Gators who were drafted or signed a free agent deal:

• WR Percy Harvin – Round 1, 22 overall, Vikings
• WR Louis Murphy – Round 4, 124 overall, Raiders
• TE Cornelius Ingram – Round 5, 153 overall, Eagles
• ———————————————————–
• OT Jason Watkins – Undrafted free agent, Texans
• OT Phil Trautwein – UFA, Rams
• RB Kestahn Moore – UFA, Broncos
• LS James Smith – UFA, Bengals

Upon closer inspection, that list isn’t quite as much of a downer as it appears to be. The only free agent who was considered a probable draftee was Watkins, and he will be given about the same opportunity to make a roster as a seventh-round pick would. The same goes for the other free agents. Harvin and Ingram both could have been taken higher as well, but teams had logical concerns – injuries for both, off-the-field concerns for Harvin – that may have caused them to pass.

The one curiosity is Murphy, whose size (6’2”, 203) and speed (4.43 in the 40, ninth-best among receivers at the NFL Combine) could have made him a second- or third-round pick. So what happened? His NFL Combine profile did express were some concerns about his hands, but I can’t for the life of me remember him dropping an inordinate amount of passes and the Gainesville Sun reported that he had no drops at his Pro Day workout.

So are there any other explanations? Mel Kiper Jr.: Your thoughts?

“Travis Taylor, Taylor Jacobs, Chad Jackson, Reidel Anthony: the list goes on and on and on. Florida receivers have struggled in the NFL and I think guys are afraid of people coming out of the program,” Kiper said.

Oh, right. The whole “Gator wide receivers don’t succeed in the NFL” thing again.

It’s tough to say whether this long-held belief had any impact on Murphy’s draft stock (or Harvin’s for that matter). Sometimes guys just drop for no apparent reason. But Kiper’s comments indicate that the idea is given at least some credence in NFL front offices. And that’s at least somewhat of an issue for Florida, if for no other reason than it’s potential to be used as a negative recruiting tool (as Joe Goodman mentioned).

It’s unfortunate, then, that the belief has such a strong basis in reality. The following chart from an article on Cold Hard Football Facts details every Gator receiver drafted between 1991 and 2008:

Even if we remove players with less than two years of experience and those selected in rounds four through seven (later rounds are hardly the realm of guaranteed success), we’re left with 11 players. Of those, it’s fair to say that only Darrell Jackson has met or exceeded expectations. Please note that when I say “met or exceeded expectations,” I mean that the player was considered a success relative to where he was drafted. For instance, Ike Hilliard was a good pro, but didn’t quite live up to the expectations of the seventh overall pick in the first round.

So in roughly two decades, no fewer than 10 Florida receivers have been considered high-round disappointments by the pro football world. But why do Florida receivers struggle so? Theories abound. Cold Hard Football Facts again:

“But the long, long list of busts and underachievers out of the same school at the same position reeks of a systemic problem. To put it another way: Florida receivers are simply not as good as they seem when they’re burning up SEC defenses. Florida receivers are consistently paired with top college quarterbacks, for example. They also play on teams filled by blue-chip performers at virtually every other position year after year. This cozy situations [sic] certainly help their production.”

Well, now might be a good time to mention that correlation does not imply causation. But frankly, I think the notion that NFL teams overvalue Gator wide receivers because they play on talented college offenses is ridiculous. If this was truly a driving factor, we should be able to see a similar ratio of busts coming out of other schools with top talent. But if we take into account all receivers selected in the first three rounds from 1991 to 2008, we can see plenty of elite programs that have churned out players with at least one Pro Bowl appearance. Florida, for the record, has produced none:

• - Miami: Andre Johnson, Santana Moss, Reggie Wayne
• - Florida State: Anquan Boldin, Javon Walker, Laverneus Coles
• - Michigan: Braylon Edwards, Amani Toomer
• - Ohio State: Terry Glenn, David Boston

I also find the idea of a “systemic problem” to be a bit of a stretch. Florida has had three different coaches since 1991, meaning that the “system” has changed at least that many times. A player’s experience and training is likely to be completely different under Meyer than it was under his predecessors. In short, anything that happened before 2005 has little relevance to the present. Of those 10 “busts” listed above, only one, Chad Jackson, played so much as a snap for Meyer. Harvin and Murphy are the first two Meyer recruits to be drafted at receiver.

In fact, if there is any kind of systemic issue, it may reside with Spurrier. Nine out of the 10 aforementioned busts were recruited and played the majority of their careers during his tenure. That’s not to say there’s a problem with Steve Spurrier. To paraphrase a refrain often recited by Chris at Smart Football, it’s a college coach’s job to win college football games, not to turn out great pros. And very few people were better at winning college football games than Spurrier (at Florida, at least). But for whatever reason – be it technique, coaching or over-valuation – SOS never did produce a top-flight NFL wideout.

None of that has a damn thing to do with Louis Murphy, however. Maybe I live in a dream world, but I’d like to think that NFL teams base their evaluations on an individual player’s merits as opposed to the reputation of other players from his college. The New York Giants didn’t seem to have a problem drafting Ramses Barden of Cal Poly in the third round, a full 40 picks ahead of Murphy, despite the fact that the school has produced just one other draft pick at receiver since 1991.

Maybe Barden will be a great pro, and maybe Murphy fell for a good reason, or maybe it was no reason at all. But until he — or Harvin or Caldwell or somebody — has some NFL success, the perception that Gator receivers don’t make good pros will persist.

Photo via Gainesville Sun

For more than a week, we’ve been subjected to ultra-sketchy reports (which deserve no link) indicating that several high-profile entrants into this year’s NFL Draft may have failed drug tests at the combine. One by one, these reports were denied and debunked. By the start of this week, every player’s name had been cleared to some extent. Except for one.

Today, a legitimate news-gathering organization finally went there: Percy Harvin tested positive for marijuana at the NFL Combine. The sources are still anonymous and therefore the word is still “unofficial” in the strictest sense of the word, but based on the number of quality outlets now reporting this news and the conspicuous lack of denial from anyone associated with Harvin, there seems to be little reason for doubt

Well then. There’s no positive way to spin this, as it’s pretty much bad news for everyone involved. But it does raise two questions: How does this impact Harvin’s draft stock? And what effect, if any, does it have on his legacy as a Florida Gator? To me, the answers to each could not be more different.

The NFL is a risky business. Investors (teams, owners) and their brokers (GMs, coaches) are making multi-million dollar bets on highly volatile commodities (players) whose success is dependent on dozens of uncontrollable variables (injury, chemistry and just plain old human free will). In short, past performance is very much not an indicator of future success.

But NFL teams obsess over past performance. Every little detail of a player’s life on and off the field is considered — from 40 times and college statistics to rumors about whether a player was involved in a parking-lot scuffle back in high school. Nothing is off-limits to over-analysis. Needless to say, flunking a weed test two months before the draft is, uh, not so good.

So Harvin will likely suffer from this failed test in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Once thought of as a mid-first round pick, Harvin had already slipped to No. 30 according to Mel Kiper, and that was before the FoxSports.com report. Many suspect he could slip out of the first round entirely. Comprehensive information on rookie salaries is surprisingly hard to come by, but according to USA Today, the No. 30 pick in 2007, wide receiver Craig Davis, made $3.33 million in bonuses paid out in the first year. The No. 51 overall pick from that year, wide receiver Steve Smith (the USC one) made just $1.61 million in bonus money.

Harvin’s reputation will also likely suffer long after draft day has passed. Any good he does on the field will be immediately qualified with a “Yeah, but…” from commentators, pundits, and perhaps most importantly, fans. Fairly or not, the “troubled” adjective will follow him for his first few years of pro football, at a minimum. (Side note: At least he wasn’t Brandon Tate, who also failed a mandatory piss test at the Combine. The same Combine where he didn’t work out at all due to injury and thus the same Combine that he could have just skipped entirely, drug test and all.)

For PR reasons alone, image-conscious NFL teams are well within their right to be nervous about selecting Harvin. But as a Gator fan, I don’t think this changes Harvin’s Florida legacy one bit.

Draft expert Todd McShay recently said the star receiver lives in “Percy Harvin World.” I’ll borrow from Joe Goodman here: What does that even mean? That he was arrogant and self-absorbed? This may come as a surprise, but many players, particularly the great ones, are selfish jerks. If it turns out that Percy Harvin falls into this category, he’d be just like pretty much everyone except Ray Allen. Was there behind-the-scenes drama during his Florida tenure? Message board rumors range from the mundane (posse of sketchy high school friends) to the outrageous (punched a Gator assistant coach). But remember the operative word here — rumors. To my knowledge, not one individual who was “there” has made a public utterance against Harvin’s character. (And someone who was “there” does not include a random guy who talked to the father of a walk-on placekicker while waiting in line for a urinal at the spring game)

Simply put, if Percy Harvin was off in his own world, it was never evident on the field. He played hard, he played hurt and he always seemed to save his best for the most opportune moment. In the 2006 SEC Championship game, just a week after suffering a concussion, he broke off 167 total yards and two touchdowns, including a poetic 67-yard run to paydirt. In the 2009 BCS Championship game, playing in pain on what turned out to be a broken ankle, he amassed 171 total yards and a touchdown, including several long runs when the Gators needed a spark. It may sound like a paradox, but even if he did all of that for purely selfish reasons, he’s still a team player. Harvin sacrificed for the Gators, and it’s almost certain that had he not, Florida would have two fewer national titles to its name.

So let the NFL think of Harvin as aloof and troubled, as the next prima donna likely to derail in the less-structured environment of the pros. I will always remember Harvin as one of college football’s most dynamic skill-position players of his era. And unless real evidence is presented to the contrary, I will always think of him as a great Gator.