National Media Making Fools Of Themselves Over Bruce Irvin Pick

I am so tired of turning on the TV or radio and hearing someone talk trash about the Seahawks because they picked Bruce Irvin with the 15th overall pick. “why pick him at 15 when he’d have been there at 43” gets repeated over and over. It makes me wonder, are they really that stupid? Seriously?

I get the initial reaction of surprise. I was surprised. I had Irvin at #65 on my board. When I heard that was who the Seahawks picked I thought it was a mistake. It wasn’t. The only mistake was my evaluation of Irvin, not the Seahawks picking him.

The thing is, people like me, and the guys like Mel Kiperon TV, dont have all the information. We don’t get to know anything about personal workouts, or combine interviews, or to see the pro-days. That’s a lot of information from the draft process that we’re without when trying to evaluate players.

For me, the big problem with Irvin was his recent arrest.  I saw that, combined it with his checkered past, and instantly dropped him from the end of round 1 to the end of round 2. I didn’t think people would take a chance on him until later because of it. What I didn’t know was that the charges were bogus, and that he’d addressed that in the interviews with teams. To most of the NFL, that arrest and his past was a complete non-issue.

It didn’t take me long to change my opinion of the pick though. When reports cam in that almost every team had Irvin in the first round, I knew the Seahawks got value with the pick. As soon as reports started coming in that at least 8 teams had Irvin in the top 15, then it seemed the Seahawks may have gotten a steal.

That’s the thing, when information came in, and it altered my opinion. It’s not that hard. And all that information was available within about 2 hours of the Seahawks picking Irvin. So why is it that Kiper and rest of the national media are still spouting off the same nonsense about how badly the Seahawks “reached” 3 days later. It’s just stupid. Are they really that incapable of admitting that they made a mistake?

The worst part of it is that every time they open their mouths on the subject they just look worse and worse. Clearly they realize that what little credibility they have is based on the perception that they know what the team’s know; know what the teams are thinking; and thus can predict what the NFL teams will do.

This is why they’re stubbornness makes so little sense. The more they badmouth the Seahawks, the more the just make it painfully obvious how out of touch they are with the way the NFL works and thinks. With each minute they lose more and more credibility. Why should we ever listen to what they have to say, when it so painfully clear that they have no clue what they are talking about.

And that’s what makes this all so foolish. Had they simply admitted that they misread this one player, or even just that they just misread how severely Irvin’s history would effect his value, then that would be the end of it. They could move on and talk about his obvious exceptional pass rushing skills and no one would know care that the missed on one evaluation.

But instead they choose to do the dumbest and most foolish thing they could do in this situation. They stick to their original story, repeating it over and over until everyone has a chance to realize that truth.

How completely and utterly foolish.