A question.
If Dez Bryant is such a can't miss prospect, guaranteed pro bowl by 2012 (that's the take-away I'm getting from reading the posts in this thread) then how did 23 teams let him get by them, and why did New England trade this pick away?
Hi Sylira,That's a totally fair and a good question. You got some good answers already it looks like.
One tangent point - I hear a lot of folks saying "his character issues are overblown". That may very well be true. I've been a long time proponent of saying that many players unfairly get a bad rap. Randy Moss and Terrell Owens are two of my favorite players. I truly believe that both of their "bad attitude" reputations are overblown. It's a human nature thing to start looking more closely at something once you detect something. I can build a boat and if it has a bad spot on the gelcoat, the owner suddenly raises his standards and starts looking more closely at the rest of the boat. An issue on the upholstery that might not have been an issue otherwise, becomes an issue after he finds the gelcoat problem. It's the same with Randy Moss. Once he does one bad thing, the next thing he does gets way more scrutiny. It's not a bad thing - it's just human nature.
So I can easily see how Bryant's character stuff can be overblown.
BUT, I will say this - most of the people (myself included) don't have a fraction of the real life knowledge of the situation on these players that these teams do. As we saw with Jeff Ireland, these players get a microscope put on them. If you ask me who I think has a better grasp of Dez Bryant's character - An NFL GM or the average football fan, I'm going to go with the GM. Just because he's got knowledge of the situation most of us don't have.
So while the answer you'll get when you ask why did GMs pass on Bryant will be people shouting Randy Moss or Dan Marino, I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the GMs here. But the flip side to that is you could make the case that Denver was really the only team that went with another WR. Should be fun to see how this plays out.
If you asked for my gut feel, I feel the character thing was overblown and that he'll be good this year with the chance to be very good in years 2 and 3.
I do not see him having anything like a Randy Moss type rookie year as many seem to.
J