Round 2

Good news Bungs fans. I have a job where I sit at a desk all day again so I should get more regular with these posts. I know the draft happened a million years ago so I'll try to push through these quickly and get into stuff like college free agents and positional breakdowns.

I've discovered that on ESPN3 they have some bowl games available for replay, which is awesome for me. Any football I can get my hands on in the middle of the off season is glorious. So with Ipod in hand, armed with Mel Kiper's draft report and a list of draft eligible players I do a little scouting. It's not good scouting certainly, one game does not a player make but you can sometimes get an idea of how explosive or athletic a guy is or isn't. They had the TCU game available so I was able to watch our key stone pick, Andy Dalton.

Andy Dalton, 6'2'' 215. QB, TCU
Mel Kiper Jr's Grade : 8.8, 4th best QB on his board

Having the 3rd pick on the 2nd day created a ton of tension for me over night. I was hoping and praying he would fall to us and I'm still stoked that he did. Very intelligent, very accurate and appears to be a stand up guy. As Andy Dalton goes, so goes the franchise and I trust him to develop. Some said he is the most NFL ready QB in the draft and I think he'll be ready to go sooner rather than later. The only knock I heard on him all the way through was arm strength. And the knock is that his arm is average. I'll take it! Jamarcus Russell and his purple drank can launch the ball 70 yards but that doesn't do you much good when its no where near a friendly helmet. Besides that, I can think of three guys who came into the league with questionable arm strength, Drew Brees, Aaron Rogers and Tom Brady. Three guys who came into the league more highly touted with rocket launcher arms: Kyle Boller, Byron Leftwich and Jamarcus Russell. It used to be that by the time a guy was drafted his arm was as good as it was going to be. With modern strength training that is no longer the case. It's much easier to fix arm strength than stupid.
Despite being a redhead QB (can you name a successful one?) he seems to have the right qualities to lead as well. Intelligent, polite and in a recent interview Andrew Whitworth, the team's incumbent leader, Andrew said Dalton's personality reminded him of Drew Brees. You love to hear that. The more he has in common with Drew the better.
Now lets dig into the bowl game I watched vs. Wisconsin and their impressive defense. The first thing that jumped out at me was Dalton being more athletic than I realized. Wisconsin seemed to be focused in on stopping the running backs early so using zone reads he ripped off a few 8-12 yard runs on the first two drives. It's not like he was an electrifying runner or anything but he was smart with where he went and how to take the hits. He also made 1 or 2 guys miss and grabbed a few extra yards after contact. One play that stuck out to me was when he misread Defensive end JJ Watt, the 11th overall pick, on a zone read. JJ is a great athlete for someone his size and had Dalton dead to rights. So Andy beat feet to the outside and was able to get around him and score a touchdown from I think it was about 5 yards out. Impressive feat.
His throws and decision making didn't surprise me because they were as awesome as advertised. I only saw 1 or 2 throws that were bad decisions/poor throws (couldn't tell which from TV broadcast) but they weren't terrible. It would have taken a pretty impressive play for those balls to be picked off and his guy had a shot at it too. Most of his incompletions came from his receiver slipping on the wet field. He hit most throws perfectly and receivers didn't have to break stride to catch them. I suppose I was a bit surprised to see him drill an out route pretty hard. Still perfectly accurate but he nailed that thing in there like a pro. Didn't seem to have an arm strength issue to me.

Alright, lunch break over. Back to the grind. Hang in there football fans, we'll get through this lockout one way or another. Look for me to start doubling up rounds here going forward. Thanks for reading!