DID MCSHAY MISLEAD WOODSON?
Posted by Mike Florio on May 13, 2008, 9:30 a.m.
In response to the news that Kentucky quarterback Andre Woodson was under the mistaken impression that he’d be drafted in the second round of last month’s draft, one league source is pointing the blame directly at Todd McShay and other wannabe scouts who don’t know as much as they think they know about what teams will do.
We tried to search ESPN.com for McShay’s 2008 mock drafts. His final 2008 mock draft now comes up as “null.” The Scouts Inc. final mock, prepared by McShay and two others, is still alive.
In that mock draft, McShay and company had Woodson going in round three to the Bears. Instead, Woodson was selected in round six by the New York Giants.
The following is an opinion that was passed along to us by the source, based on McShay’s assessment of Woodson.
“The problem with people like McShay is that they have no accountability,” the source said. “They can say what they want and when they are wrong no one cares, [except] the kid’s family. McShay could not get a job with any NFL team, even as an intern. He is a very poor evaluator. He proved it with his evaluation of Woodson.
“Woodson’s problem, and most everyone in the league saw it, was he has a very slow release and he stares down his receivers. In our league, he would get a very high percentage of interceptions because of his flaws. His accuracy is very average at best, so you put a slow release, not good accuracy, and stares down receivers and you get a guy who can’t play quarterback in the NFL.
“The networks should hire real scouts not wannabes like McShay. The other kid at ESPN, Jeremy Green, was fired after a couple of years with a club because he couldn’t evaluate, yet he is an “expert” with ESPN. These guys make more than twice as much money as real scouts and they don’t have a clue. ESPN should grade what these guys say and fire them when they are wrong a lot more often than when they are right.”
Moving forward, we’ll be keeping a close eye on what McShay has to say, especially since he seems to be the “hair” apparent to Mel Kiper. And, apparently, we’ll need to print off all of McShay’s mock drafts, since after the fact they can’t be found in a medium that ordinarily is premised on saving stuff, not deleting it.
In saying this, we full acknowledge the fact that we offer up our own periodic mock drafts in the weeks leading up to the draft. But ours isn’t based on our own scouting assessment of the players; we do it based on the things we hear from folks in the know. Even then, our mock draft often is a complete mess, too.
It would be even more of a mess if we pretended to be scouts.
