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03-14-2007, 06:28 PM
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Here's the evidence on how great players win Super Bowls
Posted: March 13, 2007
Cliff Christl
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Green Bay - I've repeatedly made the point that until the Green Bay Packers acquire at least one of the top five or 10 players in the National Football League, they'll have no chance of winning another Super Bowl.
Today, we'll show what evidence there is to support that premise. And, two, we'll look at where teams generally find great players.
First, let's look at the past 15 Super Bowl winners and where their best players were ranked among the best in the game. We'll start with the 1992 Dallas Cowboys for this reason. The following summer, the late Joel Buchsbaum rated the top players in the game, regardless of position, for the first time for Pro Football Weekly's preview magazine and continued doing so until his death in 2002.
Buchsbaum had connections with general managers, coaches and scouts throughout the league and his ratings were generally viewed as a consensus of league thought. Since his death, the magazine has continued to compile a list of the top 50 players after polling GMs and scouts.
Here are the ratings for the best players on the past 15 Super Bowl winners. The ratings were published prior to the start of the next year's training camp. Buchsbaum and PFW rated 50 players each year except in the six years noted.
1992 - Dallas Cowboys: 5. Emmitt Smith, RB; 21. Troy Aikman, QB; 28. Michael Irvin, WR
1993 - Dallas Cowboys: 4. Smith; 6. Aikman; 11. Erik Williams, T; 17. Irvin. (Only 20 players rated)
1994 - San Francisco 49ers: 1. Jerry Rice, WR; 4. Steve Young, QB; 8. Deion Sanders, CB. (Only 21 players rated)
1995 - Dallas Cowboys: 2. Smith; 3. Aikman; 6. Deion Sanders; 13. Larry Allen, G; 16. Williams. (Only 22 players rated)
1996 - Green Bay Packers: 1. Brett Favre, QB; 24. Reggie White, DE. (Only 30 players rated)
1997 - Denver Broncos: 8. Terrell Davis, RB; 12. John Elway, QB. (Elway was rated fifth before the season started.) (Only 30 players rated)
1998 - Denver Broncos: 2. Davis. (Elway retired following the Super Bowl and, therefore, wasn't rated the next summer, but he was rated 12th going into the season.) (Only 40 players rated)
1999 - St. Louis Rams: 7. Marshall Faulk, RB; 10. Kevin Carter, DE; 21. Kurt Warner, QB; 27. Orlando Pace, T; 32. Isaac Bruce, WR. (Faulk was rated No. 1 a year later.)
2000 - Baltimore Ravens: 3. Ray Lewis, LB; 5. Jonathan Ogden, T; 30. Chris McAllister, CB.
2001 - New England Patriots: None.
2002 - Tampa Bay Buccaneers: 7. Derrick Brooks, LB; 24. Simeon Rice, DE; 30. Warren Sapp, DT; 48. John Lynch, S. (Sapp was rated third going into the season and fourth the year before.)
2003 - New England Patriots: 13. Tom Brady, QB; 29. Ty Law, CB; 34. Richard Seymour, DE.
2004 - New England Patriots: 4. Brady; 16. Seymour; 39. Corey Dillon, RB; 49. Adam Vinatieri, K.
2005 - Pittsburgh Steelers: 25. Casey Hampton, NT; 29. Hines Ward, WR; 33. Troy Polamalu, S; 45. Alan Faneca, G.
2006 - Indianapolis Colts: Ratings will be published next summer, but before the '06 season, quarterback Peyton Manning was rated 2nd; wide receiver Marvin Harrison, 8th; and defensive end Dwight Freeney, 10th.
Of the 15 winners, nine had at least one of the top five ranked players in the game. Three others had a top-10 player.
The three exceptions were the 2001 and '03 Patriots, and the '05 Steelers.
Aha, some of you are no doubt saying: There's the proof that it doesn't take a great player to win a Super Bowl.
Maybe that was the case with the Steelers, but not the Patriots, at least in my estimation.
Let's face it, NFL personnel people are like anyone else. They're going to be reluctant to admit a mistake without mounds of evidence to the contrary.
Brady was a sixth-round draft pick. Thus, personnel people were slow to give him his due. They weren't going to concede they were wrong based on one season or maybe even two or three.
Brady had an immediate impact when he became the starter in 2001 just as the legendary Johnny Unitas did 45 years earlier and Hall of Famer Joe Montana did 20 years earlier. Unitas and Montana also came out of nowhere and weren't instantly recognized.
After he had been drafted in the ninth round and cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Unitas played a year of semi-pro football for $6 a game starting out before he was signed by the Baltimore Colts. He became a starter four games into his first season and led the Colts to an NFL title in his third season, when he first gained all-pro recognition. Montana, a third-round draft pick, led the 49ers to victory in Super Bowl XVI in his first year as a full-time starter, but wasn't named first-team all-pro for six more years or until three years after he won his second Super Bowl.
When Brady took over as the starter in the third game of the '01 season, the Patriots had lost 13 of 18 games under Bill Belichick. Brady led them to 11 victories in the next 14 regular-season games and three playoff victories, although an injury knocked him out of the AFC Championship Game.
In his first year as a starter, Brady had the best completion percentage of his career and ranked sixth in the league in passing. He completed 32 of 52 passes for 312 yards on a snow-covered field to lead the Patriots to victory over Oakland in the first playoff game, and completed 5 of 8 passes for 53 yards to engineer the winning drive in the final 1 minute 21 seconds of the Super Bowl and was named the game's MVP. He also was named to the Pro Bowl.
Two years later, Brady was named MVP of the Super Bowl again and was named to another Pro Bowl.
But it wasn't until after Brady led the Patriots to a third Super Bowl title that he finally cracked PFW's top 10. In 2005, the magazine ranked him the fourth best player in the game. Before the 2006 season, after the Patriots had finished 10-6 and been knocked out of the playoffs in the second round, Brady was ranked the best player in the game.
Clearly, he was a top 10 player as soon as he became a starter and his No. 1 ranking before this past season was as much a reflection of his play in '01 and '03, as it was of his play in '05. It was just that scouts were either slow to recognize his talents or slow to admit a mistake or both.
The Steelers, on the other hand, appear to be proof that it's possible to win a Super Bowl with a slew of very good players and no superstar. That also may have been the case with the three Super Bowl winners that Joe Gibbs produced in Washington.
Following the Steelers' Super Bowl triumph, their top rated player in the poll was Hampton at 25. The Steelers also had three other players in the top 50 One also could argue that they easily could have had three others.
Ben Roethlisberger was the third leading passer in the NFL behind only Manning and Carson Palmer in '05 and had a 101.7 quarterback rating in the post-season.
Roethlisberger had a disappointing '06 season after a traumatic motorcycle accident. As a footnote, that partly explains why scouts are reluctant to dramatically raise a player's grade too quickly. They want to see them pass the test of time. But the results and his statistics suggest that Roethlisberger performed at the level of at least a top 50 player two seasons ago.
If the scouts had rated the Steelers' two-headed monster at running back as one, they also could have included it in the top 50. Willie Parker rushed for 1,202 yards and a 4.7 average, fifth highest among the league's 16 1,000-yard rushers. Parker also had the breakaway speed to break an 80-yard run during the regular-season and a 75-yard run in the Super Bowl. Spelling Parker a year ago was Jerome Bettis, maybe the most punishing and effective short-yardage and goal-line runner in NFL history.
And linebacker Joey Porter had 10 ½ sacks in '05 and just barely missed the top 50 list. Tennessee linebacker Keith Bulluck was ranked 47th with a 3.99 rating, whereas Porter was left off with a 3.9 grade.
In other words, the Steelers had four of the top 50 players in the game, more than any other team; and essentially had the equivalent of a top 50 player at three other positions. And if they had at least seven of the best 60 players in the game, it was an unusually high number of very good players, maybe more than any team since the talent-loaded Cowboys of the early 1990s.
Whatever, almost all the other Super Bowl winners have been more top-heavy in talent.
The '93 Cowboys had two of the top six players in the game. The '94 Cowboys and '95 49ers each had two of the top four and three of the top 10. The '96 Packers had the No. 1 ranked player and the '99 Rams had two top 10 players.
The '97 and '98 Broncos had two of the top 12 players. The '00 Ravens had two of the top five. The '02 Buccaneers had a top 10 player, but also three defensive stalwarts ranked in the top 30 and another in the top 50. And, no doubt, the reigning champion Colts will have the No. 1 or No. 2 ranked player on next year's list. At least it would come as a shock if Manning wasn't rated No. 1 or 2.
Twelve of the 15 most recent Super Bowl winners also had a quarterback who at some point since 1993 was ranked among the top four players in the game.
And that leads to the next question.
How did those teams acquire their best players?
It wasn't free agency.
Counting the Colts, those 15 winners have had 16 players who ranked among the top 10 in the game.
The only one acquired through free agency was Deion Sanders. Three others were acquired in trades: Young, Favre and Faulk.
The other 12 were draft picks, 10 of them in the first round. The two exceptions were Terrell Davis and Brady, both sixth-round draft picks.
Of the seven quarterbacks who have won 12 of the most recent 15 Super Bowls and have been ranked in the top four, three were selected No. 1 in the draft: Aikman, Elway and Manning. Steve Young would have been a high pick, maybe the No. 1 choice in the 1984 draft, if he hadn't signed with the Los Angeles Express of the United States Football League more than six weeks before the NFL draft. As it was, Young was chosen No. 1 by Tampa Bay in the USFL supplemental draft and later traded to the 49ers.
Favre was drafted in the second round by Atlanta and traded to the Packers for a first-round pick. Kurt Warner of the Rams entered the league as a non-drafted free agent with Green Bay, got cut and signed with the Rams as a street free agent almost four years later. Brady was the other.
Perhaps a more telling way of determining how teams obtain the game's best players is to examine all the players ranked in the top 10 by PFW - not just the top 10 players from the Super Bowl winners - since 1993.
In all, over the past 14 years, 54 players have received a top 10 ranking. Of those 54, 37 were first-round draft picks and two others - Young and Reggie White - were first-round picks in the USFL supplemental draft and would have been high first-round picks in the NFL college draft if they hadn't signed with the USFL first.
In a nutshell, 72% of the players who achieved a top 10 ranking have been first-round draft picks. Among them, if you include the two supplemental choices, 21, or 38%, have been top five picks.
Twenty-eight, or more than half, were drafted in the top 10.
Six players were drafted between 11th and 20th: Jerry Rice (16th in 1985), Emmitt Smith (17th in 1990), Warren Sapp (12th in 1995), Marvin Harrison (19th in 1996), Daunte Culpepper (11th in 1999) and Dwight Freeney (11th in 2002).
Among the others, seven were drafted in the second round; three in the third, one in the fourth, one in the fifth and two in the sixth. Two entered the league as non-drafted free agents: Warner and running back Priest Holmes.
In addition to Deion Sanders, the only players ever to make the top 10 after signing and playing with another team as a free agent were: Holmes and Curtis Martin. A backup in Baltimore, Holmes was cut by the Ravens and signed by Kansas City. Martin was a restricted free agent when he signed with the New York Jets and the Patriots took the compensation - first- and third-round draft picks - instead of matching the offer.
The bottom line here is that if general manager Ted Thompson is going to find the one or two superstars that it will almost certainly take for the Packers to win another Super Bowl, his best chance of doing so will be in the years when the Packers have a top five or 10 draft pick.
This year, the Packers own the 16th selection. In the first 40 years of the common draft, Rice is the only 16th pick who was a for-sure top 10. The only other possibility would have been tight end Russ Francis, who was drafted 16th in 1975 and played before Buchsbaum started rating the top players in the game. Also, the jury is still out on maybe about five of the No. 16 picks since 1999.
If you do the math, it shows that Thompson has somewhere between about a 2.5% and 17.5% chance of selecting such a player at 16.
The odds of finding a top 10 player in the second round probably are about 1%.and drop from there in succeeding rounds.
A handful of top five players have been acquired in trades, but most of those involved extenuating circumstances. For example, how often is a Favre available in a trade?
And, basically, the chances of landing one in free agency are almost nil when you consider that Sanders fell into a special category because he could use baseball as leverage.
The other possibility would be for Thompson to get incredibly lucky just as the Broncos and Patriots did when they drafted Davis and Brady. Brady is a cinch to make the Hall of Fame and Davis would have been if his career hadn't been cut short by injury.
But do you know how unusual it is for players drafted that low to have that kind of impact?
Since 1967, the first year of the common draft, no skill-position player selected after the fourth round has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. And Brady, Davis and defensive lineman La'Roi Glover are the only players drafted after the fourth round to ever make PFW's top 10.
In fact, to say the Patriots and Broncos were incredibly lucky would be an incredible understatement.
But those are some of the odds that Thompson is facing.
Here's the evidence on how great players win Super Bowls
Posted: March 13, 2007
Cliff Christl
Green Bay - I've repeatedly made the point that until the Green Bay Packers acquire at least one of the top five or 10 players in the National Football League, they'll have no chance of winning another Super Bowl.
Today, we'll show what evidence there is to support that premise. And, two, we'll look at where teams generally find great players.
First, let's look at the past 15 Super Bowl winners and where their best players were ranked among the best in the game. We'll start with the 1992 Dallas Cowboys for this reason. The following summer, the late Joel Buchsbaum rated the top players in the game, regardless of position, for the first time for Pro Football Weekly's preview magazine and continued doing so until his death in 2002.
Buchsbaum had connections with general managers, coaches and scouts throughout the league and his ratings were generally viewed as a consensus of league thought. Since his death, the magazine has continued to compile a list of the top 50 players after polling GMs and scouts.
Here are the ratings for the best players on the past 15 Super Bowl winners. The ratings were published prior to the start of the next year's training camp. Buchsbaum and PFW rated 50 players each year except in the six years noted.
1992 - Dallas Cowboys: 5. Emmitt Smith, RB; 21. Troy Aikman, QB; 28. Michael Irvin, WR
1993 - Dallas Cowboys: 4. Smith; 6. Aikman; 11. Erik Williams, T; 17. Irvin. (Only 20 players rated)
1994 - San Francisco 49ers: 1. Jerry Rice, WR; 4. Steve Young, QB; 8. Deion Sanders, CB. (Only 21 players rated)
1995 - Dallas Cowboys: 2. Smith; 3. Aikman; 6. Deion Sanders; 13. Larry Allen, G; 16. Williams. (Only 22 players rated)
1996 - Green Bay Packers: 1. Brett Favre, QB; 24. Reggie White, DE. (Only 30 players rated)
1997 - Denver Broncos: 8. Terrell Davis, RB; 12. John Elway, QB. (Elway was rated fifth before the season started.) (Only 30 players rated)
1998 - Denver Broncos: 2. Davis. (Elway retired following the Super Bowl and, therefore, wasn't rated the next summer, but he was rated 12th going into the season.) (Only 40 players rated)
1999 - St. Louis Rams: 7. Marshall Faulk, RB; 10. Kevin Carter, DE; 21. Kurt Warner, QB; 27. Orlando Pace, T; 32. Isaac Bruce, WR. (Faulk was rated No. 1 a year later.)
2000 - Baltimore Ravens: 3. Ray Lewis, LB; 5. Jonathan Ogden, T; 30. Chris McAllister, CB.
2001 - New England Patriots: None.
2002 - Tampa Bay Buccaneers: 7. Derrick Brooks, LB; 24. Simeon Rice, DE; 30. Warren Sapp, DT; 48. John Lynch, S. (Sapp was rated third going into the season and fourth the year before.)
2003 - New England Patriots: 13. Tom Brady, QB; 29. Ty Law, CB; 34. Richard Seymour, DE.
2004 - New England Patriots: 4. Brady; 16. Seymour; 39. Corey Dillon, RB; 49. Adam Vinatieri, K.
2005 - Pittsburgh Steelers: 25. Casey Hampton, NT; 29. Hines Ward, WR; 33. Troy Polamalu, S; 45. Alan Faneca, G.
2006 - Indianapolis Colts: Ratings will be published next summer, but before the '06 season, quarterback Peyton Manning was rated 2nd; wide receiver Marvin Harrison, 8th; and defensive end Dwight Freeney, 10th.
Of the 15 winners, nine had at least one of the top five ranked players in the game. Three others had a top-10 player.
The three exceptions were the 2001 and '03 Patriots, and the '05 Steelers.
Aha, some of you are no doubt saying: There's the proof that it doesn't take a great player to win a Super Bowl.
Maybe that was the case with the Steelers, but not the Patriots, at least in my estimation.
Let's face it, NFL personnel people are like anyone else. They're going to be reluctant to admit a mistake without mounds of evidence to the contrary.
Brady was a sixth-round draft pick. Thus, personnel people were slow to give him his due. They weren't going to concede they were wrong based on one season or maybe even two or three.
Brady had an immediate impact when he became the starter in 2001 just as the legendary Johnny Unitas did 45 years earlier and Hall of Famer Joe Montana did 20 years earlier. Unitas and Montana also came out of nowhere and weren't instantly recognized.
After he had been drafted in the ninth round and cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Unitas played a year of semi-pro football for $6 a game starting out before he was signed by the Baltimore Colts. He became a starter four games into his first season and led the Colts to an NFL title in his third season, when he first gained all-pro recognition. Montana, a third-round draft pick, led the 49ers to victory in Super Bowl XVI in his first year as a full-time starter, but wasn't named first-team all-pro for six more years or until three years after he won his second Super Bowl.
When Brady took over as the starter in the third game of the '01 season, the Patriots had lost 13 of 18 games under Bill Belichick. Brady led them to 11 victories in the next 14 regular-season games and three playoff victories, although an injury knocked him out of the AFC Championship Game.
In his first year as a starter, Brady had the best completion percentage of his career and ranked sixth in the league in passing. He completed 32 of 52 passes for 312 yards on a snow-covered field to lead the Patriots to victory over Oakland in the first playoff game, and completed 5 of 8 passes for 53 yards to engineer the winning drive in the final 1 minute 21 seconds of the Super Bowl and was named the game's MVP. He also was named to the Pro Bowl.
Two years later, Brady was named MVP of the Super Bowl again and was named to another Pro Bowl.
But it wasn't until after Brady led the Patriots to a third Super Bowl title that he finally cracked PFW's top 10. In 2005, the magazine ranked him the fourth best player in the game. Before the 2006 season, after the Patriots had finished 10-6 and been knocked out of the playoffs in the second round, Brady was ranked the best player in the game.
Clearly, he was a top 10 player as soon as he became a starter and his No. 1 ranking before this past season was as much a reflection of his play in '01 and '03, as it was of his play in '05. It was just that scouts were either slow to recognize his talents or slow to admit a mistake or both.
The Steelers, on the other hand, appear to be proof that it's possible to win a Super Bowl with a slew of very good players and no superstar. That also may have been the case with the three Super Bowl winners that Joe Gibbs produced in Washington.
Following the Steelers' Super Bowl triumph, their top rated player in the poll was Hampton at 25. The Steelers also had three other players in the top 50 One also could argue that they easily could have had three others.
Ben Roethlisberger was the third leading passer in the NFL behind only Manning and Carson Palmer in '05 and had a 101.7 quarterback rating in the post-season.
Roethlisberger had a disappointing '06 season after a traumatic motorcycle accident. As a footnote, that partly explains why scouts are reluctant to dramatically raise a player's grade too quickly. They want to see them pass the test of time. But the results and his statistics suggest that Roethlisberger performed at the level of at least a top 50 player two seasons ago.
If the scouts had rated the Steelers' two-headed monster at running back as one, they also could have included it in the top 50. Willie Parker rushed for 1,202 yards and a 4.7 average, fifth highest among the league's 16 1,000-yard rushers. Parker also had the breakaway speed to break an 80-yard run during the regular-season and a 75-yard run in the Super Bowl. Spelling Parker a year ago was Jerome Bettis, maybe the most punishing and effective short-yardage and goal-line runner in NFL history.
And linebacker Joey Porter had 10 ½ sacks in '05 and just barely missed the top 50 list. Tennessee linebacker Keith Bulluck was ranked 47th with a 3.99 rating, whereas Porter was left off with a 3.9 grade.
In other words, the Steelers had four of the top 50 players in the game, more than any other team; and essentially had the equivalent of a top 50 player at three other positions. And if they had at least seven of the best 60 players in the game, it was an unusually high number of very good players, maybe more than any team since the talent-loaded Cowboys of the early 1990s.
Whatever, almost all the other Super Bowl winners have been more top-heavy in talent.
The '93 Cowboys had two of the top six players in the game. The '94 Cowboys and '95 49ers each had two of the top four and three of the top 10. The '96 Packers had the No. 1 ranked player and the '99 Rams had two top 10 players.
The '97 and '98 Broncos had two of the top 12 players. The '00 Ravens had two of the top five. The '02 Buccaneers had a top 10 player, but also three defensive stalwarts ranked in the top 30 and another in the top 50. And, no doubt, the reigning champion Colts will have the No. 1 or No. 2 ranked player on next year's list. At least it would come as a shock if Manning wasn't rated No. 1 or 2.
Twelve of the 15 most recent Super Bowl winners also had a quarterback who at some point since 1993 was ranked among the top four players in the game.
And that leads to the next question.
How did those teams acquire their best players?
It wasn't free agency.
Counting the Colts, those 15 winners have had 16 players who ranked among the top 10 in the game.
The only one acquired through free agency was Deion Sanders. Three others were acquired in trades: Young, Favre and Faulk.
The other 12 were draft picks, 10 of them in the first round. The two exceptions were Terrell Davis and Brady, both sixth-round draft picks.
Of the seven quarterbacks who have won 12 of the most recent 15 Super Bowls and have been ranked in the top four, three were selected No. 1 in the draft: Aikman, Elway and Manning. Steve Young would have been a high pick, maybe the No. 1 choice in the 1984 draft, if he hadn't signed with the Los Angeles Express of the United States Football League more than six weeks before the NFL draft. As it was, Young was chosen No. 1 by Tampa Bay in the USFL supplemental draft and later traded to the 49ers.
Favre was drafted in the second round by Atlanta and traded to the Packers for a first-round pick. Kurt Warner of the Rams entered the league as a non-drafted free agent with Green Bay, got cut and signed with the Rams as a street free agent almost four years later. Brady was the other.
Perhaps a more telling way of determining how teams obtain the game's best players is to examine all the players ranked in the top 10 by PFW - not just the top 10 players from the Super Bowl winners - since 1993.
In all, over the past 14 years, 54 players have received a top 10 ranking. Of those 54, 37 were first-round draft picks and two others - Young and Reggie White - were first-round picks in the USFL supplemental draft and would have been high first-round picks in the NFL college draft if they hadn't signed with the USFL first.
In a nutshell, 72% of the players who achieved a top 10 ranking have been first-round draft picks. Among them, if you include the two supplemental choices, 21, or 38%, have been top five picks.
Twenty-eight, or more than half, were drafted in the top 10.
Six players were drafted between 11th and 20th: Jerry Rice (16th in 1985), Emmitt Smith (17th in 1990), Warren Sapp (12th in 1995), Marvin Harrison (19th in 1996), Daunte Culpepper (11th in 1999) and Dwight Freeney (11th in 2002).
Among the others, seven were drafted in the second round; three in the third, one in the fourth, one in the fifth and two in the sixth. Two entered the league as non-drafted free agents: Warner and running back Priest Holmes.
In addition to Deion Sanders, the only players ever to make the top 10 after signing and playing with another team as a free agent were: Holmes and Curtis Martin. A backup in Baltimore, Holmes was cut by the Ravens and signed by Kansas City. Martin was a restricted free agent when he signed with the New York Jets and the Patriots took the compensation - first- and third-round draft picks - instead of matching the offer.
The bottom line here is that if general manager Ted Thompson is going to find the one or two superstars that it will almost certainly take for the Packers to win another Super Bowl, his best chance of doing so will be in the years when the Packers have a top five or 10 draft pick.
This year, the Packers own the 16th selection. In the first 40 years of the common draft, Rice is the only 16th pick who was a for-sure top 10. The only other possibility would have been tight end Russ Francis, who was drafted 16th in 1975 and played before Buchsbaum started rating the top players in the game. Also, the jury is still out on maybe about five of the No. 16 picks since 1999.
If you do the math, it shows that Thompson has somewhere between about a 2.5% and 17.5% chance of selecting such a player at 16.
The odds of finding a top 10 player in the second round probably are about 1%.and drop from there in succeeding rounds.
A handful of top five players have been acquired in trades, but most of those involved extenuating circumstances. For example, how often is a Favre available in a trade?
And, basically, the chances of landing one in free agency are almost nil when you consider that Sanders fell into a special category because he could use baseball as leverage.
The other possibility would be for Thompson to get incredibly lucky just as the Broncos and Patriots did when they drafted Davis and Brady. Brady is a cinch to make the Hall of Fame and Davis would have been if his career hadn't been cut short by injury.
But do you know how unusual it is for players drafted that low to have that kind of impact?
Since 1967, the first year of the common draft, no skill-position player selected after the fourth round has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. And Brady, Davis and defensive lineman La'Roi Glover are the only players drafted after the fourth round to ever make PFW's top 10.
In fact, to say the Patriots and Broncos were incredibly lucky would be an incredible understatement.
But those are some of the odds that Thompson is facing.