SI on JaMarcus Russell

Obviously he had/has a 10-cent head and a 50-gallon gut, but I can say unequivocally that JaMarcus Russell had the strongest arm of any college quarterback I ever saw (Dan Marino, whom I saw in the Senior Bowl when I was 9, would be a close second).

 

Quinn was coming off a bowl game (the Sugar Bowl, a blowout against LSU) in which he was 15-for-35. He tested out poorly in most regards at the combine. The Raiders would have been killed for taking Quinn, who was not at all seen as a "safe" choice at the time.

In retrospect, we should have seen some signs that Russell was not what we thought he was. His wide receivers at LSU were Dwayne Bowe, Buster Davis, Early Doucet and then-freshman Brandon LaFell. His running backs were Keiland Williams, Jacob Hester, Justin Vincent and Trindon Holliday. Russell's junior-season stats were impressive (232-for-342, 3,129 yards, 28 touchdowns, eight interceptions and a 167 rating), but not top pick-worthy when considering his targets. In addition, all of his best games came when he attempted fewer than 25 passes.

Still, his arm strength was unparalleled, and the general assumption was he could at least be a good starter who could throw a great deep ball on occasion, a la Jeff George on a good day. Some experts thought he would be a truly special quarterback because of his natural release and arm strength. That arm strength kept coming up. Russell, in conjunction with the relative successes of Chad Pennington, may have done more to dissuade NFL draft reaches on quarterbacks with big arms (see Ryan Mallett) than anyone else.

All of that said, I totally thought Gaines Adams was going to dominate the NFL.

 

The list of current and future Hall of Fame quarterbacks who had their arm strength questioned before and even after they joined the NFL is a very long one. Start with Tom Brady and work backwards until you get to Bobby Layne.

 

I concur, but I don't think that stopped NFL GMs from overvaluing it for decades. I think, five years ago, Ryan Mallett would have been a first rounder.

It should also be pointed out that a strong arm can be an asset; John Elway, Dan Marino, Peyton Manning and Michael Vick have done well for themselves.

 

A strong arm is like a 100 mph fastball. It makes people notice quicker. Some guys do great. Some don't.

 

In throwing either a baseball or a football, if forced to choose between velocity and accuracy, accuracy always wins out by an enormous margin.

 

They lost me in the dek by calling him 'maligned,' which means 'unfairly criticized.' My God, how I hate Terry O'Donnell.

There's little that's intrinsically interesting to me about Russell...Oakland gambled tens of millions on him and lost. Next. In the set-up, Wertheim tries way too hard to sound like Gary Smith.

 

agree. I would add in there the speed of release. A lot of people don't get how important that is for a quaterback to this day. To me, that is No.1 with accuracy being 1B

 

The word "unfairly" does not appear in the definition for malign in any dictionary in our newsroom.

 

TINYTOWN -- Webster's Dictionary defines "malign" as "to utter injuriously misleading or false reports about."

Well, after a week of the Smallington Saints' maligning trash talk about the Tinytown High School offense, the Tinytown Tufted Titmice proved them wrong by winning the heated crosstown rivalry, 45-28.

It was a tale of two halves as ...

 

Just pulled mine out of the mailbox in a rare Thursday arrival.