In his Sunday column, Detroit Free Press sportswriter Drew Sharp makes a good point when he suggests that there's a level of "outrageousness" to all of the instant declarations of winners and losers that follow the NFL draft.
Handing out draft "grades" to the Lions or any other team now is little more than half-assed guessing and presumptuous speculation.
But if you're a Lions fan, even if you somehow manage to avoid giving out A's and B's for personnel choices that even the real experts can't honestly evaluate for two or three years, you still can't help feeling anxiety, maybe even dread, over this year's draft.
Yes, anxiety and dread are your birthright as a Lions fan. But the Lions draft also has raised far more questions for the future than it appears to have answered, as usual.
Let's start at the top. No matter how coach Jim Schwartz or general manager Martin Mayhew spin the first-round selection of BYU defensive end Ziggy Ansah, there's no getting around the fact that, three years ago, Ansah didn't even know how to put on shoulder pads.
The guy's a project and everyone (except, apparently, the Lions' brass) seems to know it. Ansah certainly has ideal size and athleticism. But his production -- 4 1/2 sacks during three years spent learning football at Brigham Young -- was far from ideal.
And while size and speed and athletic ability certainly matter in the NFL, fundamentals and experience and force of will count just as much. Ansah surely lacks the first two, and no one has seemed to have any idea about the third.
Coach and GM Could Lose Job
For Mayhew and Schwartz, Ansah has to work out, and pretty fast. If he doesn't and the Lions don't improve over last season's dismal mark, the GM and coach are gone and the Lions could be looking at the prospect of starting over again. Again.
(Gosder Cherilus, the offensive tackle the team picked first five years ago, was praised for his ideal size, too. He now plays for the Indianapolis Colts.)
Second-round pick Darius Slay appears to have as much upside as Ansah. A cornerback, he's blazingly fast and, like Ziggy, also has ideal size. But like too many earlier picks, he joins the roster while injured, having recently suffered a slightly torn meniscus in his knee.
While the injury doesn't seem significant right now, there's no telling what it will mean for him come OTAs and preseason camps. He says he won't need surgery and that the tear won't impact his future, but after the Lion's experiences with guys with injury histories (e.g. Jahvid Best), Slay's assurances won't do much to allay fans' fears.
Third-round pick Larry Warford strikes me as perhaps the safest of the early selections. I actually liked this selection better than the first two picks. He's a guard with a respectable SEC pedigree and can open huge holes in the running game.
But at 330 pounds, he's also raised some red flags over his ability to control his weight. If you're old enough to remember a 1999 draft pick named Aaron Gibson, you know why this is reason to worry.
The Lions traditionally don't do well in later rounds of the NFL draft, having been chronically unable to find any of the hidden gems that more successful organizations, like the Pittsburgh Steelers, seem to habitually spot.
I'm not confident they've made any headway this year. Fourth-round pick DE Devin Taylor -- the "other" defensive end from South Carolina -- is regarded by most as another project, one who could take even longer than Ansah to develop.
Passing on Denard Robinson
I'm not among those who'll fault the Lions for passing on Denard Robinson in the fifth round -- I loved Shoelace at Michigan. But he's transitioning from QB to RB/WR/PR and has yet to show he can catch or field punts consistently. I agree that taking a punter from Appalachian State was a waste. Unless Sam Martin turns out to be Ray Guy in disguise, I'm inclined to think of this as the sort of typical late-round brain fart that has characterized Lions' drafts since before Matt Millen.
Meanwhile the following selection, Corey Fuller, is a big and fast receiver. But, like Ansah and Taylor, he's raw and will need time to develop. The Lions spotty results with wideouts is legendary, and little about Fuller gives you reason to believe he'll be any more successful than, say, Tim Toone, in transitioning from a late-round pick to the Lions' game-day roster.
Theo Riddick, the Lions second pick of the sixth round, has been described as an insurance plan for Reggie Bush. He's versatile, having caught the ball as well as run it out of the backfield, and could be an immediate special teams contributor. Still, his talent ceiling suggests he'd be more of an insurance plan for the workman-like Joique Bell than Bush.
Lions Took Big Risks
The Lions drafted twice in the final round, choosing TE Michael Williams from Alabama and Brandon Hepburn, a linebacker from Florida A&M. Having played on a pair of national title winners at 'Bama, Williams may well have the mental toughness and raw ability to make the team. And at the very least he's not the stretch that the disappointing Brandon Pettigrew was a few years ago. Plus, he's a real blocking TE, which already gives him a leg up on Pettigrew.
Meanwhile, Hepburn seems like late-round filler, a small-school outside linebacker with only an outside chance of making the team given the competition he'll face at that position. He could prove as utterly meaningless to this year's draft class as Doug Hogue was in 2012.
It's too early for predictions on any of these guys' careers.
Naturally, as a Lions fan, I hope they all work out. As a realist, though, I suspect that most of them probably won't. It could be a few years before anyone will be able to determine just how good -- or awful -- this year's crop of picks turned out to be.
But what's obvious is that the Lions took some big risks this season in an effort to rebound from last year's showing. In light of this, there's one prediction I have no qualms about making: If the players chosen at the top of this Lions draft don't stick, the coach and GM who picked them surely won't either.
Then the anxiety and dread can start anew.
