Jake Locker to Remain at Washington for Senior Year
You made the right choice. Now force your coaches to get some talented offensive linemen and fix the defense.
about 2 years ago
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Looks like you beat me by a hair.
Interesting decision for Locker, even if it’s been sort of a foregone conclusion for a while. I applaud Jake for sticking around and finishing what he started, but wow this is a risky choice.
With a new CBA potentially on the horizon rookie salaries could get capped. One bad injury could derail his career. Other prospects emerging could catch the fancy of other GMs. There’s so much that could go wrong between now and the next chance Locker can be drafted.
Gun to my head, I think Locker should have declared. He had a really good chance to guarantee himself financial security for life and there’s just too much that could go wrong between now and then.
I think it was a good move.
He has the baseball contract if football fails. This is about more than hist rookie contract. This is about making it more probable for a longer career. Injury could strike but that’s a concern for anybody. Going back for one more year will not only potentially cement his legacy at UW but make it so there’s less chance of him being a bust in the NFL.
Also a die-hard Hawks fan.
by Hopefulmsfan on Dec 14, 2009 1:08 PM PST up reply actions
To take it a half step farther
I think returning to Washington could turn Lockler from likely bust to franchise quarterback. He has made huge strides this year.
Regarding money: Locker sought the opinion of the NFL Draft Advisory Committee before making this decision. It might be more financially motivated than we assume. Mock drafts love Locker, but I think he would have fallen into the late first.
Agree ... the early mocks are dumb
Why would any sane GM draft him ahead of the many solidly accomplished QBs coming out this year? (Bradford, Clausen, McCoy, Tebow, etc).
Next year, if the Huskies move in the right direction regarding offensive players and defense, could be Locker’s huge year.
The demise of the Broncos in '09 is our future. Pray hard.
They would draft him because they love potential.
They’d be willing to overlook his (relatively) weaker stats and accomplishments because he’s a junior, had only one year in a pro-style offense, and is one of the more athletically gifted QBs to come out in a few years. He’d better be sure that his performance will get a lot better next year, when GMs won’t be so quick to look past his production.
by SeaTownBlueDevil on Dec 14, 2009 2:51 PM PST up reply actions
Cool, then let's just throw all college experience and stats to the wind
and draft solely on potential !!!
Sarcasm aside, all you’ve really got is the player’s PAST performance with which to evaluate his long term potential.
It might not translate perfectly to NFL success, but it’s probably a better indicator than anything else.
Just my opinion.
The demise of the Broncos in '09 is our future. Pray hard.
I'm not disagreeing.
But there’s a reason Brian Brohm went from a Top 5 pick to the bottom of the second round when he stayed for his senior year and didn’t show much progress.
by SeaTownBlueDevil on Dec 14, 2009 4:59 PM PST up reply actions
Solid college accomplishments don't directly translate over to success in the NFL.
Take a look at this list of “accomplished” NCAA QB’s.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:37 PM PST up reply actions
Poor Timmy Chang. (Just one of the entries I read)
I can only imagine how terrible it must feel to be so unbelievably good throughout high school and college, have such high hopes for a pro career,and fail miserably. Failed in the NFL, NFL Europe, and even the CFL.
It's Great to be a Florida Gator!
"I never met a llama I didn't like." - TJ Duckett
All I want for Christmas is Joe Haden, Eric Berry, and Nandamukong Suh in Seahawks blue.
by Wayward Llama on Dec 14, 2009 4:01 PM PST up reply actions
I actually started by searching for him, and that led to the whole list...
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 4:06 PM PST up reply actions
College accomplishments do not translate directly into the NFL
but I can’t think of a single quarterback that succeeded in the NFL after being bad in college. Good prospects are talented, unlike Chang, and accomplished, unlike Locker.
I don't disagree with the sentiment.
I would disagree that Locker is not accomplished. His numbers this year were certainly tolerable albeit pale in comparison to McCoy or Bradford. But Locker was not “bad” this year.
And staying in school was the best decision he could make to further harness that talent and turn it into more accomplishment.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 4:51 PM PST up reply actions
I honestly think you judge Locker too harshly.
Comparison…
230-395 (58.2%) 2800 yards, 21/11 TD/Int, 388 rushing yards, 7 TD.
273-462 (59.1%) 3,073 yards, 21/9 TD/Int, 215 rushing yards, 1 TD.
That is Locker beside Jay Cutler’s SEC offensive player of the year numbers his senior year. He of course went 11th overall in the draft and had enjoyed until this year a solid NFL career.
Cutler’s career NFL numbers—
973-1,558 62.5% 11,377 68/54
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 5:13 PM PST up reply actions 1 recs
Whatever happened to Graham Harrell, anyway?
Is that the light at the end of the tunnel, or the headlights of an oncoming train?
Wiki...
Following his senior season at Texas Tech, Harrell entered the 2009 NFL Draft but went unselected. He participated with the Cleveland Browns in their rookie camp the first weekend in May 2009 but was not signed. UFL Access reported that Harrell will be working out in front of United Football League representatives in Las Vegas.
On July 20, 2009, Harrell signed a two-year plus an option contract with the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 9:44 PM PST up reply actions
FYI Jake Locker made his decision before the NFL Draft Advisory Committee got back to him
Still, Locker had said following the season finale against Cal on Dec. 5 that he would consider all options, and a week ago Monday he applied to be evaluated by the NFL Advisory Committee, which supplies underclassmen with an estimate of where they will be drafted.
But he decided not to wait for that input — the committee hasn’t even begun to return evaluations — before making his choice to stay.
Very interesting.
Unlike most guys, I think he had a good idea already...
Strong first round, upper half, potential to drop to back half or get into top 5 depending on combine.
I think, bottom line, he wanted to stay in school and finish his Husky career…
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 9:46 PM PST up reply actions
Thank God.
I really want to see him succeed in the NFL and his chance of doing that will have no doubt improved in large part due to this decision.
This.
Also from what I heard from people close to him.
He doesn’t care about the money so much. He has money from the Angels.
by Scruffy Lefty on Dec 14, 2009 1:19 PM PST up reply actions
I heard on 710
that he only got a couple hundred grand. I hope his stay in college is worth it, and he stays healthy.
It's Great to be a Florida Gator!
"I never met a llama I didn't like." - TJ Duckett
All I want for Christmas is Joe Haden, Eric Berry, and Nandamukong Suh in Seahawks blue.
by Wayward Llama on Dec 14, 2009 4:06 PM PST up reply actions
Think you're right actually
The two years removed from high school, three years of college experience standard always struck me as contradictory.
Yo SS, head over to the Dawgpound and get the latest skinny...
They HAVE gotten some great OLine recruits.
This is a top 10 recruiting class at OLine and there are a couple more possible 4 star guys close to signing with us.
UW football is BACK, and this just sealed the deal!!!!
Locker for Heisman, 2010!!!
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 1:21 PM PST reply actions
Locker for Heisman 2010?
I like the sound of that.
Without Tebow around anymore, he should get more attention as one of the best all-purpose QBs in the game. I really hope his passing improves and he leads the UW program back to respectability. I miss the UW-powerhouse days…
This.
Everything I've heard about their o-line recruits is that they're a few years off
But hey! No more Ben Ossai!
One guy I think is ready to play right away-- he's the 4 star signing,
and another isn’t yet committed but he might be an instant starter if he does sign with us. Hawaiian Somoan-type name, can’t remember it.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:39 PM PST up reply actions
Whoever comes after Locker is going to be set up really nicely
Are these guys that might start away actually good or just better than whats already there?
Those two I'm referring to are 4 star recruits...
that’s GOOD. Most our class (ranked anywhere from 7th to 16th in the country by the “expert” sites) is composed of 3 star guys.
What you frequently see in college recruiting is the traditional elite teams (USC, Texas, Florida, Alabama, etc.) grab around a few 5 star guys, a dozen 4 star and fill in with a few 3 star guys.
A team like UW or Oklahoma State will pump themselves into the top 10-20 by getting like 25 guys with like ten 4 star and fifteen 3 star guys. In other words, they may not get the overall talent, but they get a particularly deep class.
Look at USC this year vs. UW at that link above.
We have 26 total with 2 in the top 100; with zero 5star, eight 4star and sixteen 3star players, they assign points and average rank.
USC has only 14 recruits (6 in top 100), however they have FOUR! 5star, seven 4star and two 3star.
Our class is rated higher, but there’s is more talented. But then, we needed to get depth and let things sort out, and USC can afford to “pick and choose” as they had a large class last year and are a young team already loaded with talent that isn’t going to lose a lot.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:53 PM PST up reply actions
They are more likely to do so when the team they are going has a bunch of 1 year starters
who were 2 and 3 star guys, and just not that talented. There are two guys that have a chance to start as true freshman on the OLine. Will they? Maybe, maybe not. But they are going to help the overall talent of the program even if not in their first year.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 4:47 PM PST up reply actions
So to answer my original question they'll be starting because they're better than whats already there
not because they’re necessarily all that good right now.
I don't know about that...
Ben Riva is the 49th OT in the country, Micah Hatchie is the 25th, and Erik Kohler is the 14th (OT).
Colin Porter is the 7th rated guard.
I’m not saying they can all play right away, but 4 star kids make up the backbone of programs like USC, Texas and Alabama. There are only 50 5 star kids by all positions in the country. Many 4 star kids are ready to play right away, but they go to loaded programs where they are forced to sit a year.
Desmond Trufant was a 3 star kid who started right out the gate at CB and did an okay job overall and was a Pac10 caliber player even as a frosh. He was 70th ranked at CB in his class. These guys are more highly graded, good chance a couple might be able to play right away and do so effectively if they get in during the spring, hit the weights hard, and adapt to the college game quickly.
Ideally in a year or two, our 4 star guys will be sitting behind other 4 star guys. That’s the difference between the USC, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama’s of the world and the UW’s and Oklahoma State’s. It isn’t the top end talent, it’s the top to bottom depth.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 10:09 PM PST up reply actions
Purple and Gold baby!
Sam Bradford, future Seattle Seahawk.
by Carl Shinyama on Dec 14, 2009 6:38 PM PST up reply actions
Late first?
Today, McShay made him No. 1, going to the Rams. That would have been a long, long way to fall. Especially since he would have been off the charts on the measurables they would have gotten off him in the meantime.
IN any event, I truly look forward to watching him grow in purple and gold one more year.
I think you're responding to me
McShay can say whatever he wants. It has no impact on the actual draft.
McShay
What a weird job he and Kiper have at ESPN. Sit around making hundreds of mock drafts each year and arguing with each other. I’d like it because it’d be easy and you can pretty much say what you please as long as you sound authoritative but I don’t think I would respect myself.
A forgiving job for sure
as I was explaining to my wife yesterday, it doesn’t take a genius to rank first round talents. For some reason, the NFL draft is cast as an arcane process that few understand and fewer still can succeed at. Any sighted human being could see Calvin Johnson was special. There’s a dearth of tall, fast, athletic and huge human beings.
Which makes me think of Colt McCoy and that some people think he's a first round talent
I wonder if they saw him next to the other Heismann candidates. He could have fit in Tebow’s shoe.
And so much of it relies not just on correct valuation of players
Like you say, you can be confident in knowing what separates first rounders from non-first rounders. But they always want to project the exact spot each player will go. What Todd McShay thinks is valuable is not what the Bengals’ GM does. Or the Seahawks’. Etc. Then you have to realize that even if you created a 100% rational draft that makes perfect sense for every team (this is a hypothetical example, of course this is impossible), you could still be horribly wrong because not every team will make the perfectly rational decision.
Forget those people who try to prognosticate beyond the first round. I’ve seen seven round mock drafts. That seems like such an incredible waste of time.
If it were a rational endeavor, intended to actually project seven rounds
it would be a waste of time. Mock drafts are discussion pieces and successful ones. I don’t think McShay or Kiper think they will nail every pick. I was reading something from Ricky Reilly, circa 2007, and he said McShay got something like seven out of 32 picks right, and that was with his mock posted directly before the draft. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t discredit McShay. He is a draft expert, and even if he’s as wrong as everyone else, people want to know what he thinks.
He exists because there is a market
People love mock drafts. I don’t, really, but maybe I want them to be something more than they possibly can be.
People love mock drafts in the same way they love pre-election opinion polls
They’re impatient for the real thing, so they run the simulations over and over again.
Given the armchair GM nature of football fandom, this is entirely understandable. It really gets hilarious when the pundits and fans presume to grade the actual draft based on how well it accords with the supposedly more rational simulations.
Here we go:
4:20
A merciful God ends the first round. For three weeks everybody but Vladimir Putin was doing a mock draft. So who was right? Well, Todd McShay of Scouts, Inc., had five of the first six right but cooled off fast and wound up with nine out of 32 dead-on. SI’s Peter King was unusually off, with three. NFL.com’s Vic Carucci had four. The winner in my survey of draft pundits? Kiper, with 10. My point? Mock drafts are a bigger waste than Jos� Feliciano’s HDTV.
From here.
And thats with the first 10 usually being gimmes
I can normally get about 4 of the top 10 the day before the draft.
Ewww....
you quoted Rick Reilly.
Heheh.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:40 PM PST up reply actions
The draft is a sequence, and the farther you get down the sequence, the more difficult predictions become
As random variables accumulate, even the most intelligent projections will come off the tracks.
For example, the weather. A meteorologist can almost perfectly predict tomorrow’s weather. But the farther away a projection, the more inaccurate it becomes. Rain scheduled for 5 days down the road often arrives two days early or not at all. After about 5 days, weather forecasts become so inaccurate that they are almost worthless. This is why we don’t see 2 week forecasts, month long forecasts, etc.
The draft is the same thing. The first 10 picks are so are fairly easy to pick, but once those “surprise picks” start adding up, it throws an entire projection off its tracks. McShay/Kiper may not have gotten every pick right, but I would guess 75% of their picks were within 5 spots of where the player actually went. Its not a precise science.
McShay/Kiper may not dictate where a player is drafted
but they are kind of like weather men for the draft. They may not exactly nail every pick, because at a certain point luck replaces expertise for determining exact hits on picks. What’s more important is being close, and they are generally pretty close. The only real disadvantage a mock draft has is that it can’t anticipate trades.
Right now, a Mock draft is probably a waste of time. Just like how accuracy decreases with increased distance from the first pick, accuracy also decreases when the distance from draft day is increased. A mock made they day before will probably nail 8 of the first 10 picks. A mock made a year in advance (like this one), is a laughable joke. With the draft still 6 months away, I’m sure Locker took his stock with a grain of salt, although with the lack of viable franchise QB prospects and Locker’s likely explosion at the combine, I doubt he would have slid very far.
Don't forget, McShay and Kiper both have PhD's
in “being full of shit.”
It's Great to be a Florida Gator!
"I never met a llama I didn't like." - TJ Duckett
All I want for Christmas is Joe Haden, Eric Berry, and Nandamukong Suh in Seahawks blue.
by Wayward Llama on Dec 14, 2009 4:04 PM PST up reply actions
Of course it doesn't.
But even given that fact, I doubt that the pundits are often 25+ spots off on picks they project as #1s.
January boards do not tell us anything we do not already know
Real shakeup will happen during and after the Combine when coaches and scouts can actual work with the prospects.
Cliff Lee to the Mariners?
Seattle sports can show itself again!
Well, except…you know….the Seahawks.
ME! BANE!
Crazyness
I don’t know man…no way we can keep him past this year?
We’ll have to see what we give up.
Mike
Wow.
I wish we could have gotten Lackey, too. I might start being interested in baseball again…I miss 1995…
This.
Two years from now, Lackey's contract may very likely LOOK like the albatross Silva's is...
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:42 PM PST up reply actions
We should resign Randy just for kicks.
Chad Brown for the Ring of Honor!
by Big Seahawk Loser on Dec 14, 2009 3:10 PM PST up reply actions
Not a bad idea, honestly. He could give you some innings...
the question is the cost compared to the depth of staff we already have.
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 14, 2009 3:42 PM PST up reply actions
This will take a while to sort out.
Halladay has to negotiate an extension, a bunch of physicals. It may not be official until the end of the week.
Good news for Seattle football fans
The Huskies will be good next year, while the Seahawks will probably still suck.
I think you just put your finger on the reason he decided to stay in school
He saw those mocks having him go to the Rams, and he decided it wasn’t worth it.
Better to play another year in college, and maybe even be a little less exciting. Heck, maybe Bradford has shown the way, by getting hurt and causing injury concerns to lower his draft stock. Rather than go to a crappy team at the top of the draft, go to a good team in the middle or bottom of the round…
Nah, that’s just crazy talk. Isn’t it?
I don't trust any Jeff Tedford QB except of Aaron Rodgers.
Carr, Harrington, Boller, Akili Smith, Trent Dilfer…
by SeaTownBlueDevil on Dec 15, 2009 1:20 PM PST up reply actions
God no.
Sam Bradford, future Seattle Seahawk.
by Carl Shinyama on Dec 14, 2009 6:49 PM PST up reply actions
I can't express how happy this news makes me
If Jake HAD declared and ended up being drafted by Seattle, even that would not have been as exciting for me. Not only do I get another exciting season of football to watch from him, but there will be the storyline all season long about his chase for the #1 overall pick.
Yes.
But he is a senior this year, and a year of redshirt will do him wonders…
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 15, 2009 1:20 PM PST up reply actions
You can't out-recruit religion...
Bird Law in this country isn't governed by reason.
by Tyler Jorgensen on Dec 17, 2009 1:25 PM PST up reply actions
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