The Slow Exit of Lawrence Jackson

Found a typo, by the way: ‘less valuable now then* when he was drafted’.

How about Desean Jackson, Ben Grubbs and Marcus McNeil instead of Lawrence Jackson, Deion Branch and Kelly Jennings.

We drafted him in the first round, and he’s been at best a mediocre player for us. You compare him to Scott, Avril, Long and Cambell, but only Long was taken in the first round. Scott is a 6th rounder.

If you define a bust as a player who didn’t ever justify his high draft order for the team he was drafted (my definition), then he’s a bust. That doesn’t mean he won’t be a good player for Detroit, but he never was worth a first round pick for us.

He’s the classic Ruskell first rounder, he could easily have been had in the 4th round. Puerto gives us a good list above of other Ruskell first rounders. Jackson, Branch and Jennings. Throw Spencer in that list as well. I don’t think any of those guys are worth the pick they were drafted with.

Maybe Curry will buck the trend, but the jury is still out. Ruskell did wonders in the later rounds, but his first round picks were awful.

Trading one player who didn’t fit the scheme, but had ok upside, for a player that has more upside that is a much better fit for the scheme – Jackson was productive at End and Tackle in college. He has neither bulked up nor sped up significantly since, so he hasn’t played either position with alacrity in the pros.

He looked best when holding the point of attack at end, but Red can do a better job of that as he has 50 more pounds of mass with about the same amount of quickness. I think he will end up as a decently stout run stopping End in a conventional 4-3, but we aren’t doing that here.

We needed big ugly depth. There was nobody to back up Red or Me! Bane! until Balmer arrived. I expect Balmer to be decently productive with some good ol’ Uncle Pete Affirmation of Goodness vs the culture of negative reinforcement he left. Even if he’s only good enough to merely alter a play, that will be sufficient for the Currys and Pistols and Thomases on the team to do their thing.

And we got Sucky Detroit’s 6th round pick, so it will definitely be higher than the one we traded to SF.

LJ had what Ruskell looked for: three-year starter at a major college program who played the college game at a high level, which usually — not in this case — is a good predictor of success in the play-for-pay game.

To me LJ was one of those players who looked like a man playing with boys in the college game, despite the fact that the higher up you go in athletics, the smaller the gap in talent between individuals gets. When you have this much of an edge over the competition, there’s two ways you can go:

1) Russell Okung, who wouldn’t care if he’d pancaked his guy 40 times in a row, if he didn’t do it the 41st time he’d be pissed off. It doesn’t matter how good his opposition is, he wants to kill his opponent on every single play; or,

2) LJ — who grows accustomed to expending the minimum amount of effort he needs to expend to excell and stand out at the level he’s playing. The problem is, you can’t do this in the NFL or it shows, and the habits were too deeply ingrained for LJ to change them, so he was soft in general with only occasional flashes of brilliance.

So either LJ has already established who he is and what he’s going to do in the NFL, or the trade to Detroit for a sixth will be the slap upside the head he needs to get off his ass and live up to his potential, but in any case it wasn’t going to happen in Seattle. He was a tweener for the scheme we play now, and an underperforming one at that.

So do we hold a roster spot for an underperforming tweener or do we get what we can out of him and move forward?

A sixth for the guy drafted right behind LF who fits our scheme and a higher sixth back for a guy who wasn’t going to fit in. No-brainer to me. GO HAWKS!!