Among things that bore me beyond reason is the NFL draft. I mean, every journalist in the country stirs up football fans to actually sit for hours and watch broadcasts of guys making random picks of random players who might someday help the home team.
I had watched a lot of college football last fall, and after a fantastic performance caught my eye at one point, I decided to tune in to watch Louisville play so I could focus in on this guy., Teddy Bridgewater. The mountain of publicity for Johnny Football and other QB prospects had obscured Bridgewater pretty much, but Louisville kept winning, and I was impressed. He threw bullet passes, he had quick feet, he ran the offense impressively, seemed to hit the right notes on audibles, but the one thing that stood out to me was that when the defense had a hard pass covered, Bridgewater had the ability and the touch to lob a perfectly feathered pass over the defenders and into the waiting arms of his receivers. Not many quarterbacks in college have the ability to pass both hard and soft, and know when to do which.
So on the eve of the draft, I said forget all those other quarterbacks, the perfect fit for the Vikings would be Teddy Bridgewater.
Because I only pay mild attention to the first round of the draft, and I was disappointed that the Vikings hadn’t taken one of the promising available quarterbacks to seal up their biggest problem, I made the comment that no matter what else the Vikings do, people will be very upset that they didn’t take a quarterback.
“But they did take a quarterback,” I was told. Then I learned the Vikings had made a late trade to get into position to take one last player, with the last pick of the first round. They took Teddy Bridgewater.
There are critics and others who are quick to say he can’t do it and it was a mistake. And the Vikings are correct to say he will just come in and be No. 3 to start training camp. My response was that then it will only take until the end of the first quarter of the first exhibition game for Vikings fans to start demanding to see Bridgewater.
My thought is that once they hand him the ball, the Vikings will move into the thick of contemporary NFL offenses, and people like Adrian Peterson will be unstoppable. Just a hunch.