Gee, I wonder why. From DraftDaddy:
Even though he's projected to be a high draft pick, ex-Notre Dame safety Harrison Smith has become a lightning rod for criticism in cyberspace.
Ridiculous. Harrison Smith should be a top 15 pick, his size and speed combination is rare. Can cover like a corner and can tackle like a linebacker. He allowed 0 completions last year when teams targeted him (at least that is what several scouts said). I did notice that quarterbacks tended to avoid his area being that he had 5 picks the year before. I guess it is similar to Eric Berry and his drop off in interceptions his last year in college.
I like this article regarding scouts such as mcmurty86 who said
“(Harrison Smith) doesn't often have a good position when the ball is thrown and has trouble in tight spaces while playing against a receiver. He will certainly be a huge liability in coverage in his rookie year.”
Looks like he took scouting reports from multiple White defensive backs over the years with the same agenda and merged them together to make it seem unique. Surprised I didn't see "tight hips".
http://fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/draftniks-ever-the-experts-and-always-on-the-clock/
The draftnik subculture has its own rituals, some fun and accessible for the layperson, others arcane and mysterious. Some activities can help the uninitiated dip their toes into the draftnik lifestyle. Be warned: in an egalitarian landscape with minimal separation between professional television analysts and some guy with old Auburn games on his DVR, one can easily go from curious newcomer to nationally recognized expert who gets 3 a.m. text messages about
Mohamed Sanu in just a few weeks. Draftniks quickly reach the point at which baseball sabermetricians appear mainstream and virile by comparison, so proceed cautiously through the steps below.
....
READ AND WRITE MOCK DRAFTS Mock drafts are pick-by-pick guesses of which team will select which player in April’s draft. They are composed by columnists, experts, obsessed amateurs, compulsive listmakers, interns and precocious toddlers, and all are of exactly the same level of accuracy. Some mock drafts prognosticate only the first round, but many now extend through all seven rounds, which is a little like trying to predict the weather on April 7, 2019.
No mock draft has ever been written without the author’s first peeking at another mock draft to make sure that they are similar, but not too similar. Axiomatically, that means that the first mock draft of each season cannot possibly exist, though some philosophers have taken the Aquinian route and proposed a prime “unmocked mocker.” In reality, trendsetting draftniks work a year or two in advance; not only are 2013 mock drafts available that rank college underclassman, but somewhere, a trailblazer is basing his 2034 mock draft on genetic research and ultrasound images.
BECOME VERSED IN SCOUTSPEAK One 240-pound athlete who can move like a hungry leopard is pretty much like all the others, a fact that cannot be allowed to stand between the motivated draftnik and that coveted senior draft analyst title. Luckily, there is Scoutspeak, a language designed to baffle laymen with submolecular analysis of every high-cut, sudden prospect who can high-point, bucket step and take proper angles but gets upright, runs with poor lean, and fails to syncopate his duodenum while percolating the jabberwocky.
Every Scoutspeak term does correspond with some real physical attribute, and true experts like Mayock can pepper their explanations with jargon without delving into non-Newtonian football minutiae.
Others use Scoutspeak to conceal ignorance. The Paradox of Draft Analysis states that the more detailed the observations about a prospect’s kinesiology, the less likely the writer-speaker is to have ever seen the prospect play football.
For years, insisting that the second-ranked quarterback on the draft board is far superior to the top-ranked quarterback has been the go-to contrary opinion for the draftnik in a hurry.
Backing the second quarterback has become a cliché, and Griffin is so good that it is hard to gain intellectual separation by preferring him to Andrew Luck. Advanced draftniks assert their individuality in other ways.
They claim that a late-round pick is being unfairly downgraded because of character issues: he will stop habitually running over Watch for Children signs near kindergartens as soon as he has a seven-figure contract to emotionally ground him. They push obscure small-college prospects, even though the only images they have ever seen from Chippewa County A & T are from Google Earth.
....
Finally, they can downgrade a top defensive lineman because he plays the wrong “technique.” Sure, he is 300 pounds of sculptured titanium, bench-presses old Chevy engine blocks for fun and recorded 60 career sacks at a major program, but he may not transition smoothly from three-technique to five-technique, an insurmountable adjustment that amounts to lining up about 42 lateral inches from where he did at college.
As a final ritual, true draftniks forget everything they ever said, wrote or thought about a prospect as soon as the N.F.L. season begins; reflection and accountability of opinion cause only uncomfortable cognitive dissonance."
sounds like Scott Wright and all of the wanna be scouts on his site. They never do eat crow when they are wrong. I am still waiting for the guy that said Anthony Dixon would be a much better pro than Gerhart to speak up. Although Gerhart isn't starting yet, he has shown much more ability in his playing time than Dixon, who has been described by 49er fans as a "fullback who thinks he is Barry Sanders"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d42RLkAF3rs
