You only think Ryan’s stats are better because you fail to note that the single biggest predictor for guys in the top half of the first is career starts. Cutler started 45 games- that’s elite territory, up there with Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb and Carson Palmer. Matt Ryan started 32 games. That’s a full season’s worth of starts that Cutler had over Ryan. So the only area where Cutler has a big advantage happens to be in the single most predictive area. I’d also note that Cutler went 11th overall, which was a reasonable place for him to go- any higher and you would have to be concerned about the completion percentage. 11th overall is too high for Ryan, but it would be a significant improvement on sixth overall.

So, seanmac, when Ryan ends up in the Pro Bowl, it won’t be the failure of FO’s regression analysis, it will be the failure to account for the challenges he faced that his competition did not face. We just think the other is wrong about Ryan and let’s leave it at that. But, returning to this thread, I agree that Gholston is not top 10 talent and taking him would be a drafting error.

I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference to the argument, but Michael Bush played less than 2 quarters of football in 2006 before suffering a broken leg! Their running game was still good, though.

Damian, I personally think we can do a lot better than Barton inside.

Mayock is a BC alum and a close friend of the Ryan family, a fact that he was rather slow to admit when he was putting Ryan on top of his draft board. It doesn’t mean his opinion should be ignored, but it’s worth mentioning. Anyway, it’s easy to point out the authority of draft experts when they’re saying something that you happen to agree with, as Mayock does when he puts Ryan #1 overall. But then you promptly ignore that authority when Mayock puts Vernon Gholston #2 overall. Kind of problematic. If you value the traditional scouting method for grading quarterbacks, then you are essentially saying that, as Brian Billick insisted, drafting quarterbacks is a crapshoot. After all, the analysts who are pimping Ryan now are the same ones who carried water for Alex Smith and for David Carr and Joey Harrington and Ryan Leaf and Tim Couch and every other highly drafted quarterback bust. Their record of distinguishing good quarterbacks from bad ones is not very good. (I mean, Mel Kiper made his reputation by banging his shoe on the table for someone to hurry up and draft Trent Dilfer.) But drafting a quarterback doesn’t have to be a crapshoot. You can manage the risk by looking at predictive factors, and those factors suggest very strongly that Matt Ryan is not another Peyton Manning, but that he’s a fairly pedestrian prospect. Is it possible that Ryan proves he’s actually an elite player? Yes. But the odds are not very good, and they’re certainly not good enough to make me want to throw the sixth pick of the draft away to find out. Somebody else was posting about how you don’t get the sixth pick in the draft very often. That’s actually not true. When you pick high, the odds are good that you are going to keep picking high, because every time you miss on a top player, it’s going to sink your franchise and it becomes a downward cycle where even when you hit on a player, you’ve spent such a large proportion on your cap on the misses-costs that upper tier teams simply don’t have-that you are constantly swimming upstream. Look at Detroit- they haven’t been universally awful at picking guys in the first round. When it comes to expending picks on receivers, they’ve done a better job than Jacksonville- Charles Rogers and Mike Williams were busts, but Roy Williams and Calvin Johnson are studs. That’s batting .500, but the costs of the misses are enormous. Jacksonville whiffed consecutively on Reggie Williams and Matt Jones, and they followed it up by whiffing on their tight end Marcedes Lewis for good measure, but the picks have been low enough that their misses haven’t had the same kind of devastating impact on their cap. The most important thing to do with these top picks is not screw them up. And nothing is a bigger screw up than whiffing on a quarterback. When you pick one, you better have very sound reasons to think the guy won’t bust.