Yeah, but you are working on Sundays. The rest of us are worried.

No, he wasn't.

Crosby had concerns about ball trajectory coming out. People were concerned he was going to push the ball low because to the long kicking he did in college.

This is pure 100% revisionist history.

All I know is I had to hear about all year long from a CU buddy about how freaking good Crosby is.

Then you see him blasting long field goals all year long.

And he has proven clearly the best. So I guess if I'm wrong and it wasn't easy to see, then my buddy & I are just awesome talent evaluators. :P

Just to follow up.. You are right about some of the scouting report thing. (low trajectory)

However, this site rated him as clearly #1
http://www.fftoolbox.com/nfl_draft/p...ospect_id=1185

Shhh....don't tell people here that Succop sucks.

I've held my breath everytime he comes in to kick a FG. He's not clutch.

The guy is simply not that great of a kicker. I was pissed off as hell that we didn't go after Alex Henery

I know one thing....the XP is a joke.
do away with that chit, or change it.

Agreed. I don't trust him at all. His stats suggest he is an above average kicker, but it always seems he is missing untimely FG's. Also, his leg strength on kickoffs is starting to drive me nuts. Other kickers are booming the ball threw the uprights on kick-offs. It seems his is mid-endzone at best.

Not a huge Succop fan.

How can that be a legitimate concern? Kicking trajectories are not like QB mechanics. Experienced kickers can offer up kicks at whatever trajectory the situation calls for.

Maybe the concern was that he wasn't experienced enough to do it the way you say?

I guess that's possible, it's just that I bristle at the notion of immutable kicking traits after spending so much of my youth practicing being able to place a soccer ball wherever I wanted in the goal mouth from any spot on the field within 60 yards. Your intended target determines your trajectory, not some unchangeable kicking motion you're wedded to.

Get a few barley pops in me, and I might start thinking I could deliver a more catchable kick than Cassel can deliver a catchable ball at over 40 yards.

Maybe it's like a golf swing.

Your mechanics ALLOW you to lay the ball up with a bit of backspin and get the ball to stop on a dime but when you get up to take your swing, your competitive nature tells you to rip it, resulting in the ball sailing over the green and into the sandtrap.

Truce, I can see where a kicker can be knocked as insufficiently proficient, or not practiced enough, or wilting under pressure, or just plain yippy.

My point was that 'trajectory' alone is not a valid knock on kickers, like a low or slow delivery might be for a QB.

Yeah, and I'm not a kicker or an NFL scout.

I just know that coming into that draft, there were concerns about Crosby's "style" and whether or not he could become a consistently good kicker or a poor man's Janikowski.

And in the end, hindsight is 50/50. The people that thought Crosby would be the better kicker were right, regardless of their reasoning.

I think the popular opinion was that the Chiefs drafted Medlock because of the UCLA connection.

Not to belabor, but in hopes of providing a visual analog to what I'm trying to say. We played a shit ton of BB during lunch hours in HS, and there was a kid we played with who was a crack shot, but was very short. And whether it was a 3-pointer or a layup, he had two trajectories for any shot. Normal if he's wide open or on a fast break, and a much higher looping trajectory with the bigs in his face. He could snap in and out of each trajectory unconsciously, depending on the situation. His shooting proficiency was largely the same with either as well.

50% of the kickers drafted in the 1st round have made it to a SB. Time to draft one in the 1st round.