You are a flipping idiot. Jake Long is one of the highest paid players at any position in the NFL. Does that then mean that anyone who makes less than him is a bust if they were taken in the top 5 of the draft?

A Guard is nowhere near as important as a Left Tackle, but it's a clearly HOF worthy position. It's not a Long Snapper or a Holder or a Kicker or a Punter. Hell, I'd draft Will Shields over Tony Gonzalez right now if you gave me the chance.

If I drafted a player number 3 to be Willie Roaf and he turned out to be Will Shields, I'm laughing at the guy who drafted a player at number four to be Peyton Manning and got Ryan Leaf.

I'd call that a waste of a draft pick, since we drafted a left tackle in the middle of the first round last year. And he played at a high level.

A guard is not a position you spend a top-5 pick on, as I mentioned in the post you quoted.

If you can't participate in the discussion like somebody over the age of 5, than I've got not use for you. Welcome to ignore.

I'm sure Green Bay shares your sentiment, given that they could have gotten Derrick Thomas, Barry Sanders, or Deion, and went the safe route and selected Mandarich.

I would, I could get a productive guard that makes a fraction of what Smith makes rounds later while also getting another player in the top 5.

What someone gave up to get a player has nothing to do with whether or not a player is a bust. Again, you don't understand the difference between busts and disappointments.

If Bill Gates buys an NFL franchise in 2010, which turns out to be an uncapped year, and he pays $10 Billion to get Matt Cassell and Matt Cassell wins him 2 Super Bowls, you would be spouting, "Cassell is a bust. For $10 billion, he should have won 811 Super Bowls." Fortunately, your stupidity would be difficult to understand, as it's difficult to enunciate while licking a window.

It amazes me how many people still don't understand positional value. It's not superstring theory, you ****s, it's relatively simple.

The most important position on the field is QB
After that is DE and LT
After that is DT, WR, CB, RB, S, LB, and TE
Interior linemen are the least important position on the field, which is why you almost never see them go in the first round, and you never see them go in the top 10.

I understand positional value very clearly, and I agree with you completely. My argument is that a great NFL player can not be considered a bust regardless of where he was drafted.

I would never draft a RB in the top 5, but I wouldn't consider LaDainian Tomlinson to be a bust.

If you told me that Sanchez and Stafford were the next Leaf and Manning, but you didn't know which was which and you also said that Moreno was the next Tomlinson, I'd probably tell you to draft a QB. That's how important I think a QB is.

That doesn't mean that drafting Moreno would be a guaranteed bust, though.

I'll put it this way:

Rather than making it a semantic argument over "bust" or not a bust, if you had to choose between Will Shields, one of the best to ever play his position, and Drew Brees, who is a premier player, but nowhere near one of the best of all time, who are you taking?

The fact of the matter is that there is absolutely no way that an interior lineman could ever play well enough to justify a top five pick. It's the same reason why you'd never give 20 million a year to a left-handed specialist in baseball. They don't have enough of an effect on the game in order to justify that draft status/monetary expenditure.

But none of those guys had careers cut short by injury. Billy Sims knee blew out.

That's actually a pretty close choice in my book. I'd lean towards Brees, but it's about a coin flip in my book. If Brees had ever won anything, I might feel more strongly about it.

I agree that it's been an argument over semantics, but words are important. A bona fide bust is not a guy who becomes a valuable contributor to a team's success for a decade or more regardless of position.

If Shields would have been taken with a top 5 pick, the pick would not have been a bust.

The argument was about Ricky Williams.

I don't think there have been exceptions, at least not to this point in time. Steve Hutchinson was looked at as maybe the most can't-miss pure guard prospect ever. He didn't go until 17 and a lot of folks at the time argued that was too high for a guard to go (I wasn't one of them).

Any recent guard I can think of that's been drafted that high or higher (and this includes Brandon Albert) has been drafted with the intention of moving him to left tackle.

You've got to go all the way back to Chris Naole in 1997 to find an actual guard drafted higher than Hutchinson. And you've got to go all the way back to the 80s (pre salary-cap era) to find one drafted in the top-10. They just don't spend high picks on the position.

mecca='good at the draft'

If the argument is that Texas doesn't produce good NFL players, then you can't dismiss certain players from the discussion simply because of the round they were taken in.

Did Ross and Hampton play for the same "country club" program that all these busts played for?