Mel Kiper Jr. says Sanchez to be a Top 10 Pick
By Joe K
According to ESPN NFL draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. three teams in the top ten of April’s NFL Draft desperately need to acquire a quarterback. Those three teams, the Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, and San Francisco 49ers, are expected to target Georgia’s Matthew Stafford and USC’s Mark Sanchez.
In a conference call earlier this week, the ESPN analyst contrasted the top two quarterbacks and also went into detail about how he formulates his draft ratings.
"“Sanchez only played and started one year plus, 15 or 16 games. He had the knee injury when the season began and played with that brace. He had a whole new supporting cast, so he had a lot of things going against him early on, but he really played well late. He had a great game against Penn State in the Rose Bowl.“He’s got skills. He doesn’t have the Stafford arm, but he throws very accurately on the move. He’s a tremendously passionate football player. Loves the study of the game, has great work ethic, very diligent to the studying of the game and putting in the time.“You look at Stafford with the big arm. He’s got the great arm. You can put him in the same class with any of the others that have come out. I’m not going to say anybody has a John Elway or Bert Jones arm. Their arm was in a class all by itself. (Jay) Cutler’s arm isn’t as strong as Elway’s or Bert Jones, and Stafford is in the Cutler mold. He’s inconsistent like Cutler was at Vanderbilt and still is with the Denver Broncos. The inconsistency sometimes doesn’t leave you. It was there with Cutler and is still there.“Stafford had it at Georgia and if he still has that inconsistency in the NFL he’ll be an up-and-down quarterback. People will be raving about him one week and criticizing him the next. Stafford has great upside. Inconsistency reigns supreme with some quarterbacks and that’s something he’s going to have to prove otherwise.“Stafford’s not quite as instinctive as Sanchez, but Sanchez doesn’t have the arm that Stafford does. Both have qualities that you like and they have something that bothers you a bit. Someone is going to roll the dice on these quarterbacks, whether it’s the Lions at No. 1, Kansas City at No. 3 or San Francisco at No. 10. And the Jets might be looking at a quarterback unless they like Brett Ratliff enough.In terms of Stafford and Sanchez, they are going to have high grades. Hopefully both of them turn out to be good quarterbacks. Both are going to end up going to teams that aren’t very good probably and be asked to be very good early in their career. Can they handle it? We will see.”"
On how Kiper formulates his ratings:
"“I rate players from their junior year through their senior year, or a third-year sophomore on if they come out. You’re rating kids not just based on one year. You’re basing it on two years at least. These grades I have right now are not going to jump that dramatically. …“If you know where a kid is ranked before the Combine and you have rankings on all these kids, yeah, you’ll move them up some and you’ll drop some kids some, but it’s not going to be significant because the rating is based on how they played.“The Combine is based on how a kid works out. Now if a kid’s not within a certain range, his stock is dropping. Because I don’t care what he did in college, this is the NFL. If his numbers are not close to the numbers that you need, or the range that you need, his stock is going to drop.”"