Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
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The United States completed a 5-0 rout of Switzerland in the Davis Cup on Sunday, with 19-year-old Ryan Harrison and John Isner winning closing singles matches.
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Tessa Worley of France fought off gusting winds to win a second consecutive World Cup giant slalom Sunday in the Andorran Pyrenees. Overall leader Lindsey Vonn was more than a second behind and finished eighth.
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AP
During the 2007 offseason, the New York Giants signed just one free agent who contributed to their Super Bowl victory. But all eight draft picks made the team and a half-dozen contributed to their remarkable playoff run.
That’s something for NFL teams, who notoriously mimic the Super Bowl winner, to contemplate when the free agent season starts in a couple of weeks. It’s nothing new: The draft has always been of overriding importance during the free-agent era because it supplies relatively cheap labor that makes it unnecessary to tax a salary cap by overpaying for average free agents, the kind most often available.
Just ask Washington owner Daniel Snyder, who has spent his team into mediocrity by overpaying for the aged (Bruce Smith), the average (Antwaan Randle El) and the awful (Adam Archuleta).
By contrast, their NFC East rival managed to win a Super Bowl two weeks ago with major contributions from youngsters.
Consider this crop: CB Aaron Ross (first round); WR Steve Smith (2); DT and long snapper Jay Alford (3); TE Kevin Boss (5); S Michael Johnson and RB Ahmad Bradshaw (7). At the same time, they signed only one free agent of note, LB Kawika Mitchell — for just a year — to fill an immediate need at the position.
All the draft picks and Mitchell made significant contributions in the playoffs, and all contributed in the Super Bowl. That win was capped by Alford’s sack of Tom Brady on the second play of New England’s final drive after New York took the lead on Eli Manning’s 13-yard touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress with 35 seconds left.
They also make it more likely that the Giants, one of the NFL’s half-dozen youngest teams, might reverse both an NFC and team trend next season. Only two of the conference’s last nine Super Bowl representatives has made it to the playoffs the next year, and the Giants have NEVER made it back the season after their three previous Super Bowl trips.
But this should be a team that breaks the trend because it has drafted so well.
“They can write this team off again if they want but they’re going to be wrong,” former general manager Ernie Accorsi says. “It’s sound at the key positions and they’re signed, and the QB is going to only get better.”
“The QB,” of course, is Manning, whom Accorsi traded for with San Diego after the Chargers took him with the first pick of the 2004 draft. As Manning stumbled through much of his first four seasons, Accorsi took a lot of heat, especially because he gave up a bundle of draft choices in the deal — one that San Diego used to take star linebacker Shawne Merriman.
On the other hand, Accorsi’s 2005 draft, in which he had only four picks because of the trade, turned out to be brilliant. In the second round, the Giants took CB Corey Webster, whose interception of Brett Favre set up the winning field goal in the NFC championship game; in the third, they took DL Justin Tuck, who had two sacks and numerous hits on Brady in the Super Bowl; and in the fourth they got RB Brandon Jacobs, the leader of the running back committee that replaced the retired Tiki Barber.
Accorsi retired after the 2006 season and turned the job over to Jerry Reese, who as personnel director was deeply involved in the previous drafts.
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Ross started nine games and had three interceptions, one for a TD, as a rookie. Smith, injured for most of the regular season, had 14 catches for 152 yards in four postseason games, including a 12-yard reception on third-and-11 on the play before Manning’s game-winning TD pass to Burress. Alford made it into the DT rotation and had that key sack on Brady in the Super Bowl.
The late-rounders were even bigger bargains.
Boss, who took over at tight end when Jeremy Shockey was injured, had two TD catches late in the regular season and a 45-yard catch in the Super Bowl that helped set up the Giants’ first touchdown.
Bradshaw, who had an 88-yard TD run to seal the Giants’ playoff-clinching victory in Buffalo, led the Giants in rushing in the postseason with 208 yards (Jacobs had 197). The 250th of 255 players taken in the draft, he is the perfect example of a risk/reward pick that paid off.
“As a player, we had him ranked as a midround pick,” said Reese, who got him in the seventh because Bradshaw had been arrested while at Marshall for taking a video game from another student’s room, and was put on probation after pleading guilty to petty larceny. With the emphasis last year on character issues, he fell in the draft despite rushing for 1,523 yards in his final season in college.
Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
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Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
