Look, I know I already wrote this guy’s career off a while back, but I was really hoping that Oakland would come to their senses and not pull a “Mario Williams”. But since they did go ahead and totally pooch the draft, the numbers guy in me instantly went running to see if I could, at all, back up my thoughts with some stats. I think before, I kind of shorted the argument, thinking that there was too much time to make any conclusions about the draft… but I should have known the Raiders would do the wrong thing. Now, let me start by saying that I do think that JaMarcus Russell is a great football player. In no way am I trying to make him out to be a hack… but put any top QB on a crap team with no help and voila, the ghost of old Ryan Leaf may just appear. And Russell may even turn out to be a good NFL player, but that still does not change the logic behind thinking that Calvin Johnson would have made a better long-term investment.

Before I looked at stats, here was really how I came up with the basis for thinking, nay insisting, that the Raiders take Calvin Johnson with the first pick (which obviously did not happen): 1. The Raiders messed up last year passing on Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler, 2. the Raiders messed up by going out to get Randy Moss, and 3. that taking Russell, and not the best player in the draft (Johnson) would not fix the mistakes of their past, but would add a third. I mean hell, look at the Lions, they went ahead and took Johnson in the first round, and as comical as it was to see them take their 4th wide receiver in the first round in the past five years, I have to give them credit for having the cajones to step up to the mike and take the best guy available to them at that draft pick. Again, forget the mistakes of the past, because if you are drafting to compensate for old errors, guess what geniuses, you’ll only make it worse by making yet another mistake.

So first off, I was interested in how successful the players have been who were drafted first overall.

Looking just at Pro Bowl appearances, quarterbacks have actually been below the overall average, and of the four receivers taken first overall, three made multiple trips to the Pro Bowl. Right there, that tells me that taking Calvin Johnson first overall might actually be less risky than Russell, considering that history shows when the top talent in the draft is a receiver, they tend to put out like Paris Hilton.

So now that I feel better about being correct, and will feel free to tell everyone at the bars about that later tonight, so lets love on and look again at the team who took Russell, and their history in selecting QB’s: it’s not pretty. Of the 30 quarterbacks taken by the Raiders in the official history of the draft, their two most successful quarterbacks are arguably Roman Gabriel and Ken Stabler… and Gabriel did not play for the Raiders despite being drafted by them first overall in 1962 (he played for the Rams and Eagles). That means that in the history of the franchise, they are essentially batting .067 when it comes to drafting quarterbacks. The biggest disappointment of the bunch has to be Todd Marinovich. Thus Roman Gabriel and Todd Marinovich were Oakland’s first and last QB’s taken in the first round until today, and my question: will JaMarcus Russell be more like Roman, or Todd?

But, maybe there is something else at play; both Gabriel and Stabler were born in the South, and Marinovich and others like Andrew Walter were born in the West. Russell, like Stabler, was born in Alabama, so maybe there is some strange Unsolved Mysteries thing going on there, that Robert Stack needs to step in and explain? Also, its not quite 40 years, but it still eerily close, and it was 39 years ago the Raiders took Stabler in the second round.

So now with all that being said… who the hell knows how JaMarcus Russell will do, but if you ask me he is not talented enough to take a Raiders team that struggled in both the run and the pass, and make something of it. Calvin Johnson on the other hand, might not have starred, but wide receiver is a position that is much easier to allow someone to develop and bring along as you build a team. And considering the money and investment in the team the Raiders just made today, I really think that they just got outdrafted by Matt-friggin’-Millen, and that in itself is something to be very, very ashamed of.

* Converted to WR