Our item from Saturday regarding Maryland’s Bruce Campbell, who put up eye-popping numbers at the Scouting Combine as an offensive lineman but with whom multiple teams have yet to fall in love, sparked a mixed bag of responses. One league source insisted that Campbell is a sure-fire first-round pick -- another one said that Campbell “tests better than he plays.”
It could be the first concrete example in 2010 of the strange dynamic that plays out in the pre-draft buildup. Teams that love a guy will put out bad opinions about him, in the hopes that the player will still be on the board when they use their pick. Teams that hate a guy will talk him up, with the goal of getting someone else to waste a pick on him, thereby pushing the rest of the draft pool one step farther down the ladder.
In Campbell’s case, however, a guy who studies this stuff as closely as anyone was candid. Mike Mayock placed the “buyer beware” tag on Campbell during Sunday’s excellent NFLN coverage, explaining that the former Terp has a lot of “average” film.
And that’s the most direct tie to Jets linebacker Vernon Gholston, whose stellar workout numbers and Paul Orndorff physique got the team to overlook plenty of subpar film. Though we’ve come to greatly respect the recent efforts of Jets G.M. Mike Tannenbaum, just think about how much better that team could be if they’d drafted an actual contributor with the sixth overall pick two seasons ago.
Of course, the Campbell comment wasn’t Mayock’s best of the day. When a former BYU player prepared to run the 40-yard dash, Mayock said, “They aren’t allowed to have sex until they’re married so they all get married at 17.”
Cue Maureen Stapleton lecturing Griffin Dunne in Johnny Dangerously.