Larry Fitzgerald has already lived through one failed top-10 pick at quarterback in Arizona. He didn’t want to go through it again.
“If you miss at corner, you can plug in someone else and play through it. If you miss at that position [quarterback], it’ll set your franchise back years, man,” Fitzgerald told Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports Thursday.
(Matt Leinart sends his regards.)
Silver spent draft night at Fitzgerald’s house, and it’s clear the Cardinals receiver is a budding draftnik.
“When I was looking at the [possible] picks, I thought Miller, Green and Peterson were the best available players, and the can’t-miss guys,” Fitzgerald said. “I didn’t see a can’t-miss quarterback. A can’t-miss quarterback is a guy like Andrew Luck, a guy who’s got every single intangible you could ever want . . . like Matt Ryan.
Fitzgerald wasn’t down with the quarterback options available in the top five picks this year, but he knows the Cardinals have to upgrade the situation this offseason. If they don’t do it quickly, many believe that Fitzgerald will bolt out of the desert.
“I don’t have any plan of doing that,” Fitzgerald said. “They don’t have to prove anything to me.”
That sounds great, but it’s hard to imagine Fitzgerald remaining in Arizona in 2012 if someone like John Skelton is still atop the team’s quarterback depth chart.