Maurice Jones-Drew lasted until the Jaguars picked him late in the second round of the 2006 NFL draft. He hasn’t forgotten.
And so when Jones-Drew talks about that draft, he likes to point out that a whole lot of the players drafted ahead of him didn’t last in the NFL.
“Half the guys drafted in front of me are working at Target right now,” Jones-Drew said, via Mark Long of the Associated Press.
It’s a slight exaggeration to say “half” of the 59 players drafted ahead of Jones-Drew are working at Target (I think a few of them are working at McDonald’s), but there certainly were a lot of high-profile picks who didn’t turn out in 2006. Vince Young and Matt Leinart, the two Top 10 quarterbacks that year, are both currently out of work. And of the five running backs drafted ahead of Jones-Drew, three -- Laurence Maroney, Joseph Addai and LenDale White -- are already out of the league.
Jones-Drew turned out to be one of the best players in the draft. As he sat there in 2006 hearing 59 names called ahead of his, he was thinking those players weren’t as good as him, and now he can boast that he was right.