Twenty-one linebackers were selected in the 2012 NFL draft before the Green Bay Packers took North Carolina State’s Terrell Manning in the fifth round. But Manning doesn’t think any of them are better than him.
“I feel like I was as good as any linebacker in this draft,” Manning said. “I’m looking to prove that.”
Packers General Manager Ted Thompson wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that Manning is the best linebacker in the entire draft, but he did like Manning enough that he traded a sixth-round pick and two seventh-round picks to New England to get Manning with the 163rd overall pick (which originally belonged to the Packers, before they traded it to the Patriots).
“It was just a situation where we felt a player was being undervalued a little bit,” Thompson said. “We didn’t know how long he would be undervalued.”
One person who doesn’t undervalue Manning is Manning himself. We’ll see once he gets on the field if he can back up that high opinion he has of his own talent.