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PROLOGUE
The 2005 NFL Draft
Saturday, April 23, 2005
The citizens of Waycross, Georgia turned out in force to watch the 2005 NFL Draft. More than 300 gathered at the city’s new community center to honor Fred Gibson, who had gone from Waycross to stardom at the University of Georgia and now was looking at a big payday in the NFL.
Banners were posted, along with blown-up images from Gibson’s Bulldogs career. There were wide-screen televisions tuned to ESPN, a giant bouncy house set up for the kids, and an impressive spread of ribs, barbecue, chicken, potato salad, baked beans, and cake.
Gibson, a skinny six-four wide receiver, arrived at the community center an hour into the first round and couldn’t believe the turnout. His immediate family was there, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, former coaches, and seemingly everyone he had known since early childhood.
NFL teams selected three wide receivers among the first picks – Braylon Edwards of Michigan, South Carolina’s Troy Williamson, and Mike Williams of Southern Cal – but Gibson was not concerned. He didn’t expect to go that high.
His agents, Doug Hendrickson and Demetro Stephens of Octagon, were not on hand but offered encouragement over the phone. They believed Gibson could go as early as the end of the first round, certainly no later than the third.
It was a festive atmosphere at the Waycross community center. The guest of honor played the role of gracious host, all the while keeping an eye on ESPN. The draft proceeded slowly during the first round, with selections trickling out every fifteen minutes.
Gibson grew a little anxious at the end of the round when the Baltimore Ravens chose Oklahoma’s Mark Clayton at number twenty-two and the hometown Atlanta Falcons opted for Roddy White of Alabama-Birmingham at number twenty-seven. Gibson had worked out alongside Clayton and White at the Senior Bowl, the late-January all-star game in Mobile, Alabama. He couldn’t begrudge the teams for drafting such talented receivers.
The party grew silent early in the second round when the Philadelphia Eagles selected Reggie Brown, who also was a wide receiver out of the University of Georgia. The two Bulldogs were linked together, though for much of their careers Gibson was viewed as the better pro prospect.
Gibson pumped his fist and smiled. “Good for Reggie,” he said.
The draft moved more quickly now, just five minutes per pick starting with the second round, and Gibson paid closer attention. “Just sit tight,” Hendrickson told him over the phone.
More receivers came off the board. The Chicago Bears selected Oklahoma’s Mark Bradley. Roscoe Parrish, a speedy five-ten receiver from Miami, went to the Buffalo Bills. The Green Bay Packers picked up Terrence Murphy from Texas A&M and the San Diego Chargers grabbed Northern Colorado’s Vincent Jackson.
Gibson stood in disbelief as the second round ended. He checked his cell phone to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Friends did their best to distract him. Surely he would go soon.
The third round got underway shortly after 9:00 P.M. The Tennessee Titans, with the fourth pick in the round, chose Indiana’s Courtney Roby. Teams were drafting quickly now, but it seemed nobody wanted a wide receiver. Fourteen selections passed. Much of the Waycross crowd dispersed, but Gibson remained. Surely the call would come soon.
The Cincinnati Bengals were on the clock now, having already selected two of Gibson’s Georgia teammates: defensive end David Pollack in the first and linebacker Odell Thurman in the second. The Bengals chose a wide receiver in the third round, but it was Chris Henry of West Virginia.
Two picks later, the Seattle Seahawks selected Georgia quarterback David Greene. Gibson was happy for “Greeney.” Like the rest of his Bulldogs teammates, Greene was picked at or before where most of the endless mock drafts projected him in the weeks leading up to the draft.
The next ten selections yielded no receivers. It was approaching 11:00 P.M. when Tennessee drafted Brandon Jones. Gibson couldn’t believe it. Did the entire NFL really consider three wide receivers from Oklahoma better than him?
The crowd had all but dispersed by the time the Denver Broncos ended the first day of the draft by selecting Maurice Clarett, a controversial figure for his failed attempt to challenge the NFL’s draft-eligibility rules and for accusing Ohio State, his former school, of all manner of wrongdoing.
There would be four more rounds tomorrow. Gibson put on a brave face and accepted encouragement from the stragglers. As he drove his white GMC Yukon back to his grandmother’s house, he pondered how much money he had lost in the last twelve hours.
A year earlier, the last pick in the second round – defensive end Marquis Hill of Louisiana State University – received a signing bonus of $1.15 million from the New England Patriots. The final draftee in the third round – Purdue linebacker Landon Johnson, taken by the Cincinnati Bengals – received a signing bonus of $441,000. Gibson didn’t even want to think about first-round cash.
But it wasn’t just the money. Gibson knew that where a player was drafted influenced the direction of his career. Sure, plenty of low draft picks went on to stardom; New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, a sixth-round pick, was the NFL’s most visible example. Still, the higher a player was drafted, the more slack teams would give him to learn complex schemes and make an impact. Teams found it easier to cut ties with players in which they had invested little.
How, Gibson wondered, did teams forget about him? Had he not done everything he could have since his college career ended on New Year’s Day, when Georgia defeated Wisconsin in the Outback Bowl in Tampa?
Gibson excelled at the Senior Bowl and performed decently at the NFL scouting combine in February. Admittedly, his time in the forty-yard dash (4.55 seconds) was nothing to brag about, but he had run faster for scouts during the University of Georgia’s “pro day” in March. Over the last four months, he had undergone dozens of interviews with NFL teams and always came across as gregarious, confident yet humble. Everyone loved “Freddy G.”
At least that’s how it seemed to Gibson. Surely, NFL teams did not view thirteen wide receivers in a better light. Did they?
Back home, Gibson broke down in front of his grandmother, Delores Bethea, who had raised him after her daughter, Brenda, gave birth at thirteen. It was the first time he had cried in front of Bethea in years.
“They’re telling me I can’t play football,” he sobbed. “Am I not good enough to play?”
Bethea comforted her grandson. Tomorrow would be another day.
* * *
In Charlotte, Chris Canty tried not to watch the draft. It was like passing an automobile accident; he knew it was ugly but had to know what was happening. Unlike Fred Gibson, he kept the day a low-key affair. He wisely did not invite friends over, preferring to watch with family. As the day wore on, his parents, both brothers, and assorted uncles and aunts tried to turn the topic of conversation elsewhere.
The last eight months had been a rollercoaster for Canty, a six-seven defensive end who had played at the University of Virginia. Before the 2004 season, many scouts viewed Canty as a potential first-round pick. A month into the year, he shredded three of the four ligaments in his left knee during a game against Syracuse. He underwent grueling rehabilitation to restore the knee and by late January was feeling close to 100 percent.
That’s when he walked into a nightclub in Scottsdale and ended up in a scuffle. Words were exchanged. In the darkness, someone smashed a bottle in Canty’s face. He suffered a detached left retina. Even now, three months later, there still were bruises.
Some teams worried about the eye. Others had concerns about the knee. Some wondered about both. Still, Canty believed he could go as high as the second round, at least that’s what he said agent Ethan Lock had led him to think.
Canty had spent the last month trying to eliminate the concern teams had about his knee and eye. It didn’t help that he did not work out at the University of Virginia’s pro day in Charlottesville on March 23, taking a few extra weeks to prepare for a private workout at his former high school in Charlotte. Since he missed the first day of the NFL combine, where players are physically examined, tested, and interviewed before all thirty-two teams in Indianapolis, he had to travel back to Indianapolis in early April for a physical. The knee checked out fine, but the eye doctor expressed concern about the retina. Those reservations became part of the official league file.
A dozen teams sent representatives to Canty’s workout on April 14. The Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys also flew him in for interviews. Canty performed all of the familiar combine drills, but concerns lingered.
“There’s not much market for a one-legged, one-eyed defensive end,” one general manager said before the draft.
So Canty watched as teams selected five defensive ends in the first round. He couldn’t argue with the picks, though it still hurt to see guys he once was rated alongside go high. At Virginia, Canty had played a key role in head coach Al Groh’s 3-4 defense, an increasingly popular scheme in the NFL featuring three down lineman and four linebackers.
Groh had spent much of his coaching career as an NFL assistant under Bill Parcells, who was remodeling his Dallas Cowboys defense into the 3-4. Parcells wielded two picks in the first round and chose a pair of defensive ends with no major physical ailments, Troy State’s Demarcus Ware and Marcus Spears of LSU.
The second round featured just two defensive ends. The Miami Dolphins grabbed Iowa’s Matt Roth with the fourteenth pick. Canty figured his best hope was the Ravens, and they did select an end with the twenty-first pick, but it was Oklahoma’s Dan Cody.
By the third round, Canty began thinking the wait could go into Sunday. Only two teams took ends. Those players, Notre Dame’s Justin Tuck (New York Giants) and Vincent Burns of Kentucky (Indianapolis Colts), were rated below Canty, at least before the eye injury.
Few players had fallen as far as Canty, who sighed as the Broncos picked the ultimate damaged goods, former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett, to close ESPN’s first day of draft coverage.
Shirley Canty tried to console her son. A tall, striking woman, she served as pastor of the Calvary United Methodist Church in Charlotte. “You have to trust God’s plan for your life,” she said.
Chris nodded. Tomorrow was Sunday, the second day of the NFL Draft. They would pray about it in the morning. Perhaps later that day God’s plan would materialize.
For now, Chris stared at the widescreen television in the corner of the living room. Throughout the room were framed news clippings from his career at the University of Virginia, along with a handsome display of his oversized diploma, and a photo taken from the center of the school’s historic grounds, an area designed by school founder Thomas Jefferson
ESPN analysts were recapping the day’s events. Canty watched the names scroll along the bottom. There were former University of Virginia teammates, along with opposing players he had outplayed. There were guys he had trained with in Arizona before the NFL scouting combine and a few names that didn’t ring a bell.
All told, one hundred and one players heard from NFL teams on the first day of the NFL Draft. Sixteen months earlier, after Canty’s junior season, there were agents and draft experts projecting him as a second-round pick for the 2004 Draft if he left school early. Even an NFL advisory committee rated him a potential first-day selection.
Instead, Canty bypassed the draft, hung around to earn the diploma, enrolled in graduate school, and now was staring blankly at Chris Berman, wondering how so much could change so quickly.
From Chapter Fourteen: PRO DAYS
Todd France pulled his black Mercedes CLK 430 convertible into a parking garage near the University of Georgia’s Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall. It was March 22, 2005, which not only was pro day for the Bulldogs but also the twenty-second birthday of safety Thomas Davis, France’s client.
To mark the occasion, France carried a giant chocolate chip cookie inside a box large enough to hold a pizza. Davis, as an elite athlete, would eat little if any of the cookie but that wasn’t the point. France, like his competitors, was all about personal attention.
France walked briskly through wind and light rain into Butts-Mehre, another multi-million-dollar shrine to the flourishing business of college football, complete with vast workout and meeting facilities, a Bulldogs museum, and decorated in an elegant style normally reserved for luxury hotels and high-end law firms.
The Bulldogs, coming off a 10-2 season, were winning the college football arms race, though the large contingent of scouts and prominent agents filing into the building served as a reminder of how hard-pressed they would be to reload for the 2005 season.
France, like the other agents, stood sentry by a bank of elevators near the meeting room that would serve as the briefing area for the scouts and Georgia officials. He nodded at rival Atlanta representatives Pat Dye Jr. and Bill Johnson, who did the same, and greeted NFL executives as they passed. France, unlike Dye, had spent the previous day at Auburn at the pro day of clients Ronnie Brown and Carlos Rogers.
Once the NFL officials were seated and doors to the meeting room were closed, France sidled up to Tom Condon, the IMG agent whose draft clients included David Pollack, the Georgia defensive end projected as a first-round pick.
Condon and France exchanged pleasantries. In France’s young career, he rarely had gone head-to-head with IMG for a client; Condon landed Pollack ahead of Ethan Lock, whose Arizona firm of Lock, Metz & Malinovic represented Wisconsin defensive end Erasmus James and Virginia’s Chris Canty, among others, for the 2005 draft.
France had only a five-person staff, unlike the hundreds employed by the worldwide conglomerate of IMG that represented athletes and sports properties throughout the industry, including a vast football client list headlined by Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson and Chad Pennington, the quarterback of the New York Jets.
But France had arguably as impressive a class for the 2005 draft. Condon and partner Ken “Fuzzy” Kremer represented Utah quarterback Alex Smith, projected as the number-one overall pick, along with Pollack and potential first-rounders Heath Miller, the Virginia tight end; and Chris Spencer, an offensive lineman from Ole Miss. France had three sure-fire top-twenty picks in Davis and his two Auburn clients.
Condon and France stepped back as the meeting broke up and scouts flooded into the lobby. Georgia officials, like their Florida State counterparts a week earlier, rearranged the schedule to account for the weather, moving the forty-yard dash first.
As the scouts and players headed outside, Tim Ruskell adjusted his Seattle Seahawks cap. It had been exactly a month since he left his job as assistant general manager of the Atlanta Falcons to become president of the Seahawks. The move included a huge increase in salary, though it didn’t feel like such a promotion at the moment.
With the exception of Titans general manager Floyd Reese, who was continuing his iron-man schedule of pro day events, Ruskell was by far the highest-ranking official at Bulldogs pro day. Many team presidents, including his former boss Rich McKay, were in Hawaii for the NFL’s annual meetings. Most general managers and head coaches also were there.
Though Ruskell was well up-to-speed on the 2005 draft with the Atlanta Falcons, he was looking at it from a new perspective, evaluating talent with different needs in mind. Not only that, he had inherited a skeleton Seahawks staff that since the beginning of the year had lost its vice president of football operations, general manager, and director of college scouting.
So, instead of going to Hawaii, Ruskell packed his stopwatch and new Seahawks logo sportswear and hit the road, with Auburn and Georgia two of his more prominent stops. Outside at the Bulldogs’ track, he took a prominent position at the finish line of the forty-yard dash.
“I’m always going to approach this from a scout’s perspective because that’s where I came from,” Ruskell said. “If I didn’t do that, then the Seahawks aren’t getting the benefit of why they hired me.”
The wind seemed to help the Georgia players. Fred Gibson ran between a 4.42 and a 4.48, depending on the stopwatch. Teammate Reggie Brown ran slightly faster. David Greene and Pollack opted not to run, standing with their times at the combine. Davis, the star attraction, ran between a 4.48 and a 4.55.
Doug Hendrickson, Gibson’s agent, was convinced his client’s stock was strong. “He’s a late first (round), maybe the second round,” he said. “He’s shed the basketball image.”
With the sky growing darker and the wind beginning to gust, the players proceeded to a practice field for position drills. Like most major football programs, Georgia had one field made of artificial turf. Instead of the knee-punishing Astroturf of the 1980s, it was a synthetic blend of sand and shredded rubber, topped by the equivalent of a giant green welcome mat.
Greene, wearing gray sweats from the combine, loosened up at midfield, flanked wide by Gibson and Brown. Zeke Bratkowski watched nearby, as did Mike Johnson, the quarterbacks coach for the Atlanta Falcons.
The last thing the Falcons needed was a quarterback. In December, the team signed Michael Vick to an eight-year contract extension worth $130 million through 2013. Matt Schaub, selected in the third-round of the 2004 draft, had quickly grasped the West Coast offense, having played it at the University of Virginia, and the Falcons were confident he could fill in capably if Vick were injured.
Still, Greene intrigued the Falcons. He was a proven winner, having led the Bulldogs to 42 wins, a record for Division 1-A quarterbacks. He was unflappable under pressure and a leader by any measuring stick. He also possessed the rare gift of being able to treat members of the media like old buddies without divulging secrets or saying anything remotely controversial.
Greene also had grown up in the Atlanta suburbs, which was no small matter for McKay, who believed having local products on the roster was grossly underrated. Even in the modern mercenary world of sports, with wealthy athletes often detached from their communities, McKay found fans were more likely to give a team and its players the benefit of the doubt if there was a local connection, no matter how tenuous.
In Tampa, McKay drafted heavily from the University of Florida and Florida State. Shaun King, a marginally-talented quarterback selected in the second-round out of Tulane in 1999, became a fan favorite despite his erratic play. King had grown up in St. Petersburg and, like Greene, lacked the traditional size and athleticism NFL teams demanded in quarterbacks.
That thinking was shifting, especially now that former sixth-round pick Tom Brady had led the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl titles in four years.
“Brady was on the lower end of physical ability,” said Mike Johnson, who evaluated Brady in 2000 as quarterbacks coach in San Diego. “But he was high on the intangible side. Same thing with Greene. If you’re a guy that lacks physical ability, you better have the smarts, intelligence and decision-making ability. For a guy like Greene, it balances out.”
As Greene fired passes to Gibson and Brown, Ruskell approached Pat Dye Jr. Unlike his former Falcons colleagues, Ruskell had a pressing need for a quarterback to play behind starter Matt Hasselbeck. He also liked Dye’s client Demarcus Ware, though he knew the Seahawks would have no shot at Ware picking twenty-third in the first round.
When Greene was finished, Ruskell asked him how he felt about playing for the Seahawks. The question is a typical conversation starter this time of year, whether in interviews at the combine or in more casual settings. Greene, who had never been to the West Coast, expressed enthusiasm for the Seahawks and related a story involving Hasselbeck.
It was a predictable response. With players coached for interviews, scouts rarely hear anything but excitement about playing for any team, no matter how cold the climate or how poorly the team has played in recent years. Are you kidding? I’d absolutely love to play for the Lions!
“You take it half seriously,” Ruskell says. “You run across players that clearly have a preference. Either they grew up as a fan of a team or want to stay close to home. But you can use it to gauge passion and how excited a guy might be to play for you. You can only fake it so much.”
When Ruskell finished with Greene, a scout from the Green Bay Packers took the quarterback to the other end of the field for some more drills. Greene had learned not to read anything into which teams seemed to be giving him more attention.
“You’ve got so many different teams and different schemes and they want to see how you fit and I don’t blame them,” Greene said. “If you’re going to invest all that money in someone, you want to check everything out. Guys get picked by teams that never spoke to them. They had no questions because they knew they were going to be great players. I don’t even try and figure it out. It’s like chasing your tail.”
The star of the morning was birthday boy Davis, who was rapidly ascending in the draft. Davis performed both linebacker and defensive back drills. The vibe France got from teams was that half projected him as a safety in the NFL, the other half a linebacker.
The Falcons and Seahawks were among the teams that coveted Davis, but they knew he would be long gone by the twenty-third and twenty-seventh picks. He had the thickness of a linebacker and the speed of a defensive back, but though he had the physique of a bodybuilder, he lacked traditional weight room numbers.
After position drills, the crowd moved inside. Georgia, unlike most schools, allowed everyone into the weight room: agents, media, friends, family, students, and underclassmen. If Georgia officials were concerned about agents talking with underclassmen, they didn’t show it. Representatives spoke freely with up-and-coming players alongside motivational signs such as “The Desire to Win is Worthless without the Desire to Prepare,” “Do You Have a Bad Case of the Wants?” and “Rule No.7: Ask God for Help.”
The weigh-in took place first. Fred Gibson again checked in at 196. Davis, who did not bench-press at the combine, managed only 12 repetitions, barely half that of players of comparable size (six feet, 230 pounds).
No matter. For players with the talent of Davis, weight room performance was irrelevant. Later, while Davis showered, France waited to take his client to lunch. He sat on a weight bench near the sign for Rule No.6 – “See Yourself Making a Great Play.”
The rest of the agents, scouts and players had departed. The draft was one month away and for thirty-three-year-old Todd France, it was all coming together.
Excepted from The Draft: A Year Inside the NFL’s Search for Talent. Copyright 2006 by Pete Williams. Used with permission from St. Martin’s Press.
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