Originally posted by NCommand:
Originally posted by captveg:
To be fair, Foster was also very personable. Everyone who met him talked about how his personality filled the room with positive energy. You can see it in interviews with the media. It's easy to see why people would like him.
Character, intelligence and the drive to be great can certainly be hard to measure at times. They've had their blunders with Foster, Pettis and Joe Williams.
Looking back, I always thought Foster was very "slow" so to speak and Pettis & Williams certainly had a ton of pre warning signs.
The good news is they seem to learn and go opposite extremes. Breida and Mostert get legit chances to earn spots (over a 3rd rounder), Sanders, Hurd, Deebo, etc. DOGS are brought in and they went out and spent big on their mistake in Foster not planning out...hell, Kinlaw for the Solomon Thomas mistake too.
Ok, i admit i'm a kyle , john homer. But in all honesty...and i knew full well about the obvious screw up at the combine...Reuben was a mistake i would have made 10 times out of 10. Had a great smile, i already alluded to his brilliance in Defensive football analysis on the Gruden QB show (when he still was a TV color guy, not a coach), and you had to love his enthusiasm, both during an interview and on the football field. I think the blue tent was invented for Reuben because he routinely hit ball carriers so hard he almost knocked himself out.
The kid was absolutely a "find" in the football world, best LB in draft and i think rated #3 pick/talent overall pre draft. Keep in mind , JL and kyle just starting out, and we are a zero team. No talent, unknown GM, and best OC on the planet. Amazing we had 45 players and basically only 2 or 3 stayed on. I mean we were bottom of the barrel. As such, to get real talent we had to reach...and ...well, with the radiology tech at the combine thing...Reuben was a reach. Talent, personality in interviews, smarts on football field. I admit, i got sucked in.
That has happened a few times in medical practice which would be over 200,000 patients( a good many of those seen while working ERs) but also a slew of patients in the office practice of medicine. That is, where i trusted a patient, only to later find they were being dishonest, which ended our physician-patient relationship. When going back over what did i miss, usually it was a person who was actually two people, and i just knew one of them. Ergo, Reuben Foster. We just knew one of the two people in there. Nobody was aware there was another.
But the smart fans knew to pay attn to the combine issue. When you are a struggling team, really short on talent, just trying to stay alive, and a superb talent comes along, but with a red flag...you have to pay attn to the red flags, no matter how good the talent is. We were desperate for talent...and Saban said Reuben was 4+/4+ . JL/kyle rolled the dice. Came up craps tho.
As we have seen, they learned their lesson. Odd it would occur on the very first day of talent acquisition...a lifelong lesson occurred first crack out of the box. When you get right down to it, that actually was a fortuitous time for that to happen. Sooner you get that out of your system the better.
Also learned one other thing early. Know your HCs and who shoots straight and who doesn't. John and kyle learned about Saban...but all was not lost. They now know about Muschamp ...and that's a good thing.
[ Edited by pasodoc9er on May 25, 2020 at 12:07 PM ]
