Gary Seymour, sports@wolfrivermedia.com
Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell was asked before the season opener against San Francisco what fans might expect from the Brewers this year.
Counsell avoided any tangible references, limiting his answer to the general excitations he was having about the overall excitement of the new season, which to Brewers fans everywhere was exciting to hear.
Basketball and ice hockey are winding it up, spring has finally arrived, and along with it – for many sports enthusiasts in these parts – thoughts of the next season of interest.
Football!
Talking about the Packers at this time of year instead of the Brewers may simply be a matter of being kind.
Brilliantly engineered Miller Park can combat the ravages of nature, as it did on Opening Day, when snow was falling outside while fans stayed dry and warm indoors thanks to the ballpark’s climate-friendly retracting dome.
But the Brewers may have a hard time getting opposing batters out, as punctually illustrated in the opener. San Francisco cranked out 15 hits and handed Brewers reliever Ariel Pena the ultimate in bad-things-come-in-threes, hitting back-to-back-to-back home runs to blow open a 12-3 win.
There is little to nothing expected of the Brewers this season, as Counsell tried his best to gently convey, but that’s not necessarily an awful thing. If the baby steps the Brewers take back to respectability are measurable, a sub-.500 season can be considered successful.
Not the case in Green Bay, where the window on a possible Super Bowl is creaking shut like the roof at Miller Park.
With the April 28 NFL draft approaching, the front office is looking to address the team’s needs at linebacker, cornerback and on the offensive line, while Packers fans hope general manager Ted Thompson can pull another Aaron Rodgers or Clay Matthews from the field.
Always provocative and stimulating, the draft is an inexact science because of the human element attached to every pick. How do you know who’s good and who’s great and who’s average, who’s going to get injured, or try hard, or stay out of trouble? You don’t. Even when it’s a sure thing, you never know, as was the case with Tony Mandarich.
Mandarich’s name often surfaces at draft time due to his having been considered one of the biggest draft flops ever.
The No. 2 overall pick of the 1989 draft, Mandarich was considered the best offensive line prospect of all time when he was an All-American tackle at Michigan State, and was chosen ahead of Barry Sanders, Derrick Thomas and Deion Sanders. Mandarich, the only one of the top five draftees in his class to not make the Hall of Fame, fell far short of draft-day expectations, never making All-Pro, never playing in the Pro Bowl and retiring after six undistinguished seasons with the Packers and Colts.
It was a tough way to learn about there being no sure things in the draft.
The street runs both ways, though, and you never know when you might upturn a gem in the later rounds, as happened with Donald Driver (seventh round, 1999) and Kabeer Gbaja-Biamala (fifth round, 2000).
The value of any draft pick doesn’t become known for a while, anyway, so any immediate “grading” of teams’ choice of selections is presumptuous.
Thompson’s track record as a GM will always include the qualifier of his being the guy who spent the 24th overall pick of the 2005 draft on the quarterback from the University of California-Berkeley. Rodgers is an outstanding pro who will be in the Hall of Fame one day.
The same can’t be said for another QB from Cal drafted by the Packers. With Ronnie Lott, Howie Long, Mike Singletary, Russ Grimm and Rickey Jackson still available in the 1981 draft, the Packers took Rich Campbell.
How could the Packers have chosen Rich Campbell ahead of the other obviously better options?
Sometimes it’s the simplest answer. Their crystal ball may have had a virus.