Sam Monson at profootballfocus.com reviews what he thought were the biggest reaches in the draft. I think this one might surprise most Bears fans:
“Eddie Goldman, DT, Florida State
#39 Overall to Chicago.“Goldman is the classic example of a player who looks like he should be fantastic, but just isn’t. You read scouting reports on him and you wonder if they have been written just by looking at his sheer physical size and whether they bothered to actually turn on any tape whatsoever. Maybe throw on a quick highlight reel just to confirm it…
“The trouble is that Goldman does not play to his physical ability very often at all. He is regularly credited as a player that can ‘take on double teams’, but unless you are happy with him taking them on by being driven off the line and crushed by two blockers, then that’s not exactly a positive of his. Goldman was the 45th-ranked defensive interior player in this draft class when looking only at run defense grade. As a pass-rusher he was almost exactly average – in the entire FBS!
“Even those grades are kind to him because around half of his positive grade came in one game against Louisville, who might well have the worst starting center in the nation.”
I find this opinion to be mildly disturbing.
I did actually “throw on a quick highlight reel”. In fact, I did quite a bit more than that. I won’t claim to have watched every game – almost certainly not as many as Monson – but I thought I’d watched enough to get a good idea of what the Bears had and I liked what I saw.
Indeed, one of the tapes I did watch was the Louisville game. Unlike Monson, I thought Goldman did a worse job there than he did against Florida, a better team. If Goldman was getting knocked back into the linebackers very often, double teamed or not, I didn’t see it.
I’m used to disagreeing with “experts” who are hired to evaluate players and who frequently do a lazy job of it. I’m pretty sure many of them simply work in an echo chamber where they parrot back what other “experts” say until it becomes “the truth”. The problem is that Monson isn’t one of those guys. In fact, he has a bad habit of being right.
The fact that I’m agreeing with the “experts”, who almost universally loved the Bears pick of Goldman, and disagreeing with Monson doesn’t make me wrong. But it does make me second guess myself. Because I’ve been wrong before. Frequently. Let’s hope this isn’t one of those times because the Bears are going nowhere without a good run stopper at nose tackle.