Better Studying at Berkeley

I don't think that the NFL has scouted the University of California at Berkeley very well over the last decade. I suppose that most of those scouts felt that their time was better spent at Pac-10/12 schools like USC in the early to mid 2000s and Oregon and Stanford more recently. It wasn't like Cal was a football talent void during these years. Nnamdi Asomugha, Alex Mack, DeSean Jackson, Thomas DeCoud, Tyson Alualu, and Mychal Kendricks were all terrific college football players that have gone on to nice professional careers.

The scouting of Cal quarterback Aaron Rodgers in 2005 may have been one of the most hacked-up jobs in recent memory. Maybe since the work done on Tom Brady in 2000. There should never have been any doubt concerning the quarterback skills of Rodgers. He was a fantastic quarterback. His game at USC in 2004 was some of the best throwing that I've ever seen in a college game. The San Francisco 49ers had the top pick in the 2005 NFL Draft. Current Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy was the 49ers offensive coordinator then. He apparently thought that Rodgers' mobility was suspect. I was more than a little surprised by this assessment. So was Rodgers. I guess that McCarthy never made the real short drive from Santa Clara to Berkeley because Rodgers showed excellent mobility in college. He could make plays with his feet. Since he first took the field as the Packers starting quarterback, Aaron Rodgers has been one of the best quarterbacks in football. And, he's proven many, many times that he can make plays with his feet. He's shown in Green Bay what I could easily see at Berkeley. He's shown the skills that scouts would have seen if they had taken the time to better scout Berkeley.

In just under three seasons at Cal, receiver Keenan Allen showed an incredible knack for making plays. He was a threat to score anytime that he had the ball in his hands. I was stunned when Rodgers fell to the bottom third of the first round in 2005. I was almost as stunned when Allen fell to the third round this past spring. He showed at Cal, so many times, that he was a first round talent. He only has a handful of NFL games but in the last three he's shown the play making ability that he showed so often at Cal. In the scouts defense with Allen, he did have a knee injury that ended his Cal career way too early. That knee injury also kept him from running at the Scouting Combine. Nearly three years of often jaw-dropping plays in college should have been enough for scouts to overlook a missing Scouting Combine. Sometimes, a scout has to go with what he sees on a football field. That's what really counts.

Just like the New England Patriots lucked into Tom Brady, the Packers lucked into Aaron Rodgers and the San Diego Chargers lucked into Keenan Allen. In all three instances, scouts were wrong. I also think that they need to take a more thorough look at football players in Berkeley.