Friday 5: 2012 NFL Draft

It’s after midnight so it’s technically Friday, so I’m calling this a Friday 5. It’s going to be the same as we’ve done in years past. The five best picks of the first round, the five worst picks of the first round, and the five best remaining players after the first round.

Check it out after the jump, and be sure to vote in the poll at the bottom.

Friday 5: Worst Draft Picks Since 2000

I haven’t written a Friday 5 in a while and I kind of stumbled across this idea while on the greatest website ever created (except this one, of course).  While we do love our NFL Draft around here, this one is referring to the Major League Draft and I’m going to throw out some rules before we get into it.  I’m not talking about the Matt Bush’s of the world who flame out before hitting the big leagues or a pitcher whose arm falls off in Class A ball.  Or just for Chappy, a guy who gets drafted in the first round, becomes the subject of a best-selling novel and plays a whopping five Major League Games.  But hey, that’s exactly five more Major League games than all the readers and writers of this site have ever played in.  No, I’m talking about the guys who were taken high and rocketed through the minors only to flame out and be done within three years.

Some of the players may surprise you.  Let’s get started.

5. Adam Johnson – SP – Minnesota Twins – 2nd overall pick in 2000

The 2000 draft may go down as one of the worst in history.  For a while it looked like the first pick, Adrian Gonzalez, was going to be a massive bust, but he’s found a home in San Diego.  Adam Johnson, who went right behind Gonzalez, hasn’t pitched in the bigs since 2003.  Let’s check his vitals.  In his career with the Twins he went a grand total of 1-3 with a 10.25 ERA in 9 games.  Helpful.  In his 26.1 inning career he gave up 7 homers.  That’s a lot.  He also gave up 40 hits, 14 walks, hit five batters, and gave up 30 runs.  He had a WHIP of over two.  This was your second overall pick.  Good start.

Johnson gets the nod over Justin Wayne, Joe Borchard and his light tower power, and Phil Dumatrait.  All are bad…none were picked 2nd overall.

The Twins could have had:  Chase Utley (15th overall), Adam Wainwright (29th overall) or Grady Sizemore (75th overall)

Friday 5 – Exciting Defenses

When I say exciting defense, what are some of the teams that immediately jump to your mind? The Ravens? Steelers? Vikings? Jets? Cowboys? What if I told you that this Friday 5 is my list of the top five most exciting defenses in the NFL right now, and not a single one of the teams I just mentioned is on it? Now hear me out before you jump to conclusions and discredit the rest of this post. I came up with with this list of top five most exciting defenses by basing it solely on numbers. That’s right, my list is purely from a statistical perspective, and that’s right, none of those teams made the cut. I started out by asking myself the basic question of what are the most exciting defensive plays? I think it’s pretty straight forward to say that they would be interceptions, forced fumbles and sacks. Bone-crushing hits would also be in there but there is no statistic for that, plus a lot of those hits result in sacks and/or forced fumbles anyhow. Starting with this as my foundation I started looking up the numbers for last season. In 2009 there were a total of 1101 sacks, 525 interceptions and 509 forced fumbles. So as a general statement (using 1 sig-fig, if you will) I think it’s fair to say that interceptions and forced fumbles are twice as exciting as sacks, based on how frequently they happen. So I developed two basic formulas:

One for the total number of exciting plays: S + I + F = N

And one for the level of excitement the team causes: S + 2I + 2F = X

Where S represents the number of sacks a team had, I represents the number of interceptions, F represents the number of forced fumbles, N represents the total number of exciting plays and X represents the level of excitement rating. I ranked the teams using the first formula, then I ranked them using the second formula, and after that I took their average from those two rankings and used that as my final number to sort the teams by. As a tie-breaker I used defensive touchdowns scored. Here’s how it panned out:

Friday 5 – Our Football Teams

For those of you that haven’t been counting down for nearly six months, football season officially starts in less than five weeks with the first games of the college season being on Thursday, September 2. This means I thought it would be a good time for us to evaluate our personal desires for how we would (realistically) like our respective teams to fare this season. Bryan and I are both Tennessee Vols fans, he’s a Missouri Tigers fan, I’m an Indianapolis Colts fan and he’s a St. Louis Rams fan. So for our Friday 5 I’ll put up the schedule for each game, how many wins we expect/hope that team to get and at then end for the final part, to complete the ‘5’ in Friday 5 I will put up a total. I will also plan on putting up some sort of weekly chart or graph or both or something to provide something to look at for the progressions our teams our making towards the goals that we are setting for them. Let’s get started:

Friday 5 – ESPN Commercials

I’m going to go ahead and rule out all of the Peyton Manning ones right now, because I could do an entire Friday 5 on just those. However to make up for the lack of Peyton-love in this post I’m going to make this Friday 5 extra special, and go ahead and make it a Friday 10. There are just entirely too many awesome ESPN commercials. I can sit here and watch them on YouTube all day long, so I couldn’t limit myself to just five. So without further ado, here are my ten personal favorite ESPN commercials of all time… well at least the ones I could find clips for. There was a great commercial when I was in grade school and it was for the Stump The Schwab show where the contestant is asked “who is the only Chargers wide receiver to ever make it to the Hall of Fame” and then the camera goes down under the floorboards and there’s this little puppet character sitting there watching the show that’s going on right above him on a minuscule TV and he’s sitting there saying “Laaaaance Allllllworth! Laaaaance Allllllworth! Laaaaaaaaaaaaaance Allllllllllllworth!” over and over again. It’s easily one of my favorite ESPN commercials ever.

Friday 5 – Favorite Highlights

This is going to be short because I have a lot I need to do but figured this would be a good way to start my day. I’m simply putting up my five favorite football highlights. This isn’t including anything that has personal, emotional or any other sort of biased attachment or they would simply be plays from the Colts Super Bowl XLI win, the win during that year’s AFC Championship game, Peyton Manning throwing his 49th TD in 2004, the Vols 1998 National Championship and one of my favorites from Peyton at Tennessee. But alas, none of those will be included. These are just highlights that I love to watch over and over simply because of how awesome they are as football plays, not because they had any sort of meaning (to me or anyone) or influence over a game or season. This was hard to narrow down to five so there are a ton of honorable mentions, but I’m sure all those will come up in the comments. Let’s get started:

Friday 5 – Review of Day 1

Last year we did a Review of Day 1 for the 2009 Draft and Bryan and I decided that we enjoyed it so much last year that we would do it again this year. The difference this year is that Day 1 only consisted of the first round rather than the first two rounds so we didn’t have quite as much to address. So this time we’re simply doing top ten players still available, the best five picks of the first round and the worst five picks of the first round. Here it is:

Friday 5 – Best Goal Ever?

Alright guys, I know I’ve been slacking.  Between our fan mock draft and suddenly getting a job, WaB has suddenly taken a back seat.  So now that things have slowed down for the weekend, it’s time to get back in the groove and what better way to do that then with the first Friday 5 since the end of January.  Apparently we’ve both been slacking in that area.

Also, before we get started everyone needs to go to this website.  A couple of my old roommates (one is periodic contributor here) decided to start a blog about movies.  I may even give them a post or two before it’s all over.  Go read it.  Go bookmark it.

Friday 5 – Play-By-Play Announcers

Alright, we have our first ever Friday 5 from Mr. Wright, who you all may remember from his weekly posts that I put up during the NFL season, with both his Bettor’s Guides and the Power Rankings. He did a top five Play-By-Play announcers list on his site, and told me I should feel free to re-post it over here. So here it is:

My Top 5 Play-By-Play Announcers Of All-Time
M.D. Wright
1.29.10

***EDITOR’S NOTE: New series of favorites — as we move up to the broadcast booth and pick the favorites there.

Mind you, I am not excluding the Tom Brookshires and Don Criquis of the world, but I can only speak on the 25+ years that I have been watching sports. So I will stick with what I know and not who I’ve only HEARD ABOUT.

Without further adieu, here is my Top 5 Favorite Play-By-Play Announcers of All-Time (that is, 1979-Present ha). Also, this list is about guys I’ve actually listened to regularly or nearly daily on local stations or during network TV. Guys like Vin Scully, who I’ve only heard call 30+ games and other legends like that are not being ignored, I am doing this for the purposes of highlighting the guys who I actually hear most — and not agreeing with everyone who likes to do a Who’s Who list of icons and legends in the broadcasting booth.

Friday 5 – Reasons to Watch the Winter Olympics

Okay, I’m going to be honest, this isn’t exactly the top five reasons to watch the Winter Olympics. It’s more so of a list for the top five things to look at while watching the Winter Olympics. In short this is a cop-out Friday 5, where I’m listing the five best looking female athletes that will be competing in the Winter Olympics this year.

The Honorable Mention for this one goes to Hilary Knight of the United States Women’s Hockey Team. Here’s a picture of her, and the top five after the jump: