I don't think we've quite run out of ways to parse the St. Louis Rams' haul of 10 players in the 2012 NFL Draft. The grades are out, and now all we need to do is wait for the players to actually, you know, play football to see how things really worked out for the Rams.
Looking up and down at the draft results, there are always a few picks that stand out as either a reach or a bargain. Who were those players for the Rams?
Value is naturally subjective. One person's reach is another person's steal. Tony Pauline at SI.com looked at reaches and steals from the draft, and Brian Quick's name made the list of reaches.
Says Pauline:
Brian Quick/WR/St Louis/Pick No. 33 -- Quick offers a lot of upside and could eventually develop into a second receiver for an NFL roster. Yet the first pick of Round 2 was much too early for his services, considering the other receivers still on the board.
That one certainly stands out to me as a bit of a reach, but clearly teams value receivers vastly different. Think about it. The 49ers drafted A.J. Jenkins with the 30th pick in the 1st round. You could hear the media's collective "huh?" inside Radio City Music Hall when the pick was announced.
The Rams would have picked him in the 33rd spot if the Niners hadn't beat them to it. Most draft analysts has Jenkins pegged for the end of the 2nd or early in the 3rd. I think Janoris Jenkins would have seemed like less of a reach at No. 33.
Obviously, you have to consider the kicker, Greg Zuerlein in the 6th round, as a reach since most kickers go in the last round or get plucked off the wire. Why the Rams were so anxious to dump Josh Brown, I don't know. He wasn't as effective as he used to be. But, it was still a 6th round pick, which is better than the usual cast of future roster cuts that used to trickle through in the 6th round.
In reality, the Rams had more steals than anything.
Jenkins would have been a top-15 pick in a less puritanical world. The Rams will hope he's as productive on the field as he is in the insemination department. I really love this pick.
Trumaine Johnson was another steal, in my opinion. Yes, he had character issues, stemming from a bar fight in which he punched a cop and got tasered. It happens. Mike Mayock considered him the 5th-best corner in the draft. The Rams got him in the 3rd round.
When you look at the rest of the team's picks, they fall pretty much were you would expect them.