hagan714

Meachum might be Hendersons replacement in 2008 when he becomes a FA. Henderson needs to have a good off season to regain Shawn's faith in him. As if he ever had it. I am sure Shawn sees what he can be, but does Henderson get it? Henderson maybe our trade bait before the season starts. Little hard though when the draft was so deep at WR this year.

The 2 CB are a projects to say the least. God only knows what we have there. One of them, should be able to step up and take over the nickle in 2008. As for the dime? Time will only tell. Craft FA in 2009. Thomas is a FA in 2008. One will be gone for sure. At the least Jones should develope into a good special teams player. He might develope into a nice ball hawking Safety. He has the skill sets. Just such a big leap to the NFL for both of them.

Alleman at the least will develope into a very good back up at the Guard position. Lets hope he can start. Nesbit is not getting any younger and he is a FA in 2008. Who knows they may make a backup center out of him too. That would be perfect. Thats the one area of the line we did not address. A back up Center. Goodwin is a FA in 2008. We got really lucky last year faine did not get hurt. He does have a history.

Bushrod is an interesting prospect who, we hope, can be a quality backup at Left Tackle for Brown. Maybe when Jon is a FA in 2009 he or Stief will be will be able to step in and become the starter. At least we can hope he can be a quality back up. OT/OG hybrid.

Fabulous Marvin Mitchell what can be said here? Time will tell. Solid special Teams guy running up the middle of the field? Well he gets my vote as the first player to go on IR our gets cut with and injury settlement.

Antonio Pittman is a north south runner that can live inbetween the tackles and he can bounce outside. Just one fumble in the past two years despite 250-plus touches in each of those years. His hands are good but has never been used that way in at OU. He is considered small? 5-11 and 200+ pounds is small? I understand the pick but......when you have another top notch project on the board like Zak DeOssie for example, whats one more? If we had stayed put Mansfield Wrotto would have fallen into our laps and he is a better project than Bushrod. This is the player I bet the Saints wanted and Seattle swooped in and got him. Bushrod was what we got. Even then there were..... and you still have that addition 5th round. I know hind sight.

Conculsion is we drafted 4 projects for the DB and OL. I have to say the quality of the projects are top notch. The two big school players. Meachum I can accept the easiest. Pittman is a little hard But if Pittman can show he is dependable in catching the ball. We may have pulled of one off the best moves in the draft. He may have put the RB rotation at the top in the NFL.

Well once again the saints have left us scratching our heads the day after draft. Lets hope they pull this one off like like last year. Just have to:
KEEP THE FAITH.

"We may have lost the game, but you'll be hurting tomorrow." Doug Atkins

papz

I'd have to say I really like the Alleman pick. That's probably my favorite pick of our draft. He's going to be a solid guy for us. We'll find out more about these guys in camp.

TheDeuce

I can't really say anything about the majority of our picks because to be honest, I had never heard of most of them except Meachem and Pittman. I like that we drafted some offensive linemen to help our depth.

I'm not sure about the cornerbacks just because I don't really know anything about them. What I hear is that they are gifted players, but might not be NFL ready. While this sounds pretty good, I am thinking that this might be the year that we HAVE to get back to the Super Bowl. We need to win, and win now. I might be wrong, but after getting to the NFC Championship game, I was looking for us to go after that one piece that would help us get over the edge in this upcoming season. Apparently Sean felt like taking some gambles on no-namers who he believes will be good players. I can't really doubt him, I just find it an interesting strategy.

I am still slightly upset with the Meachem, Pittman, and Mitchell picks. With Meachem, I still don't understand how we can justify ignoring our defense again. I read some interview with Payton after day 1 and he was asked why he didn't address defensive tackle or linebacker, and he said some crap about not wanting to take a player just because we had a need there. I understand his point, and I would have agreed with it if there hadn't been good defensive players still on the board at the time, but there were still guys like Posluszny, Branch, and some other guys who would have helped our defense tremendously. Instead, we decided to try and "improve" our #1 offense. I don't really get it, but hey, I'm not getting paid to make the calls. I think Payton is offense-biased and that's why he took Meachem. If he was a defensive guy, he would have gone with one of the aforementioned defensive players. Yes, we were thin at WR, but we were that thin ALL SEASON LONG last year, and we still got to the NFC Championship game. And in case you guys didn't notice, it wasn't our offense that prevented us from beating the Bears, it was our inability to play defense. Disgusted is a little too harsh for how I feel right now, but I am disappointed in Payton that he would go the entire offseason and not address defensive tackle or the other LB spot; two positions which have been clearly defined as weaknesses for several seasons. The Pittman pick is still ridiculously stupid in my mind. Why trade up to get him? If he's there when we picked, fine, take him. But why trade away multiple picks to address the strongest position on the team? Especially when Branch did such a good job as a backup last year? I think that was a big mistake and was another example of Payton's offense-bias. The Mitchell pick? Don't even get me started. Bad character (on and off the field), durability issues, and he's slow as molasses. Sweet.

Overall, this draft is probably a C+ in my mind. We didn't get any impact players (except maybe Meachem, but we'll see if he can run routes in the NFL), and we made some dumb picks IMO. Hopefully some of those small school guys will pan out...

BrooksMustGo

It's hard to say, but it looks like Payton wants to build a roaring offense.

In fairness, I suspect that if we average 28 points a game, we'll win the division. Indy does the same thing every year, they rely on pass rush and lots of points to win games. The theory did make them champions last season.

BRSaintsFan

Im not sold on all of the small school prospects. I think there is room in a draft to select one or two and indeed we lucked out last year with Colston and Evans but I agree in that I see too many projects. However, I think Alleman has the ability to step in right away and give you a few blows a game at G and maybe at C. My concern with Bushrod is that I dont see the same traits in him that were in Evans last year. From what I hear he will probably have to move to Guard, because he doesnt have the footwork to play tackle and handle edge rushers. Overall, Im okay with the addition of depth to the offensive line.

I think our LBs will be fine. Fujita, Shanle, and Simoneau. Simmons, Fincher, Evans, Faulk, Mitchell, and Koehl. I would like to see a few more bodies there and I wouldn't be thrilled with anyone but Simmons taking over in a starting role in case of injury, but I think our LBs are versatile enough. If two of the three starters go down, then yes we will have a problem but so would any other team in the league. I think we leveraged ourselves enough there.

However, I agree with Missile about DT. I for sure thought that we were going to draft Tank Tyler with one of our two picks or that we would at least add someone to give us some depth at the position. There is still time to sign some people to get into camp and let them battle it out but as our roster now stands, Im not entirely comfortable with the position. Should Thomas get into anything else or should injury strike, we could be in trouble at that position. Lake and Leisle can give some quality minutes but I think both are situational at best and aren't capable of anything more than spelling the starters. Brandon Villareal is the other DT on our roster.

GumboDawg

My overriding thought is that we Saints fans don't know what it's like to go into a draft not needing 4 immediate starters. Outside of Meacham, a BPA pick I like, we appear to have taken on a lot of high-character project types that can be brought along slowly and groomed into starters. Like all drafts, some will fail.

Carve Meacham out for a minute -- for this draft to be considered a success, he has to do well. As for the rest, if three years from now we've gotten two additional solid starters and some usable depth out of a rather tepid draft pool, I think we've done well. Once you get beyond the first round, you're hard-pressed in almost any draft to find rookies that would in year one unseat McKenzie/David, or our LB corps, or our DTs. If we did, that's a great problem to have. But I'm holding out judgment on this draft until a few years from now. It's nice to actually be in a place to do that.