Draft Winds: Lies, damn lies and Ryan Mallett
April 22, 2011 by Richard Lines
Filed under Uncategorized
Ryan Mallett is a very interesting Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke coined the phrase ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’ back in 1891. It’s unknown who coined ‘Lies, damned lies and character issues’ but come draft time it could be any number of ‘sources’, especially in the ever changing environment of social media. Mallett has suffered more than any player in this draft by the dreaded word ‘character issues’. Much as we did with Cam Newton we dug around, did the leg work, spoke to some people in the know, tried to corroborate some stories and came to the conclusion that we really could draw no conclusion based in stone cold fact. But we turned up some pretty interesting stuff nonetheless, stuff that may surprise you. And the final conclusion may surprise you given what you think you know about #15.
In all the searching around that we did, the one rumour that wouldn’t go away concerned drug use. But what’s interesting about that is that a lot of misinformation gets passed off as fact: take a discussion thread I came across on the net that Ryan’s father Jim, a middle school teacher and football coach, struggles with drugs himself in Texarkana. There were responses to said thread that intimated that this was a serious discussion: it isn’t. And that’s a fact. We’re never likely to privy to the sort of in-depth information that NFL teams are. After all, there’s a reason why ex members of the secret service do their investigating for them. This goes for most if not all of the draft analysts you will come across to a greater or lesser extent. But what we’re tried to do here is give you facts where possible, backed up by quotes and sources. Where we delve into speculation, we’ll make that clear as well.