The "best for my future" argument

Irondawg · Mar 26, 2008

If you define that as bowl games and national championship hopes, choosing LSU over MSU is fine.

If you're talking about getting to the NFL, I think it's a myth. While the LSU's of the world do put more players into the NFL, that's more a result of they get more blue-chip talent that it is about their development plan.

For example, what's LSU's success going to do for Matt Flynn? People bring up the J. Russell argument but he would have been a Top 10 pick most anywhere - see Daunte Culpepper as an example. I think the NFL gives you more bonus points if you do more with less (see Eli) than for being surrounded by NFL talent (see Tom Brady).

The point is that if you can play and have NFL "measurables"...you'll get drafted highly no matter where you are in D1.

The only risk is that if your team goes 4-8 every year. GM's do want to see that you can carry a team to wins but the MSU's of the world should always have enough talent that if they get an NFL QB 7-4 to 10-2 is plenty realistic.

BriantheDawg · Mar 26, 2008

is probably the best example. He couldn't lead Vandy to a bowl game, yet got them somewhat competitive. And he was taken in the first half of the 1st round 2 years ago. Had he gone to another school, like say LSU for example, he would've never seen the playing field and would be selling insurance right now.

AROB44 · Mar 26, 2008

I know it is a long time ago, but D D Lewis was an AA on a MSU team that , I think, did not win a game. Ended up having a "pretty good" career with the Dallas Cowboys.

"I just don't want people to think he's not a man of his word," David Garrett said. "

 WELLLLLL...........................................!!

Irondawg · Mar 26, 2008

and I guess Alex Smith from Utah would be another good example. Heck Brodie Croyle got drafted high and their offense I'd guess was about as incompentent as MSU's the past few years.

Heck Spurlock made the NFL as a receiver...so trust me, the NFL drafts a lot more on the talent potential they see than the college stat line.

KurtRambis4 · Mar 26, 2008

argument. i feel that at this level (sec football, even with the gulf coast offense) that if a guy is talented enough to make it to the nfl, he is. if this kids ultimate goal (which i assume) is to make it to the nfl, i just don't think he's got just a good enough chance to do it at state as he does lsu. now, that's taking into account that he is talented enough. if not, then it really doesn't matter where he goes to school, in my opinion. i mean sure there are examples that support my thought and there are examples that disprove my thought...but that's just how i feel.

Irondawg · Mar 26, 2008

Why do you think a kid at MSU wouldn't haveas good a chance as making the pros than if he was at LSU

Todd4State · Mar 26, 2008

It depends kind of on the midset of the player. Personally, I don't think MSU would be a bad place to be a QB. Why? Because if you do well there and put up some numbers, people would be like, "Wow! Look at what this guy did at MSU!" Plus, winning the Sugar Bowl and going 13-1 at MSU = cult hero for life. Now, it's going to take someone with some balls, because our fans want to change the QB if they throw an incompletion. But there are people out there like that- I think Carroll has that personality.

Look at Matt Ryan at BC, Rothlesburger at Miami-Ohio, and Alex Smith at UU.

Now if I wanted to win a NC, I wouldn't go to MSU. If I wanted a NC and to go to the NFL as a QB, I wouldn't choose LSU. I would go to USC- Carson Palmer, Matt Leinart, heck Matt Cassels is in the league, and now I'm pretty sure John David Booty will get drafted. But that's just me.

PosterFormerlyKnownAsRFAA · Mar 26, 2008

to a bowl game? Elway.

(I pray that Cutler ends his career as a Bronco with a few Super Bowl rings. Can I pray about that?)

Coast Dawg · Mar 27, 2008

is what if by going to MSU and playing behind a crappy line (in a conference with the best DL's in the country) gets you crippled?

Our OL is adequate now, so not as good of an example as in past years.

Irondawg · Mar 27, 2008

Ok, this got my curiosity sparked about where the current QB's in the NFL came from. Here's the long list:

Bills - T. Ewards (Stanford) or Losman (Tulane)
Dolphins - T. Green (Indiana) or Beck (Stanford)
Patriots - T. Brady (Michigan)
Jets - Pennington (Marshall) or Clemens (Oregon)
Ravens - McNair (Alcorn)
Bengals - Palmer (USC)
Browns - D. Anderson (Oregon State)
Steelers - Big Ben (Miami of Ohio)
Texans - Schaub (Virginia)
Colts - Manning (Tenn)
Jags - Garrard (UAB)
Titans - Young (Texas)
Broncos - Cutler (Vandy)
Chiefs - Croyle (Bama)
Raiders - Russell (LSU)
Chargers - Rivers (NC State)
Cowboys - Romo (Eastern Ill)
Giants - Eli (Ole Miss)
Eagles - McNabb (Syracuse)
Redskins - Campbell (Auburn)
Bears - Grossman? (Florida)
Lions - Kitna (Cent. Washington)
Packers - Rodgers (Cal)
Vikings - T. Jackson (Alabama State)
Falcons - who knows
Panthers - Delhomme (LA Lafayette)
Saints - Brees (Purdue)
Bucs - Garcia (San Jose St)
Cardinals - Leinhardt (USC)
49ers - Smith (Utah)
Seahawks - Hasselbeck (Boston College)
Rams - Bulger (West Virginia)

So the SEC and Pac-10 are well represented but nothing seems to favor one school over the others.

Foronce · Mar 27, 2008

Ok so this is not about him saying I am going to STATE, no wait let me go to LSU...
That is not being a man of your word. We are better off without him.

If you kid could go to MSU or LSU, are you serious you would tell your kid to go to MSU.

Now I realized this is different than 2 or 3 years ago and state has great upside. Even seems like Croom is happy and doesn't want to go anywhere so you have that. If you run an honest program there is no way you are going to recruit in the leagues with AL or LSU... I mean c'mon can Saban really walk in a kids living room and have the kid believe the stuff that comes out of his mouth.

I am alum from STATE but I would seriously have a hard time telling my kid to turn down a top 5 program for a building one. And I pretty much hate Love Shaq Uni....

Irondawg · Mar 27, 2008

I wouldn't tell my kid where to go - it would be where he felt most comfortable with the situation, coaches, etc. Would you tell your kid to go to LSU just b/c they're a top 5 program?

This thread is about what does a Top 10 program do for your NFL prospects vs. other schools. If you're talking college bowl games, national championship hunt then we're having a different conversation. This thread was meant to discuss does a Top tier program give you a better shot at the NFL than others simply b/c of the program and not the talent level of the individual player.

excrementoccurs · Mar 27, 2008

Garrard went to East Carolian, not UAB.

davatron · Mar 27, 2008

the hell he wants, but I would warn him to think long and hard about it, telling him that once he makes a commitment, he needs to stick to it.

Mid-thread highjack:
Had Garrett been offered by LSU before he committed to us, or did he just ride our coat tails until a bigger-name school gave him some attention?

KurtRambis4 · Mar 27, 2008

i meant to say that he would have just as good a shot...if he had the talent

dogmatic1 · Mar 27, 2008

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dogmatic1 · Mar 27, 2008

<h3 style="text-align: center;" align="center">Clarion-Ledger</h3> Estimated printed pages: 7 <table class="MsoNormalTable" style="width: 100%;" border="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%"> <tbody> <tr style=""> <td style="padding: 0in; width: 100%;" width="100%"> December 12, 2001
Section: Main
Page: 1A D.D. Lewis
Rick Cleveland A Hall of Fame story: Never give up on life </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table class="MsoNormalTable" style="width: 100%;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"> <tbody> <tr style=""> <td style="padding: 0in;"> NEW YORK - So here silver-haired D.D. Lewis was Tuesday night, dressed in a black tuxedo, in the Grand Ballroom of the plush Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue for induction into college football's Hall of Fame. Lewis, 56, becomes only the second player in 105 years of Mississippi State University football to receive college football's highest honor. Of all the hundreds of thousands of players who have played football collegiately, Lewis is one of only about 600 chosen for the Hall of Fame. Bet on this: None of the 600 has come any further in life or overcome more obstacles than has Dwight Douglas Lewis. His life has taken him: •From the shantytown neighborhood of Happy Hollow on the wrong side of the tracks in Knoxville, Tenn., to the Waldorf Astoria. •From the depths of alcoholism, drug addiction and the deepest of depressions, to sobriety and a general sense of well-being. •From a childhood of poverty and almost unimaginable despair to pro football stardom and five Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys. •From that NFL stardom and Miller Lite commercials, back into a drug and alcohol-induced oblivion, and then out again. •From an urge to end his life to a fierce determination to help save others. •From a dysfunctional family, through a failed marriage, and in and out of chemical dependency centers, to school podiums all over America from which D.D. Lewis warns teens not to take the same roads he has travelled. Most who travel those roads, he tells them, do not survive. Somehow, he has. Four kids to a bed Happy Hollow may be the most inappropriately named neighborhood in the country. A mile or so from downtown Knoxville, Happy Hollow consists of a collection of shacks and beer joints that went up between the railroad yards and textile mills. There, D.D. Lewis, named for Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, was raised, the 14th of 14 children born to Bessie and Henry Robert Lewis. Happy Hollow was a place where people from the hill country of east Tennessee who had nothing came to try to find something. There wasn't much to find in Happy Hollow except for poor-paying jobs and shabby but cheap housing. The neighborhood was so rough that policemen refused to patrol without a partner. The Lewis family lived in a four-room house. Three of D.D.'s older siblings died young. The rest slept four to a bed. Says Chuck Lewis, one of D.D.'s older brothers, "D.D. and me slept in one double bed with Larry and Eugene. Me and Eugene were older. D.D. and Larry took turns wetting the bed." Chuck and D.D. used to walk along the railroad tracks and pick up coal that had fallen off of railroad cars. That's what the family often used for heating. Life was chaotic. Henry Robert and Bessie Lewis married when he was 22 and she was 15. He tried to make ends meet by fixing up old cars and selling them. She just raised young'uns, lots of them. "Mama was about five feet tall and weighed about 230 pounds," D.D. Lewis said. "She had a third-grade education, and she dipped snuff. She could be sweet, but she had a mean side, too. Knowing what I know now, I've got to believe she was manic-depressive." Henry Robert Lewis, tall and slender, was in and out of the house and left home for good when D.D. was 13. Not surprisingly, D.D. was in and out of trouble, mostly in. "I thought I was dumb and no-good white trash," D.D. says, matter-of-factly. "That was the message I always got." Imagine this: A 10-year-old boy sits down at the kitchen table with a notebook and a pencil. His mother walks by and asks him what he's doing. He says he is trying to learn the spelling words for tomorrow's test. She says, "Forget it. You're too dumb. You'll never be smart enough to do that." D.D. was that 10-year-old. He remembers going to school the next day and the teacher calling out the spelling words. "I turned in a blank sheet of paper," he says. "I was too ashamed to write anything down." In trouble with the law He turned to the streets, where trouble was easy to find. At 13 and having already flunked the eighth grade, he stole a car, was arrested and spent two weeks in solitary confinement. "They said I was incorrigible," he says. "I didn't know what it meant." He knew what reform school meant, and he knew that was where he was headed, until his mother talked a principal at a nearby Lutheran school into taking an interest in her youngest son. That man, Wilbur Krause, "saved my life," Lewis says. "He took an interest in me. He kept me at the Lutheran school for a year, and he made sure I did my work. I passed the eighth grade." The next year, back in public school, Lewis found football. "I weighed about 140 pounds, but the coaches put me at linebacker," Lewis says. "First day of practice, here comes the runner my way and I run up and hit him as hard as I can. I mean, I popped him. Knocked his teeth out. I looked down and blood was gurgling out of his mouth. And here came the coaches running at me. "I thought, `Oh no, I've done it again.' I figured they were going to either have me arrested or thrown out of school, but they started pounding me on the back and telling me what a great play I had made," Lewis says. "That's when I knew I finally had found something I could do." He wasn't very big. Nor was he very fast. But he was quick and explosive. And, man, did he love to hit. The 14th of 14, Lewis craved attention. And now he had found a way to get it. "I couldn't believe it," Lewis says. "They were writing about me in newspapers." "D.D. was the best football player I ever coached," says Robert Beam, Lewis's position coach in high school. "And he was also the most coachable player I ever saw. He'd do anything you told him. "I made him my lunchroom monitor so he could get free lunches, all he could eat, and we gave him cans of Nutrament to help him put on weight," Beam continues. "By the time he was a senior he weighed 190 pounds. Nobody hit harder." He still wasn't big enough to draw much interest from the University of Tennessee, but Paul Davis, Mississippi State's coach, heard about Lewis, went to see him play and loved him. Davis offered a scholarship, and Lewis took it. That's how the most decorated defensive player in Mississippi State history found Starkville. "Hell," says Lewis, "I had never heard of Starkville." `Best I've ever coached' Lewis's impact at State was immediate. He was the best player on campus the day he got there. During Lewis' three varsity seasons at State (1965-67), the Bulldogs were mostly lousy, but Lewis nearly always was sensational. As a senior, Lewis was named All-America and the Southeastern Conference's most outstanding defensive player. That season, the Bulldogs won one game. Bear Bryant called him the "best linebacker in America." Paul Davis called him, "The best player I've ever coached." There were games where it seemed Lewis made all the tackles. Jack Cristil, now in his 50th year as voice of the Bulldogs, never called anyone's name more. "Tackle by Lewis. Tackle by Lewis. Another tackle by D.D. Lewis." Cristil sounded like a broken record. Lewis still was undersized for a professional linebacker, but the Dallas Cowboys drafted him in the sixth round. He made the team by excelling on special teams. Later, he became a starting linebacker and standout on what became known as America's Team. Football drove him. Football was his release. Football was his way of getting the attention he had craved since childhood. "Football was the way I validated myself," he says. "Off the field, I had no feeling of worth. In football, I was somebody." He was a terror on the field. He was also somewhat of a terror off it. He played hard on Sunday. He partied hard most every other day. Then came his retirement from football. Then came disaster. Drugs and alcohol Without football, Lewis had no way to validate himself. Without football, he was full of what he calls "toxic shame," with no way to get rid of it. So he drank. And he snorted cocaine. And he took pills. And he drank some more, lots more. His marriage failed. His relationship with his two daughters became strained. "I thought often about just killing myself," he says. He checked himself into chemical dependency centers twice, but, he says, "it didn't take." He remembers deciding to drink a beer after shooting one of those Miller Lite commercials back in the 1980s. "The next thing I knew, I woke up in the median of the road, in my car, with the motor running," he says. "I didn't know how I got there." In 1986, he checked himself in for a third time to a chemical dependency center in Arizona. He has not had a drink - or taken a drug - since. He has become a born-again Christian. He has mended fences with his two daughters from his first marriage, remarried, this time to his old college sweetheart Dianne Walters, and helped raise a stepson. "Everybody thinks of him, D.D., as the great football hero," Dianne says. "I never cared for football. I still think of him as that 18-year-old kid I fell in love with a thousand years ago." Their relationship did not work out the first time. They broke up while still in college. "It was hard at the time, but it was for the best," she says. "People tell me all the time it's a shame I missed all those years when he was a pro football star. No way, I tell them. I'd have never made it through the drinking and the drugs. I much prefer him now, as a sober, Christian man who has learned to like himself for who he is. "Somehow, I just think this is the way it was meant to be for us. I thank God every day that we found each other again." They are not rich, but they are comfortable. Lewis' top salary as a Dallas Cowboy was $110,000. Most of what he had saved he lost when oil investments went bad shortly after his retirement. Lewis lives in Dallas, working in public relations for a fertilizer company, and making more than 100 speaking engagements a year. He has yet to tap into his NFL pension, which will someday provide a comfortable retirement. He figures he has spoken to more than 10,000 children and teens in 2001. "I just try to help kids make good decisions, a lot of good decisions I didn't make," he says. He is active in Alcoholics Anonymous, trying to help people the way others have helped him. "I just figure there's got to be a reason I'm still here," he says. "I think I've got an important message, and I'm passionate about letting people know." And that message? "Never give up on life," D.D. Lewis says, hours before his Hall of Fame induction. "Never give up on yourself. Never give up on someone you love. People can come back from just about anything. "Look at me." -- 30 -- </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

The "best for my future" argument

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