April 30, 2006 8:49 AM

Inept, incompetent, and built to stay that way

Let’s be clear: Bypassing Bush smacks of stupidity

The fans take: Aggravation takes place of celebration

McNair does impossible: make Adams look good

The No. 1 pick is seldom signed before the draft. Yes, holdouts are part of the process with the top players. Yes, Bush wanted an obscene amount of money. Tough luck. Taking a hard line with Bush makes absolutely no sense. You overpaid for Gary Walker, Todd Wade, Morlon Greenwood and others. Now you’re going to play hardball with Bush? That makes you look incompetent and petty.

I suppose this one could reasonably be filed under “What in the Hell were they thinking??” Afther months of feeding the speculation that their selection of Reggie Bush with the #1 pick in the NFL was a foregone conclusion, the Texans appear to have suffered a collective brain cramp. Now, it may well turn out that Mario WIlliams will be a star NFL player, but you have the opportunity to select perhaps the most phenomenally talented athlete EVER to come out of college, and you PASS on him? WTF? Why do I have the sinking feeling that we may be seeing the Houston Texans turning into the NFL equivalent of the Los Angeles Clippers? Inept, clueless, and built to stay that way, eh?

When I was living in Portland , the Trailblazers one year selected Sam Bowie (a reasonably talented player in his own right), and in doing so passed on a talented player from North Carolina who would change the game of basketball forever. This phenomenally talented player’s legacy will define grace, class, and competitve fury for generations to come. Yes, I’m talking about Michael Jordan, and he could (and by all rights should) have been wearing a Trailblazers jersey throughout his brilliant career. Instead, Portland took Sam Bowie, who certainly wasn’t a bust as an NBA player, but when you consider that he’s better known for breeding and racing horses…yeah, the Trailblazers blew it. Now Houston is faced with a situation that may well turn out to be a virtual repeat of the Bowie/Jordan scenario. I hope that I’m wrong, but I don’t believe I am.

Ah, ‘tis good to be a Vikings fan. At least they don’t f—k up the #1 draft pick, eh?

Were the Texans scared off by Bush’s family living in a house furnished by a sports agent? If that was an issue, why did they continue to negotiate with him until Thursday?

Or did the Texans change their mind about Bush? Did they decide he wasn’t the best player available in this draft?

Maybe all those other teams, maybe all those other talent evaluators, aren’t as smart as the Texans. The Texans decided their need for a pass rusher was more pressing than taking the best player on the board.

There’s a word for this kind of logic in professional sports. It’s called stupidity.

Most draft-day mistakes are made when teams attempt to draft for need instead of simply taking the best player. That’s especially true of Bush, who has been compared to Gale Sayers.

It’s going to be interesting to see what the reaction will be here in the Houston area to this fiasco. After last year’s 2-14 debacle, you’d think that Bob McNair and Charlie Casserly might want to take the safe, smart route to making a splash. Reggie Bush certainly would have been that. While Mario Williams is without a doubt a gifted athlete, my mind keeps drifting back to the Sam Bowie/Michael Jordan scenario. Santayana was hardly referring to football, but he was certainly correct when he said that those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it. Why does this feel like the NFL version of “Groundhog Day”?

I wouldn’t be surprised if this blunder resulted in a significant backlash from Texans fans. She Who Endures My Myriad Eccentricities has already declared that she will no longer watch the Texans, root for the Texans. or purchase another item of Texans paraphenalia. We’ll see whether her fury will last once the NFL season begins, but her emotions probably closely mirror that of thousands of Texans fans. How can you believe that Bob McNair is serious about building a Super Bowl contender when you allow your GM to pass on arguably the most gifted and talented player in NCAA history? The short answer, of course, is that you can’t.

I’d never thought I’d have any reason to compare Robert McNair to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who is the gold standard for ineptitude and poor decision-making in professional sports. I’m beginning to wonder if this might not be more of an apt comparison that I could have imagined.

The buck might stop with Bob McNair, but it’s not as if his GM, Charlie Casserly, has made a reputation for drafting wisely. How Casserly even still has a job with the Texans is beyond my comprehension. It seems that this brain cramp is an organizational issue more than something that can be laid at the feet of any one individual. Even so, the end result is still the same. Reggie Bush went to New Orleans, and Houston is paying $9 million a year for Mario Who???

2-14? At this rate, Houston might just be a fixture at the #1 pick.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on April 30, 2006 8:49 AM.

Sleeping the sleep of the clueless and complacent was the previous entry in this blog.

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