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NFL Draft Wrapup
The SEC had 38 players taken total in the NFL Draft, more than a quarter of them in the first round. The breakdown of selections by round: First, 10; Second, 2; Third, 8; Fourth, 4; Fifth, 4; Sixth, 3; Seventh, 7.
Only Vanderbilt did not have a player taken in this year's draft, and Georgia and LSU tied for the conference lead with six apiece. Alabama was next with five, with four of them being first round picks and the last a seventh. Next came Auburn, Florida, and Mississippi State with four each.
The most notable faller was Arkansas' Ryan Mallett, who didn't come off the board until New England took him early in the third round. A few players, most notably Florida's Will Hill and South Carolina's Tory Gurley, made poor choices to enter early as they did not get picked.
A poster at Black Heart Gold Pants look at the rates at which players of each number of recruiting stars get drafted to figure out which schools and conferences do the best jobs at developing talent for the NFL. The SEC is pretty much right on target across the board as a conference, and the best individual school by this measure is Georgia.
Where there's smoke, there's fire.
Does Florida have a drug problem? Officials there unsurprisingly say no in this lengthy look at the program from the Gainesville Sun. The best stuff comes in the second half of the piece once you get past the boilerplate statements from UF leaders about being vigilant and whatnot in regards to drugs.
Urban Meyer is quoted as saying that marijuana was a problem when he got to Florida, and that he "put a little bit of a dent in it" while still calling it a problem. This comes after the athletics director, president, and current head coach all said Florida has no problem. Also revealed is the fact that, while Florida's official policy only includes a mandatory dismissal after five positive tests, Meyer's personal policy was to kick players out after three. The only player to get hit by that was Marcus Thomas in 2006.
Football Study Hall uses four-year trends to figure out who won from last year's rounds of conference realignment. The only conference that really came out materially ahead is the Big East with its addition of TCU. The Big 12 actually gained the next most amount of ground because, while losing Nebraska was a blow that helped the Big Ten, losing Colorado was that big a gain.
The article then goes on to analyse the counterfactuals surrounding what might have happened had the Pac-16 vision been fulfilled. Most interestingly, it includes a list of the just 16 teams (!) that the SEC could have taken from that would have improved the conference's average effectiveness. We're on top, you know, so taking nearly anyone would only drag us down.