More than
Winning Selections...
Money Management Tools
to Turn Picks into Profits.

What do Jeff Christenson, Babe Laufenberg, Reggie Collier, Gary Kubiak, Tom Ramsey and Bruce Mathison have in common with John Elway, Todd Blackridge, Jim Kelly, Tony Eason, Ken O’Brien and Dan Marino?

They were the next six quarterbacks chosen in the 1983 National Football League Draft after Elway, Blackridge, Kelly, Eason, O’Brien and Marino were selected in the first round. No quarterback was chosen after the Miami Dolphins took Marino with the 27th pick until Christenson was selected by the Cincinnati Bengals in the fifth round with the 137th pick in the draft.

What can we learn from this information?

Well, why it is fashionable to point out that Joe Montana wasn’t selected until the third round, the San Francisco 49ers tabbed him with the 82nd pick in the 1979 draft, and Tom Brady lasted until the sixth round, chosen by the New England Patriots with the 199th pick in the 2000 draft, most often the scouts get it right.

Now, there are often some unsubstantiated claims about certain players that taint their viability on draft day. In 1983, there was a rumor that Marino had a drug problem, it is not verified that the Dolphins planted the story, but they certainly were the team that benefited from the false claim. Without that story circulating, we could have expected Marino would not have been the last of the six first round quarterbacks chosen that year.

This year, recent reports have Ohio State’s quarterback Justin Fields battling epilepsy. This is not a false rumor and has been confirmed by Fields who has battled it since a child and has managed it to where episodes are less frequent and it has never affected his play on the field. Still, the news may cool the 49ers prospects of drafting him with the third pick in the draft and shift their thinking to Alabama’s Mac Jones.

When my grandson was two-years-old he was clear on what major league baseball player was his favorite. It was Oakland A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson. As the doting grandfather I am, before he attended his first baseball game I bought him a Donaldson jersey.

Just after his fourth birthday, the A’s traded Donalson to the Toronto Blue Jays, and for his next birthday I gave him a Donaldson jersey from the Jays in a little bigger size. For Christmas in 2018, I gave Mickey a Cleveland Indians jersey that was a couple sizes larger when Donalson joined them. Last year, for his ninth birthday, Mickey had moved up to a larger Minnesota Twins jersey for a gift once Donaldson moved onto his fourth professional team.

This week, for my first visit to a stadium in two years, the A’s were playing the Twins and Donalson had a great day, hitting a home run, scoring three runs and collecting four hits. But, he had made the last out in the ninth inning, so when the A’s tied the game in the bottom of the ninth he was placed at second base to start the tenth inning. During the pandemic, Major League Baseball has adopted the rule of beginning extra innings with a runner at second base and that player is the one that made the final out the previous inning.

Instead of Donaldson at second base when the tenth inning began, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli put in a pinch runner. Now, he would justify it later in postgame interviews as the way he works to best assure getting that runner home from second. I was second guessing him from the stands as it happened, thinking that taking one of your hottest hitters out of the game might be a problem when his turn in the batting order came around again if the game went beyond the tenth inning.

In fact, the move was an error for another reason.

First, you didn’t need speed to score from second that inning, as Byron Buxton blasted a majestic drive deep into the left field stands for a two run homer. The slowest player in the league would have scored from second on a home run. But, while Baldelli was guarding against a close play at the plate going his way with more speed at second, the move ended up most likely costing his team the game.

Bay Area interest in the upcoming National Football League draft got a lot more intense after the San Francisco 49ers traded up to the third pick in the first round. They paid a heavy price for moving up nine spots, including their first round choice this year and first rounders in 2022 and 2023 along with an additional third round choice next season sent to the Miami Dolphins.

The trade made it clear that San Francisco is looking to draft one of the quarterbacks available this year in a draft considered to be QB rich. When they made the trade, they thought they might get their choice of the four considered best available after Jacksonville used the first pick in the lottery to tab Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence. That list includes BYU’s Zack Wilson, Alabama’s Mac Jones, North Dakota State’s Trey Lance and Ohio State’s Justin Fields.

Between the Jaguars first pick and the 49ers third, the New York Jets were wedged and they had traded up a couple years ago to pick their franchise quarterback, Sam Darnold. But, like so many things with the Jets, Darnold never took off with a professional career that matched his prowess during his college days with the USC Trojans. We are going to find out now whether Darnold’s struggles were solely his fault or more likely attributed to the mess that is the Jets.

The Carolina Panthers paid a small price in draft choices to acquire Darnold last week, meaning New York has decided it wants to hit the restart button for a quarterback in the Big Apple and will use their second pick in the draft to grab one of the four that remain after Lawrence is a Jaguar. San Francisco had hoped that the Jets would stay with Darnold and go for another position with the second pick … that possibility is now erased.

As for Darnold’s future, he is likely to have a career boosted by his departure from the Jets. We have other examples of QB’s that didn’t succeed with struggling teams that drafted them and went on to Hall of Fame careers with better organizations. Jim Plunkett was the first pick of the New England Patriots and struggled there before a couple NFL stops later landed him with Al Davis’ Raiders and resulted in a pair of Super Bowl wins. Steve Young struggled with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after a brief career with the Los Angeles Express of the USFL, then blossomed with the 49ers and engineered a win in Super Bowl XXIX while throwing a record six touchdowns.

In 1983, the NFL had a draft that was considered the most quarterback rich ever and six teams used first round picks to choose a field general. The Baltimore Colts took John Elway with the first pick in the draft, and then were cornered into trading him and his career with the Denver Broncos was pure storybook. It included four Super Bowl appearances and two wins. That same year, the Miami Dolphins, who had lost to the Washington Redskins in the prior season’s Super Bowl, took the last of the six signal callers chosen in the first round … and that worked out very well with the addition of Dan Marino to South Florida.