There is one thing that continues to haunt my mind though.  I have a good friend who works at a restaurant in the Tampa Bay Area.  About a month and a half ago, he called me after work and said that Radio Raheem, Ronde Barber and Sabby “SoSo Awful” Piscatelli had been eating dinner at his restaurant that evening.  This particular friend, is not one that you would call a die hard sports fan.  He did call me to let me know that Radio was gushing over Jason Pierre-Paul the whole evening.  He happened to know who this was, despite his lack of any real in depth sports knowledge, because he graduated from USF.

I don’t watch a plethora of college football games.  I tend to watch a lot of highlights, video of highlights and games for top level teams moreso than watching games between SMU and Hawaii at 11pm on Saturday night.  I did watch quite a few USF games though, and while JPP seems like a physical freak, he was just not a player that I watched and thought, holy shit, this guy is going to be an NFL star.  This of course is about as non-scientific of an evaluation as you can get.  I think the fancy Youtube video of him backflipping all over the field is nice and all, but I could care less about back flips from my DE’s, I want sacks.

His 6 college sacks, only 2 of which came against top 3 round level tackle talent, is a little troubling for a guy who some are claiming to be the premier edge rusher of the draft.  He just didn’t seem to have that explosive first step that is necessary to produce double digit sacks.  Hell, he barely had half of a double digit sack total in a below average BCS conference.

FootballOutsiders, one of my favorite websites to read, put out an article yesterday about a new stat they have called SackSEER.  It evaluates edge rushers based on the following criteria:

There are four main factors that correlate to sack success in the NFL: vertical leap, short shuttle time, sacks per game in college (with some playing time adjustments), and how many eligible games worth of NCAA football the player missed for any reason (except early entry into the NFL Draft). SackSEER projects each prospect’s total sacks through five years, which is roughly the average length of the rookie contract received by a first- or second-round pick. Although the individual trends are small, when considered together, they project sack production approximately three times more accurately than a player’s draft position within the first two rounds. Overall, SackSEER accounts for approximately 40 percent of the historical variation among these players’ accumulated five-year sack totals.

Very interesting stuff, and completely unsold on JPP as a pro prospect.  He actually ranked out as one of the lowest edge rushers that has top 2 round potential.  There was one stat that correlated to combine numbers that I thought was very interesting…No elite edge rusher has emerged from any round of the NFL Draft since at least 1999 with a short shuttle slower than 4.42 seconds.  JPP was one of the worst at the combine out of the guys that have top 2 round talent or rankings.

I like the Buccaneers accumulation of picks over the last 5 months.  I think they have done a good job recognizing this draft as a deep one, and trying to obtain as many picks as possible to be able to move around the draft as they please.  I just hope they don’t get infatuated with collecting as many picks as possible, not draft Gerald McCoy at 3, trade down and target JPP.  Please don’t do this Mark, pretty please, my 2nd plea  of the day.

Footballoutsiders.com, produced a 2009 All-Keep Choppin Wood Team on Thursday, and two Bucs made the list.

Every week, your Scramble writers award players, coaches and owners for mind-bogglingly bad decisions or performances — those actions that go above and beyond mediocrity and directly lead to their team losing. Over the course of the season, a few starts fall down into the dregs, and subtly or overtly hang about their team’s neck like an albatross. These are the players of the All-Keep Choppin’ Wood Team. Tom and I went through position by position and picked out some of our favorite wood-choppers. Keep in mind that this is not only incredibly subjective, but rife with partial information; while it’s easy to get good information on the NFL’s premiere performers, it’s not quite so easy to get information on the chronic underachievers and purveyors of debilitating mediocrity.

Jeremy Trueblood

Mike: It’s a common refrain that penalty-prone linemen are a massive liability to their offense, and it’s quite true — very few drives can survive a holding penalty, and false starts often put teams in unmanageable positions. Jeremy Trueblood, however, is in a league of his own. He’s a holding and false start machine, tied for second in the league with 13 penalties, and he’s generally a turnstile. On top of this, he somehow caught a reputation as a dirty player. Not “Olin Kruetz cheats” dirty, but “getting fined over $26,000 by the league” dirty. How do you rack up that much unnecessary roughness? Especially as an offensive lineman!

Tom: Consider him an overachiever.

Mike: He’s got to be some kind of psychopath.

Sabby Piscatelli

Tom: So, Sabby Piscitelli. It’s kind of a fun name, in that juvenile, vaguely dirty way some Italian names are. His house was burglarized during the win against Green Bay this year, and burglary is wrong and illegal, so he has my sympathies. I hope he was covered by insurance. If you do an Internet search on him, he’s apparently somewhat of a favorite of the ladies. They had an easy time finding him this year; all they had to do was look at who was supposed to be there when Tampa Bay gave up a long touchdown pass.

There isn’t much more for me to say that I haven’t said at some point this year, or wasn’t summed up by Footballoutsiders in this funny article.