peppersjap":3rraeyvn said:
I have no problem admitting I was a skeptic (and so glad I was wrong) and know how I was coming to that conclusion by the way they were using him early in his rookie year. I think it was the Bears game before they finally cut him loose and we found out what we had. I was solidly on the Flynn wagon and would never deny that. I thought that we just needed someone solid but we had someone fantastic that they drafted. I've never been so happy to be wrong!
That's the closest anyone has come to duplicating my thoughts.
I had seen Russell in college when he played for Wisconsin, and was impressed. He put up excellent numbers, and I was not against drafting him because of his height. I did think that we took him too early, that he could have been had for as little as a 5th rounder.
In the preseason, even though I thought Russell played better than Flynn that it had to be weighed against the fact that Flynn was playing in the first half against better players vs. the training camp fodder Russell was playing against. As I recall, Flynn got hurt before the final preseason game. I wonder if Russell still would have won the job over a completely healthy Matt Flynn.
No revisionist history here. I was dead wrong, both on the expenditure of a 3rd rounder as well as my initial preference for Flynn.
One side note, Pete kept insisting that it was a 3 way competition between Russell, Flynn, and TJack. Nothing could have been further from the truth. They had already decided that TJack was not in the mix, and indeed, TJack never took a snap in the preseason and was traded before the season began. They wouldn't have both signed Flynn in free agency and drafted Russell if they had any confidence in TJack at all.
