Six years after then-rookie Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson took the NFL by storm, another Texans rookie quarterback is having an even bigger debut season.
C.J. Stroud is arguably the best rookie quarterback the NFL has ever seen.
Zak Keefer of TheAthletic.com has taken a closer look at the manner in which Stroud has shaken things up and defied expectations at the NFL level.
Stroud’s performance becomes even more impressive in light of the relentless anti-C.J. campaign that someone was waging before the draft. Because someone was trying to get him to slide. Most likely, someone who wanted to draft Stroud wanted the Texans and presumably others to pass on him until he slipped into the clutches of whoever was trying to get him to fall.
That’s how it happens. Employees of a team that loves a player will whisper to reporters all sorts of negativity in the hopes that the player will end up being there when that team is on the clock.
The most tangible fact that was used to drag Stroud down the board came from the S2 test. Much was made of the fact that Bryce Young aced it, and that Stroud definitely did not. At the time, we were told that only a handful of teams even use the S2 test. Which told us all we needed to know about what was really happening.
Someone was looking for something/anything to knock the Texans wobbly at No. 2. To their credit, the Texans held firm.
So did Stroud.
“What’s a man gonna do to me?” Stroud told Keefer. “I fear God. I don’t fear no situation, I don’t fear a team, I don’t fear an owner. What’s so bad that’s gonna happen? I’m gonna drop to No. 10? Look at my perspective. I’m gonna get drafted regardless of that dang test.”
It’s unclear who was trying to get Stroud to fall. Stroud seems to think he knows.
“I got down to how it happened, so I got some heads to bust in the offseason,” Stroud told Keefer, who added that Stroud was “laughing just enough to make you think he might be serious.”
For every great college player, there’s a ceiling that won’t be known until he competes against the best of the best opposition the NFL has to offer. Some fail. Others thrive. Stroud is thriving.
Just like whoever was trying to get the Texans not to draft him suspected he would.
Keep this in mind when we get to March and April and reports emerge from “anonymous scouts” and other unnamed team sources. When a team secretly loves a player, it will privately trash him so that the team has a chance to get him. And when a team privately hates a player, it will talk him up in the hopes that someone drafting earlier will take him off the board and push other players down the board.
Of course, by the time the Draft Industrial Complex is up and running, that nuance gets ignored. It’s all about generating items about who’s interested in which players and who’s rising and who’s falling and way too many in the media gobble up the bullshit and pass it along to their audiences because, for a sizable chunk of the offseason, blindly trafficking in such nonsense pays the bills.
