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Is Michigan State Ruining Javon Ringer?
By Anthony
October 2, 2008 11:43 pm
We spend a lot of time talking about player evaluation on this site, and we often talk about the idea of red flags that you can look at to cross a player off of your board altogether. One of those is on display right now in college football, and it’s a damn shame for the NFL team that makes the mistake of drafting him.
Javon Ringer is a beast. He is an absolutely unstoppable runner from Michigan State. He’s run for 3,658 yards and 24 touchdowns in what is quickly becoming a storied career. That’s not the problem. The problem is that he has carried the ball 187 times in the first 5 games of the season. For those of you who are too lazy to do the math, that’s 37.4 carries per game, and over the course of a 12 game season that will add up to 448 carries. That’s a lot.
By comparison, the man everyone talked about this with last year was Kevin Smith. Now a Detroit Lion, Smith toted the ball 450 times in 2007 and despite being the nation’s leading rusher fell to the third round because teams know that guys who carry the ball that many times in a year typically take two or three years to recover from it.
I believe that Javon Ringer will eventually be a great NFL runner, it’s just a matter of how long it will take him to recover from the beating he is taking in college.
Topics: 2009 NFL Draft, NFL |