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Viewpoint: How’d the Bears do? Who really knows?

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By Craig DeVrieze | Saturday, May 3, 2008 6:38 PM CDT | () comments

Good news, Bears fans. Mel Kiper says the Bears helped themselves more than any other NFL team during last week’s draft.

Oh, but there is bad news, too, Bears fans.

Mel Kiper says ...

Instant NFL Draft analysis typically is as accurate and reliable as Notre Dame recruiting class rankings. And the fact that Kiper has made a living from his alleged ability to decipher who done good and who done bad one day a year is owed more to his audience’s voracious appetite for malarky than to the shellac-’do’ed dude’s ability to deliver genuinely cogent review.

Understand that Kiper is not alone in this game, and, to be fair, he’s at least as good as most at pegging Draft Day hits and misses.

In fact, when it comes to offering quick draft analysis — or, for that matter, opining on anything regarding the NFL in remotely close to spot-on fashion — it is Sports Illustrated’s Paul “Dr. Z’’ Zimmerman who ranks as the Matt Millen of the craft. (Which is to say provably incompetent, yet chronically employed.)

On the opposite end of the Kiper-scale, Dr. Zero ranked last weekend’s Bears draft near the absolute bottom of the NFL barrel because — get this — a team that desperately needed to shore up a bullet-ridden offense failed to spend the No. 14 overall pick on a run-stopping defensive tackle.

Never mind that virtually no one paid to give these matters much thought believed that was a first-round direction the Bears would or should take. And forget that many post-draft analysis credited the Bears with stealing a first-round talent in the third in Arkansas defensive tackle Marcus Harrison.

Do remember this: Zimmerman pegged the Bears as the 31st best team in the NFL in 2005. They finished with the NFC’s second best regular-season record.

As for Kiper’s kind verbal assessment of Jerry Angelo’s body of work last weekend?

Consider that Kiper later graded the Bears draft an overall B in print.

Consider II: B is the same grade he granted Team Angelo in 2003, starting his recap with this sentence: “I like the addition of Michael Haynes at defensive end, and I have always been high on Rex Grossman at quarterback.’’

Now consider: Haynes is a missing person two years beyond the least storied Bears career this side of Stan Thomas. And Grossman’s continuing presence on the Bears roster is the chief reason many draftniks found fault with a 12-pack of ‘08 Bears picks that failed to include a quarterback.

Footballfuture.com, docsports.com and Yahoo! Sports all cited that as the chief reason for saddling this Bears class with a grade of C.

The Orlando Sentinel, meantime, slapped Angelo with a D, saying: “12 players and not one throws the ball.’’

As evidence of this science’s inexactitude, however, the Bears got an A from Rick Gosselin of the Dallas Morning News, who cited as “value picks” the selections of Harrison, receivers Earl Bennett in the third and Marcus Monk in the seventh, safety Craig Steltz in the fourth and defensive back Zackary Bowman in the fifth.

The Bears also got a B-plus from CBSSports.com, which said Harrison “will make this draft’’ and B-minus for USA Today, which applauded the Steltz selection.

And then there was Canadian point of view. TSN, a north of the border Web site, tentatively graded the Bears at a B-minus, but said the grade ultimately will be determined by the success or failure of Matt Forte, the running back the Bears selected in the second round.

A would-be Quad-City Times pundit could be tempted to concur with the Canucks, but, he will hold his tongue instead.

Wouldn’t want Mel Kiper throwing those words back in his face four years from now.

Craig DeVrieze can be contacted at (563) 333-2610 or cdevrieze@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com