I'll Survive Without Clay, and Bucky Will Too

John Clay is following the example of the immortal P.J. Hill and leaving early for the NFL despite the fact that he will not be picked anywhere near high enough to make most players traditionally want to leave. Clay is a lot better than P.J. Hill ever was, so I'm not going to say I am HAPPY he is leaving like I was when Hill left. And I don't blame Clay, because his stock is probably not going to get higher (in fact, he should've left last year). I guess my point in this rambling, incoherent post, is that Clay was only arguably the best RB on the team, and more likely part of a 3 headed monster with Ball and White. While 3 headed monsters are nice, they can get frustrating because Brett is more likely to not play the hot hand in order to give someone their share of the carries, which may not work out in the Badgers' best interest. Bucky will be fine, especially since there are two good freshman coming too. We will miss J.J. Watt a whole lot more.

Clay will stick in the league for quite a while if he can stay healthy. If P.J. Hill and DeShawn Wynn can play, Clay can. But he's probably not a starting back. But who knows? I never thought Ryan Grant was good until he got hurt and I had to watch Brandon Jackson play.

Trade Deadline

So it was brought to the attention of the JSOnline readers that earlier this week TT decided to offer a 3rd round draft choice for Tony Gonzalez while the Chiefs wanted a 2nd round choice. In the past TT has been unwilling to trade for two current studs in Michael Turner and Randy Moss, now granted we have a great wide receiving corps and we probably didn't NEED Randy Moss, but we definitely could have used Turner, we'd be paying him about the same as we are paying Grant right now, especially if Grant hits his incentives(not looking that way right now). Randy Moss would have been great, but we probably would have over-payed for a very good wide receiver who would bail out on us near the end of his contract if he felt like his situation wasn't ideal, so I'm not all that upset about missing the boat on him.

Back to Gonzalez, he is probably in the top 3 or 4 for receiving tight ends in the league, depending on if you count Kellen Winslows's 3 seasons of motorcycle accidents and syphilis as dependable enough to rank him higher than Tony. Not only that he's a complete tight end, he can block as well, now he may not be the best blocking tight end, but as I've already mentioned, great receiver AND he can block, so that's just a nice bonus. Donald Lee isn't a bad tight end, in fact I think he's good enough that once him and Rodgers develop a real rapport he'll start seeing a lot of balls thrown his way, and not swollen Kellen Winslow balls either, actual footballs.

The fact that we could have gotten T-Gon for a 2nd round pick, which has been a crapshoot thus far for TT, makes me wonder. We got Nick Collins and Greg Jennings, but we also drafted Terrence Murphy, Daryn Colledge(who will probably be let loose after his rookie contract), Brandon Jackson(verdict is still out on him, but I think he's terrible), and now this year, Nelson, Brohm and Patrick Lee the corner. Go through that list, tell me who you'd rather have than Tony Gonzalez. Greg Jennings, maybe Nick Collins? We'd also have just as good of a chance that TT would trade down that pick and turn it into 17 6th round picks(that's an exaggeration). Gonzalez also just said he was only going to play for another 3 years, which doesn't screw up our long term goals to keep our salary cap under control while we sign some of our younger studs we have on the team right now to long term deals.

I guess in the end I'm at least happy that we made an offer instead of just sitting on our hands, and hopefully Donald Lee starts getting more looks, but man I really think it would have helped our offense to have a safety valve like Gonzalez running around the field...