One of the great mysteries of my life is why I continue to return to ESPN in search of quality sports information when they consistently leave me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied. I'm just like the women in those Lifetime movies.
A lot of you probably already know where this is going.
So I flipped on the world wide leader last night to take in this NFL mock draft show with the hopes that I might get some quality knowledge as to how this whole thing Saturday is going to play out. The show consisted of the networks' NFL "experts" like Sean Salisbury, Michael Smith and a couple of other guys whose names couldn't survive a Thursday night out on the town, going through the first round of the draft and predicting who they thought each team would pick.
After a while it became apparent that something was wrong.
It took nearly an hour and-a-half, two breaks, and 24 picks before the draft expert speaking after Mel Kiper (may have been Todd McShay, but don't hold me to that) finally said what everyone with any basic knowledge of the rookie class of '07 was thinking: "I think you guys may have forgotten about Amobi Okoye."
Indeed they had.
The defensive tackle out of Louisville who is being projected in nearly every mock draft as a top ten pick, and who has been forecast at lowest to be selected with the 15th pick, was still on the board.
After a commercial break the panel admitted that they had completely forgotten about Okoye, and he was selected by the New York Jets with the 25th pick.
When you think about it's not really all that big of a deal because nothing says "this is a completely legitimate NFL mock draft show featuring extremely knowledgeable professionals" like totally whiffing on one of the biggest names about to enter the League.
This is even more reprehensible when you take into consideration how much Amobi has been in the news over the past four weeks or so because of his age, and more recently, his experiments with marijuana as a 16-year-old. I don't think it's a stretch to say that outside of Russell, Quinn, Johnson and Peterson, Okoye is the hardest player in the draft to forget about.
Of course the real loser in all of this is the poor guy who has been feeling left out of the sports conversations at work, so he took notes as he watched ESPN for an hour and-a-half only to realize that his torch bearers had somehow blanked on a top ten pick, making the entire show irrelevant.
Keep your head up Stephen A.