I suspect that Aaron Curry's draft hype was most likely a media creation, much like Shariff Floyd this year. His tape was nowhere near top five pick quality, and the untapped potential argument always struck me as myth-making because there wasn't any evidence that made you think "oh, if he does this one thing better he'll take off." Nothing like that. He had a "missile" like quality against running backs that attacked laterally, and he had good "physical" talent (size, speed, etc), but otherwise he was ultra blase on tape. If you are going to pay a LB $60 million over 6 years you need to be sure he's Julian Peterson first, and on his college tape Curry looked much more like a Leroy Hill type.
Perhaps because of the cautionary tale that is Aaron Curry, it seems front offices have gotten better at figuring out which players are media creations and which aren't. Floyd looked like a lock for the top 3 based on draft hype but slid into the late 1st. Based on how I graded him, late 1st is what he deserved. Floyd has short arms and couldn't penetrate to save his life at Florida. He's good at everything else, he's not a bum, but as a pass rusher he's the opposite of great, and yet people in the media were saying he'd be a 10 sack a year 3-tech. Talk about clueless. People said the same thing about Curry, that he'd be a 10 sack a year player, and like Floyd, they predicted this despite strong evidence to the contrary. They pulled it straight out of their ass. Unfortunately for us, Tim Ruskell fell for it because he didn't know how to evaluate talent.
I felt the same way with Greg Oden. Every time I watched him at OSU he would get 10 points 10 rebounds playing full time. I understood the argument that you draft centers #1, but I never understood why it had to be Oden. He was a hype job gone out of control. I'm glad I'm not a Blazers fan. Watching my teams take mindless hype jobs like Oden and Curry within the span of a couple years would have been too much to take.
