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When last we left Jimmy Clausen fluffer Peter King, he had Jimmy at about half sail. But that was before a weekend that saw the latest Notre Dame douche product dip in the middle of the second round, which took a significant toll on his tumescence. Obviously, the Good Lord would not stand this for long and saw fit to grant wisdom to the people of Carolina to welcome Clausen with barbecue-sauce coated arms. Let the PK retroactive fluffing begin!

Also: Why does the NFL hate smart people? Is the draft so intense that it only be described a one-word sentence at a time? Just how different is Seattle? Where in relation to happy is your town? Which derisive chant will Mike Florio yell at you? These revelations (AS WELL AS GOD’S!) after the jump.

My favorite draft weekend story: The Man Who Said No to the NFL.

manwhosaidnonfl

I caught him as he pulled his car back onto his bucolic campus Sunday and prepared to buckle down for a long night of Italian homework.

Ooh, Italian homework. That’s one rigorous course load you got there. Is it that assignment where you have to write a one-page paper on your summer vacation or what you wanted to be when you grew up. “Da quando ero un ragazzo…”

You see, on a New England campus, one player just said no to five teams that wanted him to come to their training camp this summer. I’ll get to Scott Sicko later.

Mio dio, what a tease! Porca puttana!

SEATTLE: Ever have one of those Dream Drafts that falls just right? The Seahawks did.

The one with all the nekkid girls and Goodell getting run through with a lance? Cool!

CLEVELAND: If you love the Colt McCoy pick, Browns fans, send a thank-you note this morning to GM Thomas Dimitroff, in care of the Atlanta Falcons.

“Dear Falcons guy,

Thanks for choosing a player who wasn’t Colt McCoy so our team could maybe select him if they wanted. In appreciation, here is our city’s finest article of refuse. It’s a McDonald’s container that once held an Apple pie. We are told that it was tasty.

Yours,
Dawg Pound”

CAROLINA: How does Jimmy Clausen fall to pick 48? The Panthers don’t know, and they don’t care.

“How’d this piece of shit end up by the side of the road? Whatevs! Ours now!”

Thursday, 5 p.m. PDT, Seahawks Draft Room. Nervous place. Quiet. Tense.

Clipped phrasing. Lone descriptors. Lofty writing. Gimmicky. Hacky.

First draft as a boss for coach Pete Carroll. First draft as a boss for GM John Schneider. Kansas City’s on the clock with the fifth pick in the draft. The Chiefs are going to take either Tennessee safety Eric Berry or Oklahoma State tackle Russell Okung. Carroll and Schneider want Okung. They’ve heard the Chiefs could go either way. Tick, tick, tick. Minutes go by, three or four of them, and the call comes into the Seahawks: It’s Berry in K.C.

Elation. Erections.

Schneider was around Ron Wolf and Mike Holmgren and Mike Sherman and Ted Thompson in Green Bay and Seattle previous to taking this gig in January, and he’s a big believer in momentum in a draft. If you get your first guy exactly the way you want it, then you don’t have to re-configure your board to account for a position of great need.

Who would have imagined making a selection was so easy when the player you wanted all along falls into your lap?

After the sixth pick, Seattle likes Jimmy Clausen the quarterback and C.J. Spiller the running back. But the ‘Hawks needed Earl Thomas the safety. Big position of need, a quarterback for the secondary.

They already got the quarterback of the offensive line. But what about their future at quarterback, who is the quarterback of all the quarterbacks? It’s a tough call for the head coach, who must quarterback the quarterback, who is the quarterback of all the quarterbacks.

My sense is that as these picks fell — Seattle was at 60 in the second round, having traded down 20 spots in the round to get Whitehurst from San Diego — there was no question Seattle would have taken Clausen if Carolina, at 48, didn’t beat them to it.

Yeah, Seattle would have given the world to acquire fuckface Jimmy Clausen. But as the old saying goes, when Charlie Whitehurst is available you just don’t say no.

I’d seen Hasselbeck Thursday afternoon and told him I’d given Seattle Clausen at number 14 in my mock draft, and who knows, they loved him and they just might do it. “Whoa,” he said. “Then I’m an ostrich. I’ve had my head in the sand. That would, uh, surprise me.”

Because Clausen sucks?

Thanks God for Carolina then.

But thank him care of the Atlanta Falcons.

Look at the teams between 48 and 60, and figure one that would pick Clausen: San Francisco (maybe, but Mike Singletary loved Taylor Mays and picked him at 49), Kansas City, Houston, Pittsburgh, New England, Cincinnati, Dallas, Green Bay, Baltimore, Houston, Cleveland (which traded up in desperation at 59 to get running back Montario Hardesty). Maybe there’d have been a trade. Who knows?

Maybe that God fella? Or the capricious spirits inside my DVR machine? The nice man directing traffic when the light broke? CERTAINLY NOT ME.

They stayed at 60 and picked Tate. When Carroll called him to welcome him to the Seahawks, he told him to be ready for anything — receiving, returning, rushing … and yes, Wildcatting. Golden Tate might play Ronnie Brown in Seattle.

He’s the quarterback of multi-purpose players.

Most teams come out of a draft happy. Seattle came out a little north of happy. “I am jacked,” Carroll told me as Friday ended.

Which I believe is still 20 miles due south of AMPED! And the sister city of STOKED!

That’s usually the idea. It’s so sobering to realize that top draft picks have about a 50-percent washout factor.

You have to risk it for the 50 percent of legitishness you might obtain. And it’s a good thing PK didn’t try to utter this sentiment on the ESPN broadcast. They would have immediately cut to:

At number 83, two spots before the Browns were going to pick, Atlanta GM Dimitroff picked Peters, the defensive tackle the Browns had in their sights at 85.

“Then,” Holmgren said, laughing, “the fates were telling me something. We had to pick him. I said to Tom, ‘Let’s pull the trigger.’ I tried to run this draft the way Ron Wolf used to in Green Bay. Everyone contributed. But I kind of pulled rank a little bit. I said, ‘Let’s do this.”’

NFL war rooms are the most melodramatic places in the world. “Clearly this team selecting a player at an appropriate time just before us is nothing short of a clarion call from the creator Himself. WHO ARE WE TO DECLINE THIS HEAVENLY MANDATE? TO ARMS, SIRS!”

He’s right. Clausen with the 48th pick isn’t in the same league with some of the great steals of all time (I don’t think) but I think it’ll end up the biggest shock of this draft when we look at it 10 years from now. The guy plays hurt, throws well on the run, is smart and productive. Maybe he’s not the kind of guy you want to go on vacation with. Maybe he is full of himself. But what’s Jay Cutler? Philip Rivers?

One of whom is good while the other led the league in interceptions last year. So I think this is an inaccurate taxonomy of quarterbacks. While Marmalard and Cutlerfucker both fall under the same douche phylum, from there they diverge dramatically. Rivers is braying asswipe with a shit-eating grin who frequently yells at fans and opposing teams at the same time espousing a life of quiet religious observance and abstinence off the field. Cutler, meanwhile, possesses a childlike standoffish quality with teammate and the media (not unlike an Eli) while being smugly convinced of his superiority in spite of frequent evidence of the contrary. Clausen falls much closer to the Cutlerfucker order.

Weis and Fox are close. Fox is sure Weis wouldn’t lie to him.

No, he is sincere in his idiocy.

With a strong offensive line, good running game and a defense that should hold the scores down, Carolina is a great landing spot for Clausen.

His fucking up won’t hurt them quite nearly as much!

“We talked after we got picked,” Golden Tate said. “And the one thing we both agreed on is that it’s a lot more important where you go than how high you go.”

Clausen then huffed and hung up on Tate.

So with the final few picks winding down, Sicko told his family the truth: If he didn’t get drafted, he wanted to go back to college full-time and see what direction the road took him.

He said he had no bitterness, no anger at teams for not picking him. But when he thought about a football life on the edge of a roster — possibly an itinerant life of an undrafted free-agent, working out day after day to try to get a shot in an NFL camp, or moving from one NFL practice squad to another, or possibly being on an active roster — it didn’t jibe with the life he wanted to live.

Stefan Fatsis has shown him the light!

He knows people will think he’s nuts. There aren’t many athletes, given a choice, who would want to go work in the real world before giving their sport a major effort. To Sicko, it doesn’t feel like quitting. It feels like just choosing to do something else he loves. There wasn’t a sentence in a 25-minute conversation that had regret in it.

Positive tone. Hope. Optimism.

It’s nice, in the midst of a weekend when football seems more important than breathing to some, that we have a different kind of role model for our kids. I hope they read everything Scott Sicko just said here.

It’s okay to quit on your dreams so long as your back-up plan serves a societal benefit!

Quote of the Week III

“We got another T.O.”
– Philadelphia coach Andy Reid, after picking Washington defensive end Daniel Te’o-Nesheim in the third round Friday.

Always have found it interesting that a man who appears so buttoned-up in front of the media and on the sideline in Philly can be so pithy and funny when he’s not doing everything he can to say nothing in front of the Philadelphia press.

Because, like Philly’s fan base, the Philly media is full of assholes.

Quote of the Week IV

“Feed your kids! Feed your kids! Feed your kids!”
– A brief, but audible chant heard by profootballtalk’s Mike Florio during the fourth round of the NFL Draft at Radio City Saturday as new Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie appeared in the hall. Cromartie has seven children by five (or six, depending on which report you believe) women.

Florio did something kinda funny. I’ll be damned.

UPDATE: A commenter rightly points out that Florio only heard the remark, and thus receives no credit for being funny. Which is good, because my brain had already half melted from the thought that Florio might be capable of humor.

Quote of the Week V

“He went to Oxford. That’s scary.”
– ESPN analyst Herman Edwards as former Florida State safety Myron Rolle, a Rhodes Scholar who spent last fall in England at Oxford University, was plummeting down the draft board.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE SIZE OF THEIR ASCOTS!?

Enjoyable/Aggravating Travel Note of the Week

Seattle is … just different. I mean that in a good way.

It’s alternative, like their rock!

“So it rains,” Pete Carroll said to me the other day, dismissively. “There’s something about every place you’d live.”

Agreed.

“So there’s a smidgen of racism. There’s other stuff in Boston!”
“So there’s…uh…an Applebee’s. Plus, Indy’s got a real good football team!”
“So you get shot. Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore too. That’s good company!”

Tweet of the Week I

“Patriots collecting draft picks like Larry King collects wives.”
– @LASportsAgent, sports agent and attorney Mark Slough, in the midst of the Patriots’ tradefest Friday night.

Ha-cha-cha!

Tweet of the Week II

“Ohio U has pick before Ohio State.”
– @Coach_Eck, Ball State offensive line coach Jason Eck, making me awfully happy and swollen with Bobcat pride after the Patriots took Ohio University wide receiver Taylor Price with the 90th pick, before the first Buckeye went in the draft.

Maybe it’s because everyone I know who went to that college annoys the ever-loving shit out of me or because, coupled with a string of upsets in the NCAA tournament, Ohio University alums have had numerous occasions recently to trot out their cutesy “who ever thought our modest little school would make a measure of impact in this world? Bully us!” but I’m fully in support of carpet bombing the shit out of that school. No one gives an Ohio-smelling fuck if you all had a pick before the bigger state school.

Tweet of the Week III

“LenDale White traded for a ham sandwich, which he ate.”

Only if it’s doused with Patron.

I think these are my non-football thoughts of the week:

Writing with conviction, the Peter King way.

c. The best TV on TV right now is when Andrew Bernard and Dwight Schrute face off.

Nard Dog is the best Nard Dog currently Nard Dogging it up! Funny. Wry. Off-beat.

e. Coffeenerdness: Bus Stop Espresso, in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood, might be the funkiest espresso bar I’ve been in. Recommended. Good stuff. You’ll need to ask for it hot, but it’s a very good plain latte.

Fuck that. I want a gazpacho latte.

f. Thanks for dinner, Gary Wright. Great catching up with you. Great town you’ve got out there in Seattle.

Even the rain is different!