In the past three years, five quarterbacks have been selected with a top-17 pick in the NFL draft.
The Niners have faced of two of those signal callers — Atlanta’s Matt Ryan and St. Louis’ Sam Bradford — in their past six games.
And here comes No. 3.
Tampa Bay’s Josh Freeman is yet another prime example of what can happen
when a franchise hits on the right signal-caller in the first round.
And, yes, former No. 1 overall picks Alex Smith and David Carr are
examples of something else entirely.
The Falcons went 4-12 in 2007. They drafted Ryan and went 11-5 in his rookie year.
The Rams went 6-42 from 2007-09. They drafted Bradford and have a 4-5 record this season.
Similarly, the 6-foot-6, 248-pound Freeman, the No. 17 overall pick in
the 2008 draft, is leading the Buccaneers from wretchedness to
respectability. Tampa Bay, 3-13 last year, is 6-3 this season as
Freeman, 22, has thrown 12 touchdowns, five interceptions and compiled a
90.1 quarterback rating, seventh in the NFC behind Green Bay’s Aaron
Rodgers and New Orleans’ Drew Brees, respectively.
Niners cornerback Tarell Brown kind of saw this coming.
Brown was a senior at Texas when Freeman, then an 18-year-old freshman,
led unranked Kansas State to 45-42 victory over the fourth-ranked
Longhorns on Nov. 11, 2006. Freeman completed 19 of 31 passes for 269
yards with three touchdowns and one interception.
“He’s a poised quarterback,” Brown said. “He makes good decisions. Even
back then he made good decisions. He was very young but you could see
that he had the talent, he had the arm strength, he had everything the
top quarterbacks have in this league. He’s been proving that this year.”
In 2006, Freeman was the only true freshmen to lead his team to a bowl
game. This season, he’s led four fourth-quarter comebacks and has the
second-highest fourth-quarter passer rating in the NFC (92.0).
Brown was struck by Freeman’s presence back in 2006.
“Just how he handled himself on the field,” Brown said. “Making checks
and audibles. So many different things quarterbacks need to have poise
with. They have so much responsibility before the snap of the ball. For
him to do what he did then and for him to do what he’s doing now, you
can see that the guy has been working really hard on his craft.”
Sounds like the ultra-cool Freeman is quite capable of doing precisely what Ryan and Bradford did against the 49ers.
Trailing 14-13, Ryan completed 6 of 7 passes for 67 yards in the final
72 seconds to set up Matt Bryant’s game-winning field goal against San
Francisco.
Last week, Bradford, trailing 20-17, completed 7 of 9 passes
for 69 yards in the final 2:06 to set up Josh Brown’s game-tying field
goal. One of Bradford’s incompletions on the drive, by the way, was a
flat-out drop by tight end Daniel Fells at the five-yard line with 29
seconds left.
Brown said Ryan, 25, and Bradford, 23, showed the same type of
leadership and poise he saw in Freeman four years ago. Brown
acknowledged that size and arm strength matter. But it takes other
harder-to-measure qualities to make an elite NFL quarterback.
“At the end of the day,” Brown said, “those guys wouldn’t have gone as high
(in the draft) as they did if they didn’t have those things.”
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