In just a little more than a month, National Football League teams will gather in New York for the annual draft.
This year's draft seems more important than ever for the Packers, since the retirement of Brett Favre.
His absence just seems somehow to raise more questions about the team -- questions that will be answered in the draft.
I remember spending some time with Dick Corrick, who spent 10 years with the Packers as their director of scouting. He and I were friendly and he graciously let me inside the Packers and their scouting operation.
In those days, used film and this amazing new thing called videotape. Corrick and his scouts scoured the country, watched month's worth of film and tried like crazy to decide who would best benefit his team.
Corrick had some good choices, like James Lofton and John Anderson and Ken Ruettgers. However, he also had some dogs, like Rich Campbell and Brent Fullwood.
The thing I learned back then was that scouting and picking players is a very inexact science. You would probably do just as by flipping a coin.
Times have changed drastically from those film and videotape days. Now, everything is digital and you can look at every play a player has made, from pee wee league through college bowl games.
Even with all that information, it is still a guessing game and you really do not know your results until four or five years down the road.
Take the 2003 draft, for example. That's long enough ago to be able to grade the results. A friend of mine did some research after the combine where players get tested in 40-yard dashes, long jumps, weight lifts, the Wonderlic test, sweat testing and urinalysis and all the rest of the stuff the players go through.
In 2003, Carson Palmer was the number one overall pick. And he's turned out to be a solid quarterback. But there were 11 other quarterbacks drafted that year: Byron Leftwich, Kyle Boller, Rex Grossman, David Raggone, Chris Sims, Seneca Wallace, Brian St. Pierre, Drew Henson, Brooks Bollinger, Gibran Hamden and Ken Dorsey.
With the possible exception of Henson, I don't particularly want any of those guys on my team.
That was also that year that a quarterback named Tony Romo wasn't drafted.
I was listening to Packers tackle Mark Tauscher talk about the combine and the draft the other day in the weekly Tuesday's with Tauscher segment with Steve "The Homer" True.
"I think the combine is fine," Tauscher said. "But it doesn't measure everything. It doesn't measure the size of a guy's heart, for example. And it doesn't really measure if the guy can play football.
"There's lots of guys who do great at the combine and can't play at all once they get into the league. And on the other side, there are lots of guys who don't do all that great at the combine and they go on to have real good careers."
What all this means, of course, is that we fans are going to scream and yell at Ted Thompson no matter what he does.
Sure things are hard to find in this world. For Elliott Spitzer, paying a beautiful girl $4,000 for sex was a sure thing. The NFL draft? Not so much.
With a history in Milwaukee stretching back decades, Dave tries to bring a unique perspective to his writing, whether it's sports, politics, theater or any other issue.
He's seen Milwaukee grow, suffer pangs of growth, strive for success and has been involved in many efforts to both shape and re-shape the city. He's a happy man, now that he's quit playing golf, and enjoys music, his children and grandchildren and the myriad of sports in this state. He loves great food and hates bullies and people who think they are smarter than everyone else.
This whole Internet thing continues to baffle him, but he's willing to play the game as long as OnMilwaukee.com keeps lending him a helping hand. He is constantly amazed that just a few dedicated people can provide so much news and information to a hungry public.
Despite some opinions to the contrary, Dave likes most stuff. But he is a skeptic who constantly wonders about the world around him. So many questions, so few answers.
