Brown Turning Heads at Senior Bowl Practices

'08 Football Alums General63

pack_in_the_nflLooks like Andre Brown is starting to get noticed in the run-up to the Senior Bowl:

Wednesday Practice Notes: Brown had a very solid afternoon.  He ran well inside the tackles, hitting the holes with authority.  Also showed good speed getting to the edge and picking up some yardage outside the hash marks.

As for Anthony Hill

Caught the ball well again today in both receiving drills and scrimmage work.  Handled his man more often than not in 1-on-1 pass blocking drills with the linebackers.

ESPN.com’s Todd McShay is a lot more effusive in his praise of Brown, saying that

North Carolina State RB Andre Brown has admittedly had durability and academic issues, but he’s healthy now and shining in this environment. In fact, of all the South backs we saw Wednesday, he made the best impression. Brown is a decisive downhill runner who has good size, shows good burst to the hole and runs with enough forward body lean to pick up yards after contact. Although he’s not the most elusive back, he catches the ball well and can contribute as a receiver out of the backfield. We now think he has a chance to come off the board early on Day 2 of the draft, and that’s noteworthy because he didn’t put up great numbers in college.

Bringing up Brown’s stats is interesting for several reasons: first, he never had a decent line to run behind until this year, and this year’s OL group is hardly one of Tom O’Brien’s vintage groups. TOB and staff are still building their OL factory and it is far from complete. Secondly, Brown has always shared duties in the backfield, first with Toney Baker, and later with Jamelle Eugene. Finally, Brown needed some good coaching, which he got over the past couple of seasons. Early in his career, it would be fair to say that Brown was more interested in bouncing off the line and free-lancing than he was in getting the three or four tough yards. While he hit a number of spectacular home runs, he certainly was not a posession back in the classical sense. Dana Bible and his offensive staff turned Brown’s compass to N-S and probably made him into a legit pro prospect. For Brown, it’s too bad that didn’t happen his freshman year. In short, I wouldn’t look to closely at his final stat page as being representative of the true sum of his abilities.

My personal prediction for Andre Brown is that he will be the sort of back that doesn’t get noticed in the draft but after a couple of years when he gets used to playing in the NFL, he’s going to have a lot of GM’s scratching their heads and wondering why they didn’t draft him when they had the chance.  While Brown is not a sure thing, he’s a tough, versatile runner and one who can not only deliver a blow, but also one who is probably not going to be taken down by the first guy that hits him.  If (and it is a big if) Dre stays healthy, and gets on the right team, I think we will certainly be hearing his name in the highlights most weeks.

'08 Football Alums General

63 Responses to Brown Turning Heads at Senior Bowl Practices

  1. choppack1 01/23/2009 at 11:39 AM #

    I remember Spikes and Leak well. They both had solid careers here. Leak did have a huge drop vs. Clemson one year…but if memory serves correct, I think he got behind the FSU secondary for a TD catch vs. them.

    Regarding Brown – if a guy has speed, can block, catch and is fast enough, he can find a home at one of the 3 RB spots most teams carry. Brown’s biggest hinderance may be his blocking ability – but I think he’s probably worked on it – and blocking for a RB, like rebounding for a basketball player is as much desire as it is “talent”.

  2. Greywolf 01/23/2009 at 11:41 AM #

    Back in the days when practices were open, I was standing near Ted after practice when the recruiting coordinator for Lou Holtz, Bruce Mays, asked Ted if he would show a recruit the library. Then asked, “Ted, You know where the library is, don’t you?”

    Ted’s reply cracked me up, “Sho I knows where the library is. (pause) Cos I ain’t never been in it.”

  3. Greywolf 01/23/2009 at 11:43 AM #

    “I made love to the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders…right after I ran a 4.4 40!!!”

    Do you mean you ran a 4.4 getting to the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders…?

  4. Red_Terrors 01/23/2009 at 11:46 AM #

    ^packalum44, it was Brown vs. App St. Here’s a link to the same video on youtube:
    ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KyDC_uFuCA’

  5. packalum44 01/23/2009 at 11:51 AM #

    From what I understand, Brandon Barnes has 4.4 speed at least.

    I know he’s a wide receiver but TJ Graham has 4.2 speed (sub 4.2 if you look at what he ran the 100 meter in 10.4 seconds multiplied by .4 equals 4.16 however 100 meters is longer than 100 yards so even faster)

  6. packalum44 01/23/2009 at 12:22 PM #

    Thanks Red Terror. Here is the play I am referring to.

  7. Noah 01/23/2009 at 1:22 PM #

    Eric Leak’s drop against Clemson basically lost the game for us. He would have scored. They were in a cover-two zone and the safety was supposed to be coming over the top. He never did and Leak was wide open. No one was within 20 yards of him.

    We drove down the field and got in the redzone. Barnette got blindsided byyyy…Trevor Pryce? He fumbled and someone picked it up and ran it back about 90 yards for a touchdown. That swing basically cost us the game and kept us out of a bowl that year.

    Leak had another big drop his senior year. I think it was against Minnesota in the bowl. We had a long third down and Rivers found him wide open over the middle for what would have been a first down. And he dropped it.

    40-speed has become one of those odd metrics teams use to evaluate guys. At the high school level, it’s just silly. I think it’s something they do because they see the pro guys doing it. They hand-time the kids (which completely eliminates the validity of your results). At the high school combines, if there were 200 kids out there, you could just watch them run and go down and hand-sort them. You can tell who can play at the next level and who can’t.

    I remember watching some ACC recruits at a Nike combine. I won’t mention any names (since I’ve already disparaged them and they aren’t around anymore), but there was one ACC recruit who ran like he had two broken legs. I glanced at my watch and, I’m not kidding, it took him eight seconds to cover 40 yards. There was a huge 6-10 kid from somewhere near Clinton there. He looked like he had never heard of this “running” thing before. But there was also a DE prospect there who ran like a sprinter. He had great form and was fluid and took long strides.

    The difference between running a 4.6 and a 4.8 can be a slightly bad start and a bad job of the guy holding the watch. But the people on the sidelines can definitely tell which one of those guys would be a quality ACC player and which one wouldn’t.

  8. Gene 01/23/2009 at 4:16 PM #

    “a bad job of the guy holding the watch. ”

    They still use watches? I thought they had some sort of electronic system for getting 40 yd times, which is why you get times under 4.40; a human holding a watch just can’t start and stop the watch any faster.

  9. Noah 01/23/2009 at 5:03 PM #

    At the NFL combine, they do it electronically. When you cross one barrier, it starts the clock, when you cross the second, it stops it.

    At the high school combines, it’s some joker holding a stopwatch.

  10. TheCOWDOG 01/23/2009 at 7:34 PM #

    I think it was Gil Brandt who said ” There are no 4.3s. Infact there are only a few 4.4s. Besides that, when they run ’em, they aren’t about to get popped by someone running a 4.9. ”

    I’m with you Noah, 40 times are arbitrary.

  11. blpack 01/24/2009 at 12:24 AM #

    ABrown should do well in the NFL. AHill, I just don’t know. Best of luck to them both and any other former Pack players looking for a shot to play on Sundays.

    http://www.geocities.com/portcityalumni/

  12. Noah 01/24/2009 at 8:24 AM #

    Well, there ARE players who have run electronically-timed sub-4.4 times. The problem is that they are running them on tracks and they aren’t in pads. Soooo…how is that time relevant?

    Renaldo Nehamiah was as good of an athlete as ever stepped on a football field. Didn’t make him a good receiver.

  13. GAWolf 01/24/2009 at 9:21 PM #

    So if the game is on NFL network that means Time Warner Cable will not have it… right?

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