Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
NFL draft Thursday
Dolphins think they’re in a good place.
It was small news in a week of big NFL drama. And it didn’t involve a loud opinion or some new name rumored to the next team. So a lot of people might not have noticed that Jake Long announced Monday he was retiring, and no doubt some of those who did notice thought he’d retired years ago.
But on the edge of another draft, when it’s trendy to sound so sure of tomorrow’s stars, it seemed perfect timing for Long to write on Twitter, “I realize that although my heart and mind still want to play my body is telling me something completely different.”
This isn’t another Dolphins draft bust story. Long, the No. 1 overall pick in 2008, went to the Pro Bowl his first four years, so he wasn’t Dion Jordan or Jason Allen. Nor is this a Dolphins-could-have-takenquarterback-Matt-Ryan revision. That time is long past.
This is just a cautionary tale for any fan smothered in draft belief, considering this process is defined as much by misses in a sport that gnaws at joints and rots full bodies, one car-crash hit at a time. Even the good draft pick can have hollow
endings, as Long’s story is the latest to show.
No one knows that better than the people paid to pick players for a living, the ones with more experience, more knowledge, and much more time for what they do than those spouting opinions right now with no scoreboard to analyze and only tip-of-the-iceberg knowledge.
“Our plan is etched firmly in pencil,” is the line Dolphins vice president of football operations Mike Tannenbaum repeats. It’s a good line. And the right idea.
Long was the perfect player with the perfect work ethic playing the perfect position, left tackle, to write into the Dolphins starting lineup for a decade. That’s the way Bill Parcells figured it in making him the top pick in ’08.
He was mountain big. He was Michigan’s captain. His father was an auto-assembly worker, his mother worked in a sub shop, and he came from a small town, Lapeer, Mich., where even the library hung a sign after he was the No. 1 overall draft pick: “Congrats, Jake Long!”
He checked all the boxes, as the draftniks now say. Yet Parcells was so unsure whom to pick leading up to that draft — Long or Ryan — that he once asked a homeless person he’d talk to at a stoplight every day on his way to work: “Would you take the quarterback or the tackle?”
“The tackle,” the man, John Schoen, said. “Who do you have to protect the quarterback otherwise?”
Long protected five Dolphins quarterbacks in his four years. Then he got hurt. First, it was his back. Then a torn biceps. He was released from the Dolphins after the 2012 season due to the injuries and only regressed from there. He tore his knees both in 2013 and 2014 with St. Louis. He played 15 snaps for Atlanta in 2015. He tore his Achilles’ tendon last fall with Minnesota. That was it. He was done. “Most of all, I want to thank the Miami Dolphins,’’ Long, 31, wrote Monday. “Mr. [Steve] Ross, Tony Sparano and Bill Parcells. Thank You. You believed in me and gave me my first opportunity to live my dream of playing in the NFL. I will always be a proud and lifelong Miami Dolphin.”
Starting Thursday, a few hundred others will try to reach their dream on a draft night that’s become consumed with public opinions and non-stop chatter. The lucky ones will reach those dreams. The luckier few will follow them to a good ending.
Long, meanwhile, will be preparing for the next chapter in his life where his connection with the Dolphins won’t exactly finish. Just last week, he was back at his alma mater in Ann Arbor, Mich., for a few days of classes at the Steve Ross School of Business.