John, you don’t want to hear about bad luck but here it is. I don’t think a severe injury is the result of a bad choice. There’s no way to predict such a thing. Was David Pollack a bad choice? Of course not. Our defense and team as a whole would be better off with him. But he had a career ending injury. Whether or not Kenny Irons would have panned out to a successful career is debatable, since no one can predict the future (except for the Psychic Hotline). But what is not debatable is bad luck does not translate into bad draft picks, unless the player has a history of injury problems.

You’re right that many Bengals fans were scratching their heads when Irons was drafted. He was drafted after another typical awesome Rudi season. It appeared at the time that a RB was not what we needed. But the debate as to whether we needed Irons or not at that time, again misses the point. Bad luck has played its part with Irons and that is nothing Marvin could have foreseen.

On another note, the article linked mentions that the Bengals have resigned players later on, once they have cleared waivers. This may happen with Irons as well.

WHO DEY

It kind of makes NFL players bellyaching about contracts they signed and demanding buckets of upfront ducats understandable when they can bring you in, use you up, and send you packing. With Chris Perry’s inability to stay healthy, they speedy, shifty Irons was a natural selection to augment Rudi in the backfield.

As to the Karma thing, I’m pretty sure Mike Brown has a shitload of the bad kind on back order. Sorry to see Kenny go. He seemed like a really good guy in interviews and it seemed like he was working his ass off to come back from that knee.

I think an interesting point here is that with Irons waived (he’ll be back guys… seriously), that the Bengals weren’t hurt at all at the position. Which suggests his draft position was seriously over-estimated.

But I’m with you guys about Karma. That crap has been in Cincinnati sports, politics and social confrontations for a while now.

I actually found the Irons pick to be completely mystifying at the time, but then thought about how fragile Chris Perry seemed to be turning out, and the pick made some sense. That said, I agree, I’d have taken him, or a lesser back, later and gone defense there. I think they’re still trying to find that second guy who is lightning in a bottle that can get outside or turn the little dump off into a 45 yard play. Unfortunately every back that has that skill set has been and/or still is injured.