Garnet And Black Attack Offers Scouting Report On South Carolina Cornerback Stephon Gilmore

The beauty of being apart of a vast network of websites at SB Nation is the resources that we have. Rather than going throughout the internet and praying for a scouting report on a player that the Bengals might be interested in, from a draftnik that watched half the games without a background perspective on the player, we go to our contemporaries who watched that prospect's development. It's like being married to an insanely hot woman, who is the daughter to a well-connected man that gets you a job for six figures. Actually I'm not sure how that feels like -- probably none of us do. But it would be awesome. That's what we're getting at here.

Garnet and Black Attack, SB Nation's website that covers the South Carolina Gamecocks, offered up their Stephon Gilmore scouting report. Gilmore is largely believed to be the second-best cornerback prospect in this year's NFL draft, often picked by the Bengals in your various mock drafts.

I have mixed feelings about Gilmore and the Draft. On the one hand, I think the folks who call him "mistake-prone" (including many of our own fans) aren't quite fair on him. Indeed, there's a certain amount of unfair criticism that goes along with being the best corner on a team. If Gilmore was picked on occasionally while he played for us, he was also the guy who typically got the unkind task of lining up across from guys like Julio Jones. Things don't always work out in your favor in that situation. I also don't think that we always played to Gilmore's strengths. As has been well documented, Ellis Johnson preferred to run containment schemes in his secondary, but Gilmore always seemed to be most comfortable in press-man, which we ran very little of. In any event, the fact of the matter is that Gilmore was an excellent player for us, and he has the potential to continue to improve.

You can read Garnet And Black Attack's scouting report right here.