I really like your thought on Felix Jones. I’ve watched Arkansas play several games over the past few years (not sure why) and while McFadden is certainly talented, I’ve always been impressed by Jones. He seems like a workhorse who has serious talent too. He’d be a great draft pick.

The credit certainly goes to McCarthy and Thompson for finding and cultivating the types of players who possess the natural confidence and football instincts to never focus on their limitations and who are not afraid to succeed. The last two drafts have been full of guys described by most of the scouts as real football players (cliche alert!!!- but I don’t know how else to say it) rather than combine/stats types and the overall depth of the team reflects this. Guys like Hall, Rouse, Jolly, Jennings, Jones and acquisitions like D. Lee, Grant, Bigby, K. Robinson have shown that TT and MM have a great idea about what type of person and player they want to build the team around, and the record speaks for itself. the early season sqeakers seemed to me at the time to be fortuitious, the NFL often hinges on one or two breaks in any given close game, and my reasoning was that we had gotten few of them the last few years and this was the payback from the football gods. But as the season wore on and unlikely guys continued to show they were consistent and able to produce in big, pressure situations, each game became less a matter of hoping they could somehow rack up enough wins to sqeak in to the playoffs, and more a matter of enjoying the tough and precise game of football played the way it ought to be played by a group of guys who genuinely seemed to like each other and who only cared about winning. The season was a joy, and the future looks bright.

The Cotton Bowl is on as I write this, and I would love to see Arkansas’ Felix Jones added to this mix. He seems like a perfect fit; a guy who has been a backup to a superstar but always been productive when given the ball. This type of player can often be had in the late first round, the type of guy the Pats or Steelers always seem to find.