Sunday, May 11, 2014

MAC and BG Draft and UDFA Round Up...UPDATED

With a flurry of activity, the draft news finally appears to be settling in.

If you are a MAC fan, in fact, the last hour of the draft and the first hour after are actually the busiest times...the UDFA period is especially fast paced.

Anyway, based on what we know, here is the news.

From a BG perspective, we did not have any players drafted and we didn't really expect to.

Two Falcons have been signed as UDFAs...Tyler Beck and Alex Bayer, both TEs.  (Ironically, this is a position we did not emphasize before and will not emphasize after Coach Clawson).  Tyler is going to camp with Chris Jones in NE and Alex will be in St. Louis with the Rams and the rest of the media in the Western world.

There was some chatter on the Internet that there might be some other good news and, specifically, that Ted Ouellet might go to the Packers, but that has not been confirmed, at least so far as I can see.  Boo Boo Gates was the other player everyone was watching...obviously we will never know, but you have to think that his recent legal issues had to have an impact on a guy who was on the margins to start with.

BG Update:  Four  Five other Falcon players received a mini-camp invite.  I'm not necessarily an expert, but that is apparently not quite as good as being a UDFA, but whenever our guys get a shot, we are 100% behind them.  They are Falcons forever and they are MAC Champions forever.  Ever dearer in our hearts...

Ted Oullet: Green Bay
Jarius Campbell:  Baltimore
Cam Truss:  Steelrs
Aaron Foster:  Dallas
BooBoo Gates:  Titans

As for the MAC, Saturday saw 5 players picked.

Jonathan Newsome, DE Ball State, 5/165 to the Colts.
Keith Wenning, QB, Ball State, 6/194 to the Ravens
Travis Carrie, RB, OU, 7/219 to Oakland
Rob Blanchflower, TE, 7/230 to Pittsburgh
Ken Bishop, DL, NIU 7/251 to Dallas

With Archer, Mack and Ward, that makes 8 total MAC players drafted.  For perspective, LSU had 9, Notre Dame 8 and Alabama 8.  The SEC had 49 players picked and the ACC 42.  The only FBS conference with fewer players picked was the Sun Belt (4).

The rest of the UDFA players are being tracked at Hustle Belt, so we just point you in that direction.  The point in both cases is this:  you can be a really good player in the MAC (eg:  Nix, Fluellen, Foster) and not get drafted.

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