Q&A with Peterson-Edwards-Kuharich on 1st Round

Apr 26, 2008, 6:14:21 PM

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Q&A with Peterson-Edwards-Kuharich on 2nd Round

OPENING COMMENTS
PETERSON: “I’d like to preface this with Bill and his staff and Herm and his staff and what a great job they did to identify these guys. These are people that we certainly hoped we would get to, but I’m not going to build them up too much because I have to get them signed.”

KUHARICH: “We’re really excited because never in our lives did we think we would get an opportunity to get Glenn Dorsey. He’s an outstanding person; we had him in for a visit and he spent lots of time with our coaches. He’s an excellent run defender and; he’s got pass rush ability that they really didn’t really allow him to do a lot of gaping and getting up the field with LSU, but he has that ability. I am really excited! He was a high-rated player on our board, he was the highest rated player left on our board when it was our turn so we felt very fortunate to have the opportunity to get Glenn Dorsey.”

EDWARDS: I think both of our picks, obviously, can come in and compete and help us right away. Both of them are very mature – that’s the one thing we know about them when I had the opportunity to go down to an LSU workout. I had a good conversation [with Dorsey]. We brought him in here as well with [Branden] Albert and just sitting down with those guys one-on-one felt very good that if we had an opportunity to choose these guys that they could come in and help us in a lot of ways. Dorsey’s a guy that will give us the ability to move some guys inside and outside. Right now, if we had to line up, he would go inside and play. Tamba [Hali] would be moved to right end and [Alfonso] Boone would go to left end. So we have a lot of different combinations all of a sudden with our linemen that we can actually play. We felt with Branden that he can play tackle or guard. We feel that he’s a multi-task kind of guy. He’s played tackle before; he has tackle ability. He’s also played guard, so we just feel like these two players can come in and help.”

KUHARICH: “Branden Albert, from my side, has versatility. We thought that the run on tackles would start with Denver and it did. We knew behind us Philly and Houston wanted to get up over us to get an opportunity to get a tackle so with a little nudging from Herm and I, we got Carl and Carl did a great job of making a deal because Philadelphia was countering above us about trying to get to Denver or Arizona’s pick. Like Herm said, he can play tackle, he can play guard, he’s smart, he’s very athletic and he’s got great strength. I didn’t, personally, think that we would have the opportunity. . . the key to me, in this, is that we got both players. But I never thought in my wildest dreams that we would have the opportunity to get both those guys.”

Q: To make reference to what you said earlier about moving players. . .

EDWARDS: “Tamba will go to right end, Boone can play left end, along with Turk. We can handle all that. We’ve put Boone at left end before. We have a lot of different combinations of what we can with some guys.

Q: You mentioned when you were talking about Dorsey that he was the top rated guy on your board. . .

KUHARICH: “I said he was the top-rated guy on our board at the time.

Q: So he wasn’t necessarily the top-rated guy when this thing got started?

KUHARICH: “Right.”

Q: Carl, this is supposed to be a trade-happy draft and it took a while but all of a sudden there were four trades in like six or seven picks. . .could you guys talk about the 10-minute thing?

PETERSON: “I think we’re learning to talk fast. There was a lot of fast talking. As I said before, deep in the draft, we have to take a mindset of what we’ve done in the second day all these other years in five minutes, you’ve got to start planning ahead – three or four picks ahead – if you want that pick. We had conversation with those people ahead of us and that we wanted to move up with that second pick and my good friend (Detroit GM) Matt Millen and I were able to work it out and, ironically with the pick, that we waited and took a while last year to get from the Miami Dolphins for Trent Green.”

Q: Earlier there was some talk about New Orleans and some people looking at your #5 pick. Can you talk about that?

PETERSON: “Yes, we had some calls on it and I think there were an awful lot of other people that wanted Glenn Dorsey. As Bill alluded to, we felt that this guy got to us. It would have had to take a real blockbuster for us to step away. This is a very talented football player. But we did have people calling and making offers. As Herm said, we were there for the workout and this is an extraordinary football player.”

Q: When you went down to LSU, I’ll bet you wanted to take Dwayne Bowe with you. What did you see down there that convinced you that this is the guy?

EDWARDS: “The workout, for one thing, that’s the insurance. But I think you always to back to the tape and you watch how guys play. Would they would ask him to do was a little bit different in the fact that he was two-gaping a lot; he never actually got to penetrate. That’s why when you look at sacks he only had seven. But he was a two-gap kind of guy where we’re going to let him go. We’re actually going to let him play the three technique and he can just go up field and that’s what he does. When they let him go he is a very, very aggressive player. He plays out on the line of scrimmage. He’s very strong and he’s very athletic as far as running down the line of scrimmage. When you talk to the coaches, he was wounded halfway through the season. He found a way every week to play. That tells you something about what type of guy he is. All those things, with the fact that he comes out of a program that knows how to win, are important too. Dwayne Bowe came out of the same program and they know how to win. You want to get players like that. He played in big games and won a national championship, so I think those things factor in, too to the type of players you are trying to bring in. He was a guy that we liked but we didn’t anticipate he was going to be there. Some other teams wanted him, some teams called us, but it wasn’t good enough. At the end of the day it wasn’t good enough. We got a good football player.”

PETERSON: “Specific to Glenn, we wanted to take one more look at him physically and our doctors are very, very comfortable with where he is now. Our doctors in the draft room said, ‘I’d love to have this guy. He’s as wide as three of me.’ So we felt comfortable with the medical report.”

Q: Where is Albert going to play?

EDWARDS: “Right now, he can play tackle or guard. I don’t really know what side, yet.”

Q: Why didn’t he play tackle at Virginia?

EDWARDS: “They had a guy by the name of D’Brickashaw Ferguson but they had another guy that was there that was playing tackle and they didn’t want to make the change. He actually played tackle for two games. After talking with Ron Prince, Ron felt that they guy could play tackle in this league. Along with Coach Groh and what we watched on tape, nothing says he cannot. And so he’s a guy that we liked. When you talk to the guy, he’s a well-rounded guy. He was team captain and everything you want in a football player. He’s athletic, he’s tough, he’s available, always available. He practices and he plays and that’s what you want in a player.”

Q: In any of your mock drafts, was there ever a draft where you had Dorsey at 5 and Albert at 17 or 15?

KUHARICH: “We never went beyond 5 at all. But, yeah, there was a mock that had Dorsey at 5.”

Q: With a player like Dorsey, were you surprised he fell to 5?

KUHARICH: “I was but when you go back and study how it went, Miami took the tackle. And then it came down to Atlanta wanted a quarterback or Dorsey. They decided they were going to start with a new coach and the quarterback’s going to be their pick for the franchise. And you all know Al [Davis] loves speed, so he took McFadden. I think you can look to see how the picks unfolded and say, ‘okay, well we can see why they took him and they took him.’”

PETERSON: “It was one of the scenarios we looked at in the last couple days. Obviously there aren’t that many when you’re picking five. We felt good about this opportunity to draft him.”

Q: NFL Network reported that New Orleans offered you a first, next year’s first and a second round pick. Is that true?

PETERSON: “We didn’t get that offer. We got a fairly decent offer, but again, for the value of this guy, we felt that we weren’t going to take the offer.”

Q: Personality wise, Dorsey-Warren Sapp, any similarities?

EDWARDS: “You make a great point about Sapp. There are some similarities but I don’t want to put this on the kid’s head. There are some traits that when I watched him play, especially when you let him go off the ball, when he can just come off the ball in that two-gap, he’s a disruptor. He can make plays, he’s very smart and he blocks very well. He’s not as flamboyant as Warren.”

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Q&A with Peterson-Edwards-Kuharich on 2nd Round