Draft psychosis

 The NFL Draft comes up next week, which means we'll be bombarded with hilarious over-analysis, utter speculation posing as bedrock truth and arcane terms like "burst." "waist-bender," "all the throws" and the Blob's personal favorite, "tight skin."

No one will know who's gonna be a stud and who won't be. Everyone will pretend they know who's gonna be a stud and who won't be. 

We'll also get the usual cranial fluid leakage about whether or not Player A has the appropriate level of fanaticism to make it in this man's league.

Which brings us to Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, who's all but a lock to go to Jacksonville as the top pick in the draft.

Most of the gurus regard him as the best quarterback prospect to come out of college since Andrew Luck, and maybe the best in the last 30 years or so. That would cover some impressive waterfront, if true. It would also depend on just how maniacal a competitor he is -- which, because some folks just can't help themselves, has come into question in a few scattered corners because of some stuff Lawrence told Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated.

It seems Lawrence uttered some remarkably sane things in Rosenberg's piece. Like, I don't know, this for instance:

"It's not like I need this for my life to be OK. I want to do it because I want to be the best I can be. I want to maximize my potential. Who wouldn't want to?"

This sounds to most normal people like a young man who has his priorities straight and his life neatly grounded. Of course, draftniks aren't normal people. So here are some imagined, and not so imagined, responses to the above quote:

He doesn't need this? Red flag, man. Where's the commitment? Where's the unhealthy obsession to the exclusion of all else? Where's the part where he says "You could break my leg and I'd still be game-prepping two days later"?

Break his leg? Hell, where's the part where he says you could tear off his arm -- both arms! -- and he'd still refuse to go on IR?

Tear off his arm? Come on, guys. I'm still waiting for him to say he could be lying in the hospital with no brainwave activity and he'd still be READY TO SUIT UP AGAINST THE 49ers NEXT SUNDAY.

That's all just exaggeration for effect, of course, but there was enough  blowback that Lawrence felt compelled to go on social media and say football was very, very important to him, that it was a massive priority, more massive than, say, an aircraft carrier or a mighty Himalayan peak or something. 

As if the fact he's been playing the game since he could walk wasn't proof enough of that.

At any rate, there are now some people out there who undoubtedly think Lawrence will be like that awful Andrew Luck, who was so uninterested in football he only played through leg injuries and torn rib cartilage and a torn labrum and a lacerated kidney, and was sacked more than 30 times four times in his first five seasons.

Finally he decided enough was enough, after 23,671 passing yards, and 171 touchdown passes, and 2,000 completions. Oh, and 174 sacks in six seasons.

Just imagine if Trevor Lawrence has that kind of career. What a terrible waste that will be.

Or so those afflicted with chronic draft psychosis would no doubt have it.