LET’S RANK ‘EM: A&M’s first round picks of the last 30 years
The 2020 NFL Draft is mere hours away, giving many of us a small taste of what it’s like to have live sports content again. It seems unlikely that your Texas A&M Aggies will have a player’s name called in the first round tonight (though Justin Madubuike has an outside shot). But A&M has had more than their share of top round talent, with 19 first round picks since 1990. So in true quarantine content-starved fashion, we’ve ranked every Texas A&M first round pick of the past 30 years, from worst to first.
This list obviously includes several players who are still in the middle of their career, and for our purposes, we ranked them only on what they’ve already accomplished, not on what they can potentially do in the future. But with that out of the way, lets get to the list. We’ll start with worst, and you probably know exactly where this will start.
Johnny Manziel was far from the highest draft pick in A&M history, but was easily the most high profile. The brash Heisman winner was chaos personified on the football field, and fans in College Station and Cleveland had high hopes for Johnny Football. But we all know how this story ended. After inconsistent play, and even more inconsistent off-field conduct, the Browns cut Manziel after only two seasons, and after short stints in the CFL and the AAF, his football days are seemingly over.
18. Patrick Bates (S)
12th pick, Oakland Raiders (1993)
Bates had only 106 tackles in four seasons for the Raiders and Falcons, and off-field problems expedited his departure from the Raiders, and soon the NFL entirely. ESPN ranked him 37th in the top 50 busts in NFL Draft history.
17. Reggie Brown (LB)
17th pick, Detroit Lions (1996)
Although not initially expected to be highly drafted, Brown’s performance at the NFL Combine boosted his stock, and he was selected 17th overall by the Detroit Lions in the 1996 NFL Draft. In his second season, he recorded 2.5 sacks to go along with two interceptions, both of which went for touchdown returns.
But Brown’s career was cut short when he suffered a spinal cord contusion while assisting on a tackle of New York Jets halfback Adrian Murrell in the final game of the 1997 season. He lay motionless for 17 minutes on the turf at the Pontiac Silverdome, briefly losing consciousness, with CPR saving his life. Brown’s career was over after only 26 games, but emergency surgery saved him from using a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
