Now first off I would like to say that he is not a new type of player, he is not an experiment, there is no cryptic uses for him, he is a proto-type, he is a safe bet, he is the best 3-4 DE prospect in the draft.

I had convinced myself that we HAD to pick a player at a NEED position, WRONG!!, lol, sometimes we fans get ourselves all screwed up about our own ideas we cook up in our head, and forget the big picture.

Odrick does not fit the NT position, not in body or in play style, he does fit the DE and DT on pasing downs mold, ala Starks and McDaniel.

The FO simply had Odrick rated a lot higher than any NEED player available, remember Nicky's NFL Draft Strategies: Part 1, he was just too good to pass up, a very safe pick with a high upside.

In a 3-4 D beefing up your Dline is always a good thing.

Impact 3-4 DEs are hard to find, imagine if we had 2 Starks.....???

Because of this pick I would not however be surprised at a McDaniel trade, for a later pick, Odrick will in my opinion will be better than McDaniel by the end of preseason, not a knock on McDaniel, but it does make him expendable, a rotation of Langford, Starks, Merling and Odrick will be sick, no rest for the weary.

Merling at OLB is a pipe dream, he is a 300 lb man now, I don't care what he was drafted at, right now he's as big as the rest of our DEs, also he is a very good rotational NFL 3-4 DE, still with a lot of upside, asking him to lose 40 lbs is asking a lot, he would have to lose muscle mass, so you could forget about him being any kind of impact this year at OLB, if ever.

No, this comes back to common sense, not taking your eye's off the prize, we are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole to apease our own feelings about what we thought we were going to do, they never forgot what the deal is, do what you think is the best move for the team.

What they did was draft the best player at that position, they drafted the best 3-4 DE prospect in the draft, not the best 3-4 DE available, the best 3-4 DE in the entire draft, and they did it with the 28th pick.

Needs or no needs, that makes sense, we just got better.