The 2011 NFL Mock Drafts I've seen recently have just felt—well, a little too good to be true. They all know that the St. Louis Rams need a wide receiver like the desert misses the rain; they all know that Julio Jones is a wide receiver. On this cloud of goodwill and sheer rightness Jones floats to the Rams at 14. Enter the NFL Combine: According to Turf Show Times, among other outlets, Julio Jones has been absolutely perfect there. Said the right things; run the right 40; closed the budget deficit with a series of cuts that struck everyone as pretty rational, all things considered.
↵This is terrible. For Julio Jones this is great, don't get me wrong, but for the Rams, who had already lurked at the edges of his place in most Mock Drafts, this could not be any worse. If he just screwed up a little—professed to prefer the third Major League, misused the idiom 'Catch-22', assumed The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was an actual autobiography—he would fall back into the Rams' hands, but at this point he's floating near the top of the draft board with A.J. Green, who's been just-okay.
↵As for Jonathan Baldwin, the only receiver with a chance to float toward the Rams, don't ask. He ran a 4.5 40 and then freaked out and hijacked a school bus full of penguins, so it's kind of a family crisis, so, come back later? Great.
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