NFL evaluator on Cardinals draft pick Josh Rosen: ‘Nobody likes him’
May 2, 2018, 11:43 AM | Updated: 5:50 pm
Arizona Cardinals first-round NFL football draft pick Josh Rosen poses for a photograph after a news conference at the team's training facility Friday, April 27, 2018, in Tempe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Time will tell whether the Arizona Cardinals got lucky.
Josh Rosen’s talent wasn’t a top-three reason why the quarterback fell to the Cardinals at the No. 10 pick in the 2018 NFL Draft. His injury history, less-than-impressive record at UCLA and personality were, in some order, to blame.
While the Cardinals said Rosen’s confident, sometimes-cocky and usually overly-analytical approach were selling points to trade up and then pick him, other quarterback-needy teams disagreed.
The Cleveland Browns (Baker Mayfield), New York Jets (Sam Darnold) and Buffalo Bills (Josh Allen) all selected quarterbacks before Rosen went to the Cardinals.
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So what bugged those teams about Rosen?
“Everybody recognizes the talent with Rosen, but he is not the top guy in the draft because nobody likes him,” an anonymous NFL executive told ESPN’s Mike Sando.
That wasn’t the only post-draft ripping of Rosen’s personality.
Earlier in the week, Browns vice president of player personnel Alonzo Highsmith said in a speech that he was rubbed the wrong way by the UCLA volleyball team when he asked some of its members about the Bruins quarterback.
Vaguely, Highsmith seemed to insinuate that the players were cautious about telling the Cleveland executive what they really thought of the quarterback.
“I was at an airport,” he said. “UCLA’s volleyball team was in front of me. You heard so much about Rosen. He’s this or that. We all know how people talk.
“So I asked one of the volleyball coaches, ‘What’s Rosen like?’ He said, ‘Aaaaa, you should probably ask his girlfriend. She’s one of the players. She’s over there.’
“I’m like, ‘All right coach. That’s good enough.’
“I don’t know what all this means, but there was something about him that bothered me.”
On Wednesday, NFL Network’s Dave Dameshek visited the Bickley & Marotta show on 98.7 FM Arizona’s Sports Station and alluded to similar opinions among NFL scouts and talent evaluators.
“It’s very weird to me and it feels like there’s a double-standard being applied here — if you like Baker Mayfield, it seems to me that you can’t then also say, ‘I don’t like the way Josh Rosen comports himself because he has a chip on his shoulder,'” Dameshek said. “You want guys who think they are the best and are angry at anyone that doubts … that opinion. That’s what Josh Rosen comes off as.”
Dameshek admitted he didn’t get to know Rosen very well during the draft process, but he did say an interview with the quarterback’s UCLA teammate, Kolton Miller, shed light into how Rosen was viewed in the locker room.
“For what it’s worth, I did talk to Kolton (Miller), who was a UCLA lineman, and you know that relationship with a lineman and his quarterback and that says a great deal if the linemen don’t like the quarterback, if they find them to be a prima donna … he stopped not while we were interviewing. He said, ‘By the way, I just want to let you know for whatever your voice is worth … let (the Cardinals) know they got a gem.’
“I think (Rosen) had a habit — and maybe we call it a bad habit — of loudly disagreeing with his coaches at various levels, not just at UCLA. I think that that’s not necessarily what coaches want … but then again, isn’t that what Peyton Manning did? You want an alpha male under center.”
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