Mel Kiper Jr. compares J.J. McCarthy to NFL draft bust

Former Michigan football quarterback J.J. McCarthy has plenty of doubters. The NFL draft is less than two weeks away and he’s one of the most polarizing prospects.

Many have praised the Michigan football quarterback as a future star. Jim Harbaugh has maintained that McCarthy should be the No. 1 pick. Rival fans scoff at that. Some have said that Harbaugh is trying to inflate McCarthy’s value to try and get a better trade for the Chargers at the No. 5 spot.

I don’t believe that to be true. Jim Harbaugh is a truth-teller. He wouldn’t say the greatest Michigan football quarterback in college, ever, should be the No. 1 pick if he didn’t mean it.

One Analyst compares the Michigan football QB to a bust

Kiper has a different view though. He says “he doesn’t know” about McCarthy who led Michigan football to the national championship this past season and compared scouting him to NFL draft bust Trey Lance. Kiper at least put McCarthy in what he calls his “Trey Lance category.”

Here’s more of what the ESPN draft expert said about J.J. McCarthy:

“J.J., I kept telling guys, ‘I’m waiting for that game. I’m waiting for that game to put him in my top 25.’ Never found the game,” Kiper said on the Waddle and Silvy show. “Then, I kept watching him – ‘Well, it’s not him’ – I got him in the top 25, got him to 14, 15. I take him any higher and he’s gonna go in the top five. What ranking players does – Carl Peterson always said this – you rate players and you put them on a board to protect you over-drafting somebody. That’s why you do that exercise. And what teams will usually do, there would be some GM, change the board. You heard those stories, they’d go home the night before the draft, they’d come up the next morning and the ratings changed, the board changed.

“So if you hold true to your board, you usually do well and it usually protects you against over-drafting and that’s why we do that exercise. But I would say J.J. McCarthy is a tough one for me. I didn’t know, do I put him in the middle of the first – 14, 15, 16? Guess what? He’s gonna go long before that.”

I don’t see McCarthy lasting past No. 5. I don’t think he should make it past No. 1. On J.J., everyone has an opinion — in a few years, we’ll see who was right.

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