The Lessons of '98

With league and Super Bowl MVP trophies, Manning has lived up to the hype. John Iacono/SI

Matt Hasselbeck had been invited to the 1998 NFL scouting combine after his senior season, so the Boston College quarterback began to wonder why he hadn't heard about travel details as the annual football job fair approached. When he called a league official to inquire about his itinerary, there was an awkward silence. Seems that Hasselbeck was the lowest-rated of the 16 invited senior quarterbacks, and after a junior declared for the draft, Hasselbeck's invitation was rescinded. No one had bothered to tell him.

"Who's the junior?" Hasselbeck asked.

"Ryan Leaf," he was told.

Of course. This was shaping up as the Peyton Manning-Ryan Leaf draft, and Hasselbeck, who was just hoping to be a late-round pick, knew he wasn't in Leaf's league. Now he wouldn't even be in his combine.

In fact, Leaf would be the second pick in the draft, Hasselbeck the 187th. Leaf got an $11.25 million signing bonus from the Chargers, Hasselbeck $50,000 from the Packers. Yet the kid from BC was euphoric about working as Brett Favre's understudy. "I was soooo not ready to play in the NFL that first year," Hasselbeck recalled last week. "If the Packers had put me in as a rookie, I'd have failed and all those scouts who doubted me would have said, 'He can't play. Never should have been drafted.' "

To the contrary, Hasselbeck, who was traded to the Seahawks in 2001, has been to three Pro Bowls and one Super Bowl and is the unquestioned leader of his team. Leaf, out of the NFL for six years after failed trials with four teams, is the quarterbacks coach as well as golf coach at Division II West Texas A&M. And in the decade since this infamous draft, not much about the science of the selection process has changed.

How to sum up the 1998 draft 10 years later? Scary. Historic. Consider this:

• Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard -- the architect of two of the Redskins' title teams -- traded a pair of first-round picks and a second-rounder to move up one slot to select Leaf. It is arguably the worst trade in NFL history.

• Tennessee, needing a franchise receiver for young QB Steve McNair, chose Kevin Dyson over Randy Moss.

• Coaches Bill Parcells and Jimmy Johnson ran the drafts of the Jets and the Dolphins, respectively, and made 22 picks between them. Only three of those players became starters for more than one season.

• Some of the disparities in draft position included running backs Curtis Enis at No. 5 and Ahman Green at No. 76; wideouts Marcus Nash 30th and Hines Ward 92nd; defensive backs Terry Fair 20th and Pat Tillman 226th. Jason Peter and John Avery were bonus babies, yet London Fletcher and Jeff Saturday were undrafted.

"Boy, that is a sad commentary on scouting," says Mike Lombardi, who as the Eagles' director of pro scouting that year was key to the team's having the best draft in the league: left tackle Tra Thomas, linebacker Jeremiah Trotter, defensive tackle Brandon Whiting, return man-cornerback Allen Rossum -- all of whom would become regulars for six to 10 years -- and linebacker Ike Reese, who would become a special teams captain.

It is also the human fabric that makes a draft so unpredictable -- in any year. Why was Giovanni Carmazzi drafted 134 spots ahead of Tom Brady in 2000? Why can't the Bears (Rashaan Salaam, Enis, Cedric Benson) pick a running back who can excel at the pro level? How can the slightly built and average-armed Alex Smith get picked first in 2005 while the strong-armed Derek Anderson goes 213th?

"Every year the draft continues to teach us a lesson," says Saints coach Sean Payton, who was Philadelphia's quarterback coach in 1998. "You get excited about a guy because of his tools and projecting his ability, but so much of this is looking beneath the surface."

Says former Packers general manager Ron Wolf, "If I batted .333 in the draft, I was pretty happy. No one bats .500. The fascinating thing about pro football is, no matter how long you're in it, you can't predict how guys are going to handle the pressure, the limelight, the money. Rick Mirer played in front of 80,000 every week in college [for Notre Dame], and apparently he couldn't handle it. Tony Romo played in front of 8,000 [for Division I-AA Eastern Illinois], and he can. Figure that out."

As the 1998 draft approached, the job of new Colts general manager Bill Polian was to divine which quarterback should lead his franchise -- Manning or Leaf. Polian sat alone in his office for four straight days that February, watching every snap of each passer's college career; by a hair, he favored Manning. He convened a meeting of his scouts; sentiment in the room was 60-40 for Leaf. Polian asked quarterback guru Bill Walsh to evaluate tape of both players; he was bullish on Manning. The Colts worked out both guys; Manning threw a tighter ball and was in much better shape. Manning had the reputation of an Eagle Scout; the Colts had heard the party-hearty Leaf stories. And then there was Manning's visit to Colts headquarters three weeks before the draft.

"I asked if I could see Bill Polian before I left the building," Manning recalled last week. "So I went into his office, and Bill and coach [Jim] Mora were in there. Those are two of the most intimidating people I have ever known, and here I was, wanting to know what they were going to do. To be honest, I felt they were kind of stringing me along. So I said, 'I'd really like to come here if you want me. But if you don't, I promise you I'll come back and kick your ass for the next 15 years.' "

A surprised Polian replied, "Maybe we ought to take you then." And deep down, he loved the quarterback's moxie.

San Diego had the third choice in the draft, but Beathard, desperate for a quarterback, dealt that pick plus his second-rounder (No. 33) and what turned out to be the eighth pick in the '99 draft to the Cardinals to take Leaf. "The ironic thing," says Billy Devaney, Beathard's director of player personnel and now in a similar capacity with the Rams, "was if we didn't move up to take Leaf, we would have picked [defensive end] Andre Wadsworth. So it would have been a disaster no matter what." A knee injury ended Wadsworth's unproductive career after 36 games.

Leaf's disastrous career, including a passer rating of 50.0, ended with a quiet retirement in July 2002. He and Manning are text-messaging friends. In an e-mail reply to SI's request for an interview last week, Leaf declined to relive his nightmare. "Thanks for the thought," he wrote, "but I don't have any interest in doing that. I hope you understand. Peyton's a great guy, and I always have nice things to say to and about him as well. Sincerely, Coach Leaf."

Since the 1998 draft the Colts have had one starting quarterback, two coaches and one Super Bowl win. The Chargers? Six starting quarterbacks, four coaches, no Super Bowls.

In another year, this decision also made in 1998 would have been the worst of the draft: the failure by every team to choose Hines Ward until the final pick of the third round, when the Steelers took him. Ward had played high school and college football without anyone else knowing that he had no anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, the result of a bike accident when he was nine. The discovery was made during a physical at the combine. He visited Tampa Bay three times before the draft, but the Bucs decided that the risk of injury was too high. What's more, after playing running back, kick returner and quarterback in his first two seasons at Georgia, Ward played wide receiver during his final two seasons. "The scouts thought I was a jack-of-all-trades, master of none," he said. "That hurt me. That plus the ACL, which was never a factor until that day." Ward was the 15th wideout drafted in '98, the one who has since caught 719 passes for 8,737 yards.

"There is only one way to do this job," says Tom Donahoe, who drafted Ward as Pittsburgh's director of football operations at the time. "You have to put the tape on and watch play after play, to see if the guy can play football. Hines proved he could play without the ACL, and play at a high level, and run away from corners. He was a victim of what still plagues a lot of players 10 years later -- a good player, but [after the season] people start poking holes in him.

"The process is not getting better," Donahoe adds. "There'd be fewer mistakes if the league drafted at the end of January and eliminated all those workouts and most of those player interviews, which are a waste because they're so scripted. Turn the tape on. Can the guy play or not?"

One more thing about scouting that drives players crazy: upside.

"What killed me," says Manning, "was when I'd see the so-called unnamed executive quoted as saying, 'Leaf has upside, Manning doesn't.' How'd you like to be 21 or 22, and you've already peaked. Does that make any sense?"

This year's "low-upside" player at the top of the draft is Virginia's Chris Long, who projects as a 4-3 defensive end or a 3-4 outside linebacker. Word on the street is that Long will have trouble getting around quicker tackles. "My belief is I'll still be getting better in my 10th [season]," says Long, "but I keep hearing words like ceiling and maxed out. Where do they come from?"

In the spring of 2002 Hasselbeck and Trent Dilfer were competing for the Seahawks' starting job when a new face walked into the quarterbacks meeting room. It was Leaf. Taking one last stab at reviving his career, he had signed with Seattle. The man who'd bumped Hasselbeck from the combine was going to compete for a job with the Seahawks.

"It was just weird," Hasselbeck says. "He was a nice guy. I just thought he was one of those guys who figured, you know, take a year, get coached by Mike Holmgren, save your career. But one day he didn't come. He retired. He just disappeared."