Wednesday roundtable: Navigating the NFL Draft

Last year’s NFL Draft brought some notable surprises for the Cardinal’s NFL hopefuls, most noticeably Shayne Skov’s failure to be drafted and Ben Gardner’s eventual seventh-round selection despite an injury-plagued senior season. With that in mind and this year’s draft set to begin on Thursday, we asked football writers Nicholas Radoff and Do-Hyoung Park: Which Stanford player is set for the biggest surprise on draft day and why?

Nic: Ty Montgomery has seen his draft stock go all over the place during the 2014 season. The receiver/returner was once projected to go as high as the third round. His injury and combine 40 time have hurt that stock and he had slipped all the way back to perhaps the seventh round before his Pro Day reinvigorated his draft possibilities. I think that this year’s depth at wide receiver will end up making it more difficult to get drafted highly at the position, but there is always a spot in the NFL for a great returner. So why not the greatest in Stanford history?  I also agree with Do: Jordan Richards is another name to look for. He maybe the best safety from Stanford since the legendary John Lynch and I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw him in the first half of the draft either.

But as far as surprises go, I’m going to go with the incomparable David Parry. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that the anchor of the best defense in the Pac-12 over the last few years was a former walk-on. Then again, so was future Hall of Famer J.J. Watt.

Though it’s probably a stretch to say that Parry gets drafted number 11 overall, I do think that there’s a chance that he gets a good look from a lot of teams. He certainly turned heads by turning in the second-best bench performance at the NFL Combine with 34. That’s just one behind the top score of 35 and the same as one of the top interior lineman prospects in the country in Washington’s Danny Shelton.

Graduating senior David Parry will look to be a surprise pick in the upcoming draft. He is a powerful force on the defensive front. (DAVID BERNAL/David Bernal Photography).

While Parry will probably not be used as a nose tackle at the NFL level like he was in Stanford’s 3-4 defense, he certainly has the ability to become a rotational guy right away as an interior lineman for a 4-3 defense and for run-stopping sets in any defense. There’s also a chance he might slide out a spot in the 3-4 to become a defensive end.

At any rate, Parry is polished and talented. Scouts might overlook him for his perceived “low ceiling,” but I don’t buy that argument. From a technical standpoint, Parry was almost perfect at the collegiate level and anchored the middle as well as anyone in college football. Look for a team to draft Parry late in the sixth round or early in the seventh.

Do: I really, really like Jordan Richards in this year’s draft. This is a notoriously weak safety class — it’s essentially Landon Collins of Alabama and everybody else. There are a lot of teams in the league this season that could use help up the middle in the secondary, and Richards is as good of an option as any — he’s come up under the tutelage of noted secondary master Duane Akina over the last two seasons, and two seasons ago, he was the better of Stanford’s two safeties (alongside current Philadelphia Eagle Ed Reynolds).

That is to say, I think that Richards clearly has at least the talent to make it in the NFL as a safety, and although he isn’t excellent as a coverage safety, Richards is tremendous against the run and takes tremendous angles to the ball and has deceptive speed as well.

I don’t think that Richards is going to go in the top two rounds, but I think depending on how the dominoes fall and how the pecking order establishes itself, Richards could potentially sneak out as high as the third round – potentially even ahead of Alex Carter, his highly-touted cornerback teammate. I definitely don’t think that he’ll fall all the way to undrafted free agent status.

Contact Nicholas Radoff at nradoff ‘at’ stanford.edu and Do-Hyoung Park at dhpark ‘at’ stanford.edu.