The experts on television said Dontari Poe was a reach. They also said Ryan Sims couldn't miss. The truth is out there, somewhere, buried between the locks of Mel Kiper's hair.
"There's a certain type of player that this city likes and this fan base likes," Kansas City Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli said, "and it's very much the same kind of player that (head coach) Romeo (Crennel) likes and I like and our coaching staff likes."
As a person, you'll like Poe, the Chiefs' first-round draft pick out of Memphis. Quiet kid. Modest. Hard-working. Grinder.
He grew up poor in the rough part of Memphis, the youngest of three boys, yet made a point to keep his nose clean. His older brother, Robert, is in jail for aggravated burglary and cocaine possession. His mom, Sandra, basically raised him by herself. He sports a tattoo on his right forearm that reads, "I Am My Mother's Keeper."
"She's pretty much my rock," Poe told reporters Thursday during a conference call, about an hour after Kansas City took him off the board with the 11th overall pick. "She's helped me with everything, everything you could think of."
He wasn't introduced to organized football until the ninth grade, when a coach spotted this gentle giant playing drums in the Memphis Wooddale High marching band.
"I had been playing it before, just with a lot of playground stuff," Poe recalled. "Being in the band taught me discipline, if you will. Like I said, it was kind of new going into it, but I caught on quick."
As a player, he's still learning. The dude hasn't reached his ceiling yet. Hasn't even scratched the surface. That's the good news. Also, the bad.
With its red carpets and fancy suits and green rooms, the NFL Draft is a crapshoot dressed up like the Oscars. It's the Super Bowl of educated guesswork. The consensus late Thursday night was that Poe wasn't a lousy pick at No. 11 — just a risky one.
As a collegian, the 6-foot-3, 346-pounder was named second-team all-conference, which isn't bad. Except when it's Conference USA, for an insanely awful Tigers program that went 5-31 during his tenure.
Insiders say there were mitigating factors at work, of course, the primary one being that he was surrounded by absolutely bubkes for talent, that he was the only defender really worth blocking. That would explain why the guy was a nonfactor against Southeastern Conference opposition such as Tennessee, Mississippi and Mississippi State.
After crushing at the NFL Combine in February — the kid ran the 40-yard dash in 4.91 seconds and rattled off 44 reps of 225 pounds on the bench press — there were whispers that Poe could be the second coming of Baltimore's Haloti Ngata, a holy terror in the middle of the trenches. Others wondered if he was just a workout warrior whose attributes wouldn't translate once you stuck the pads on. Draftnik Wes Bunting of the National Football Post summed up the cognoscenti best when he referred to Poe as a "boom or bust kind of player."
The Chiefs fans who booed at the team draft party went with the latter. Crennel sees the former.
"I'm excited about it," Crennel said of his newest toy. "You guys need to be excited as well."
Based on the immediate Twitter response, folks were excited, all right. In an angry, let's-storm-Arrowhead-Drive sort of way.
"I'm not sure what to say to the fans about that," Pioli said. "The fact is, we like this player. We really like this player. . . . There were opportunities, maybe, to trade up, but (they) could have cost too much. And we had two opportunities to move back from this pick and not take this player, and chose not to because we wanted this player."
Ultimately, your faith in Poe comes down to your faith in Crennel to find out what ticks the young man's boxes. At New England, the coach helped turn Vince Wilfork into an All-Pro nose tackle. At Cleveland, he made Shaun Rogers relevant again.
The first responsibility of a good nose tackle in a 3-4 defense is to take up space. The second is to act as a cross between a sumo wrestler and a Swiffer Duster, sucking up blockers so the guys behind him can get the glory on the stat sheet. If he happens to split a double team and rack up a few tackles along the way, that's just a bonus. It's the least glamorous job on the line. But at the same time, it's not one you can afford to miss on.
Pioli and Crennel know the drill: In 2004, while part of the Patriots' brain trust, they put their heads together on Wilfork, a 323-pound plugger out of Miami. He went to four Pro Bowls.
In hindsight, mind you, Wilfork also had film, and the stats, to match the hype. In his final collegiate season, the ex-Hurricane collected 64 tackles and six sacks. In his final season at Memphis, Poe notched 33 tackles and one sack.
Numbers can lie. The tape usually doesn't.
"I'm so ready to just get in and prove to (everyone) that I belong here and I belong at the next level," Poe said. "My motivation is pretty much unlimited right now."
So is his potential. Whether anybody can tap it, we'll find out soon enough.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com
