First, an explanation. Every day for the next four weeks, we'll be highlighting the top 10 San Diego Chargers biggest draft busts and then the top 10 best draft picks by the Chargers. I am in charge of picking these, so here are the "rules" that I've come up with for the "busts" side of things.
- Only players picked in the first 3 rounds are eligible. After that is when teams start taking fliers on guys with injury problems and all that, but in those first 3 rounds they're looking for guys to contribute either immediately, long-term or both.
- I limited it to the last 12 drafts. Why? Because that's how long I've been watching Chargers football, so the names on the draft lists from the years before that might as well have been in Cantonese to me.
- Draft position matters a great deal. A third round pick that did nothing does not hurt the team nearly as much as a first round pick that did nothing, so the first round pick is going to be positioned higher (lower?) with the same career as someone picked in a later round.
Now, onto our first draft bust......Right Tackle Courtney Van Buren (The Baron!). After the jump, find out why it pained me to include him on this list.
After mentioning "The Baron" (probably not his nickname, but it should be) in a post a few weeks back, and then seeing the Chargers post a picture of his enormous shoe on Twitter, I decided to do a little snooping to see if I could find out what ever happened to Courtney. Here's what I found:
- An entertaining Twitter account. On it, Courtney talks sports, politics, religion, books, civil rights and even puts up his Formspring profile if you want to ask him something.
- An absolutely fantastic, although infrequently-updated, blog. Imagine the Twitter account, but expanded to allow him more than 140 characters.
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