Watch Tower: So Now Huey Richardson Played a Defensive End…?

Draft Day has arrived! Tonight the eyes of the National Football League and its fans will focus on New York City’s Radio City Music Hall as the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft commences.

The draft is of course about possibility and potential, but it is also about disappointment and let down. For every Tom Brady and Terrell Davis late round Cinderella story, there are dozens of stories of 6th and 7th rounders who, well planned out like 6th and 7th rounders.

  • And of course there’s the 1st round draft pick busts.

Steelers Nation has not tasted the B word, under Kevin Colbert’s watch, but every team has its horror stories of the sparking can’t-miss kid who in fact, did.

  • And in the modern-era the Steelers have no bigger first round bust than Huey Richardson.

For those too young to remember and for those old enough with the fortune to forget, Richardson was the Steelers first round pick in 1991, drafted with (and this sounds ominous this year) the 15th pick overall out of Florida.

Richardson was an inside linebacker who on paper had some position flexibility to play on the line of scrimmage. In reality he was also pathetic, having gotten into only 11 games in a two year career.

  • Richardson’s story is also one of the most frequently mis-reported Steelers stories.

Popular lore has it that when Bill Cowher arrived in 1992, he was so disappointed that he cut Richardson in training camp. All of that is true, Cowher was very disappointed with him and wanted him gone, but the Steelers actually traded Richardson to the Redskins. But as the Watch Tower pointed out even veterans like Ed Bouchette are wont to say the “Steelers cut Richardson.”

And this is a problem with the internet. Little factoids get incorrectly reported, they get circulated, and well there’s a snowball effect.

  • And it doesn’t help when official team sources initiate the errors.

That’s right. While doing research on the Steelers 2014 NFL Draft, yours realized by chance that the Steelers 2013 Media Guide listed Richardson as a defensive end. As this was odd, I checked previous editions, and it seems like between 2010 and 2011 Richardson switched from being a linebacker to a defensive end….

Yeah, writing a blog entry on this kind of thing defines “nitty gritty” in its purest form, but I guess such things are prone to happen when the NFL decides to extend the draft into the second week of May.

Thanks for visiting. To read more analysis of the media that cover the Steelers, click here to read more from Steel Curtain Rising’s Watch Tower.

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