Mike Nolan said the reason the 49ers took Alex Smith over Aaron Rodgers was because Rodgers was COCKY
The Draft is coming, we are one day away. Mike Nolan was on the NFL Network this morning and he was answering questions regarding the 2005 NFL Draft, when the 49ers selected Alex Smith first overall and passed on Aaron Rodgers from Cal. This explanation was pretty good.
“The other thing as Alex at the time was a good kid — a very good person, a safe choice, always trying to please,” former 49ers coach Mike Nolan said Tuesday morning on NFL HQ. “On the other hand, Aaron was very cocky, very confident, arrogant. So you can say, ‘Why didn’t you take him to begin with?’ Because that’s really what your best quarterbacks look like. They aren’t very pleasing. They aren’t very safe.”
“Basically, we thought in the long term that Alex Smith would be the better choice than Aaron,” Nolan said. “It was one of those, maybe, paralysis by analysis. We had so much time to think about it.
“We put a lot of stock in changing Aaron’s throwing style. We also got caught up a little bit in that Alex was so mobile. That was a good thing. But in the end, we felt Alex would be the better long-time guy. Obviously, we were wrong in that thought process.”
I bet that had to be hard for Mike Nolan.
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