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This Day In Sports…April 28, 2007:
By all accounts, former Boise State star Ashton Jeanty will be wearing his familiar No. 2 with the Las Vegas Raiders (if he can strike a deal with the team’s current kicker, Daniel Carlson). There was a draft night that involved another No. 2 for the Raiders, and everybody in the organization was really excited about him, too. We sure don’t think Jeanty’s story will end like his. Quarterback JaMarcus Russell of LSU was taken with the top overall pick in the 2007 NFL Draft by Oakland, and that was as good as it got. Russell is now considered to be the biggest draft bust in NFL history.
Russell was hyped going into the draft as a rare combination of size and strength for a quarterback. But bad omens abounded. According to CBS Sports, one NFC general manager literally told Raiders owner Al Davis that selecting Russell would be a bad idea. There was also the story related by Rich Eisen at NFL.com that claimed teammate Warren Sapp said a Raiders coach had given Russell a DVD loaded with plays and ideas he could take home overnight and critique. As the story has it, Russell returned the DVD the following day and said he was all aboard with everything he had seen. The thing is, the DVD was blank.
Then Russell alienated his team and fans alike when he held out in training camp, and that impasse extended into the season. He was already infamously averse to conditioning, and sitting idle on purpose didn’t help. Russell started exactly one game as an Oakland rookie, the final one. In three seasons with the Raiders, he went 7-18 in 25 starts, with 18 touchdowns, 23 interceptions and 15 lost fumbles. Russell was expecting a fourth season, but when he showed up for minicamp in May, 2010, weighing 290 pounds, Oakland cut Russell loose. He never saw the field again.
Russell tried to get back into the NFL, but there were no takers. He auditioned with Washington and Miami during the 2010 season. In 2013, he tried out with Chicago. In 2016, Russell said he wrote letters to all 32 NFL teams and none responded. The last we heard from him, he was arrested last June when he was alleged to have taken a $74,000 donation to his high school alma mater for weight room equipment and pocketed $55,000 for himself. Russell, by the way, made $40 million from his ill-fated stint with the Raiders.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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