The bummer to me was that the team derailed his development by moving him last season from CB to S. If Petrino/Zimmer had left him at corner, he would have been the natural choice for the nickel back.
Instead, for most of the season Petrino used his Louisville boy Antoine Harris as the nickel. The royal screw-up was that he and Zimmer had Harris (a CB) come in and take Chris Crocker's place at safety and had Crock line up one-on-one in coverage against the slot receiver. Result: a promising young DB wasted away on the sidelines, a young CB was in over his head as a safety on the field, the linebackers were forced to bite on every play action fake due to the lack of a true safety, and the QB was handed a gift-wrapped mismatch on the third WR, who was one-on-one in man coverage against a safety with no reliable deep help behind him.
Many of us around this board last season wondered why the team did all those wacko moves instead of having the safety Crocker actually play safety, keeping Williams at his natural corner position, and having Harris (or Allen Rossum, who was the guy forced out to make room for Harris on the roster) be the backup sitting on the bench.
But then, none of us here are football geniuses like Bobby Petrino...
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Williams was indeed the first player actually selected by the Falcons in that draft, but remember that the first pick became John Abraham. The next pick after Williams was used to take Jerious Norwood. So while losing Williams certainly will hurt the grade of that draft, it certainly doesn't kill it.
Also, the pick we gave up to move up and take Williams was one of the two extra picks we got out of the Abraham deal. It wasn't reported as well as it should have been, but that was actually a three way deal. Denver traded up in the first round with Atlanta, giving the Falcons a late third rounder and a fourth rounder in 2007. The lower first rounder from Denver went to the Jets for Abraham. That late third rounder was the extra pick that the Falcons gave up to draft Williams.
So the trade up in the second round to get Williams wasn't a catastrophe. It was actually just one of many deals involving draft picks that offseason, and looking at the whole picture the trades came out pretty nicely.
The team was (as always) short of cap space - in this case thanks to $5.7 million dead money on Peerless Price in addition to the big bucks paid to Ron Mexico. McKay and assistant GM Billy Devaney had to make the draft picks go as far as possible to plug all the team's holes.
Those holes included replacing Kevin Shaffer at LT (who signed with Cleveland for big bucks), Brady Smith at DE, and Keion Carpenter and Bryan Scott (who had already lost his starting job and would likely be cut before the end of camp) in the secondary. The coaches also wanted extra competition at RB to push TJ Duckett, who was allegedly falling out of favor due to poor work habits.
When you put all the trades together, the net was that we gave up our first rounder, our 2007 seventh rounder, the aforementioned flop Bryan Scott, and pushed our 4th rounder out a year to 2007. In return we got DE John Abraham, LT Wayne Gandy, DB Chris Crocker, and we moved up in rounds 2 and 5.
The team drafted Williams to replace Keion Carpenter, Jerious Norwood to push Duckett, Quinn Ojinnaka to replace backup tackle Barry Stokes, Adam Jennings to add to the backup WR corps, and DJ Shockley to replace the retiring Ty Detmer as the #3 QB.
The rumors over the summer were that the coaches had become even more frustrated with Duckett in camp. When Finneran got hurt in practice and went on IR, the team needed more depth at WR. They pulled off a three way deal and unloaded Duckett for WR Ashley Lelie. DT Grady Jackson came aboard as a bargain rack free agent, followed by Morten Andersen once the "triple threat" experiment with Koenen went sour.
In the long run, the team plugged a whole lot of holes and even made a few upgrades, and did it all with virtually no cap space.
