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Mark Dantonio sick of Connor Cook gossip

Many NFL prospects get drafted later than expected every year. Connor Cook was among those who heard his named called a few rounds later than anticipated, but that's no excuse to attack his personality.

By Jason Marcum
Mike Carter-USA TODAY Sports

Time and time again, we're shown how the NFL draft and projecting college football stars into the NFL is an inexact science.

We try to through waves of mock drafts, detailed scouting reports and even the 'anonymous scouts,' yet time and time again, we're badly mistaken in our evaluation of prospects vs how the NFL and all 32 teams actually view them.

There were many examples of this in last week's draft as guys projected to go as high as Round 1 mysteriously fell into the latter rounds. Michigan State Spartans quarterbacks Connor Cook was unfortunately one of them as he didn't hear his named called until Round 4 after some thought he could go at the end of Round 1.

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But he was far from the only one, not to mention several higher-ranked prospects managing to fall further than Cook. guys like Baylor's Andrew Billings, Duke's Jeremy Cash, and Ohio State's Joshua Perry were all expected to be drafted in Round 2, but fell into Day 3 of the draft (Cash went undrafted).

Yet we're not seeing columns like the one attacking Cook's personality written about Billings, Cash, Perry or most prospects who were drafted later than expected. The NFL just didn't view Cook or those other guys the same way many of us did, which led to them being drafted later than the public expected, but probably close or right at where those 32 NFL teams expected.

That's why Mark Dantonio is not happy with the aforementioned Detroit News column, and he's voicing such on Twitter:

His "35-5" line is in reference to Cook’s win-loss record as a starter for Michigan State. It's hard to think Cook and the Spartans were able to accomplish that if the guy playing the most important position in football was as bad of a leader as some want to make him out to be.

It's good to see Dantonio continue to squash the rumors of Cook not being a good leader or having personality issues. At this point, those rumors really don't matter at all. Cook is in the NFL and under his contract for the next four years. Let's let him live out his NFL dreams instead of trying to speculate as to why he fell further in the draft than expected.

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