NFL Drafka, April 15

Seven days until the NFL draft starts, and eight days until any NU player has a chance in hell of getting drafted (the first night only has the first round - word to Luis Castillo) - so we're going to start covering what's going on with this jawn. Every few days, I'll keep y'all updated on the various ongoings with Northwestern peeps making their transition to the next level.

Right now, there's three players who it seems like have a chance of getting drafted:

Corey Wootton: I'm seeing his name popping up anywhere from the mid-second round to the fifth.

MIke Kafka: As high as the third to as low as the seventh.

Sherrick McManis: Earlier mocks had him as a potential sixth-seventh round prospect, but he's not really showing up on anybody's radar right now.

So I'll break down what news I got on each of em. A lot of the news here is just from anytime in the last few weeks, but as the days move forward, I'll be keeping the info as up to date as possible.

Corey Wootton

• If you want to see a big-ass overview of Wootton's stock, click here. I'll take a Mathias Kiwanuka comparison where I can take one - especially because teams seem to think Wootton will be a better OLB than a defensive end. 
  
• The team I'm hearing the most noise about with regards to Woot is the Buccaneers, mainly because they have 11 draft picks, a lot of them in the 2-4 range, and have to use them somehow, so essentially anybody who looks pretty 2-4-ish to draft prospects is being described as a potential fit with the Buccaneers.
• As of last week, the man had worked out with the Pats, Bills, Chiefs, and - wait for it - NEW YORK JETS. (Go New York Go New York Go!) Then again, the source reporting this info - the National Football Post - isn't too big on spelling the guy's name right, so, who knows. 
• The team that's giving out the second most Woot-related noise is definitely the Patriots, who are one of those teams who brought him in for a private workout.  However, it doesn't seem like he'll be a good fit, because the team has a history of only drafting linemen over 300 pounds. 

Mike Kafka

• As errbody and their cousin knows, Kafka has leaped up a lot of people's draft boards to the point where he's being considered as the 6th-7th best quarterback in the draft, in the most optimistic people's boards. Two talking heads have proclaimed Crazy Legs to be a "sleeper" in the draft: Ron Jaworski from ESPN and Pat Kirwan from NFL.com. If two people call you a "sleeper", how under-the-radar can you be? I think the appropriate term is "napper" at this point. (For the record, Kirwan beat Jaws to the punch on this, making everybody's favorite creepy old ex-Eagles quarterback a ripoff.)
• Mel Kiper, Jr. has Kafka to the Chiefs in the fourth round. And Mel Kiper Jr. said that, so it's essentially fact.
• Other teams listed in association with everybody's favorite scrambler are the Raiders and Bengals, as well as the Browns and Patriots. Note that two of those teams have quarterbacks I wouldn't trust to start for my co-rec flag football squad, so people be talking bout Kafka. 

Sherrick McManis

• Sadly, not much positive about the guy. The only team that has brought him in for a workout was the Patriots, but I'm not reading much into it. Here's why: as you can see from this post and this post, it was in the same workout as Corey Wootton - the Pats skipped NU's pro day - making McManis the NFL draft equivalent of a double date. I'd put it somewhere in between the time the Red Sox signed Daisuke Matsuzaka, and then randomly signed Hideki Okajima so Daisuke wouldn't feel lonely being the only Japanese guy in Boston, and that one episode of Greek I watched a few weeks ago, where Rusty goes on spring break with his girlfriend but gets guilted into bringing Dale along and he ends up sharing a room with them, leading to all sorts of awkward yet comical hilarity. Another reason I don't buy the McManis-New England connection is because as this article shows, everyone from Boston seems to get the Northwestern Wildcats confused with the Northeastern Huskies, which is understandable, because one of them is a really great school with a football team and the other is the team that always finishes fourth in the prestigious Boston Beanpot hockey tournament, and produced Mavs guard J.J. Barea and essentially no other sports figures ever in the history of the world.

Andrew Brewer

• Adam Rittenberg said that Brewer was "making a push for the draft" after NU's pro day. I'm just here to say that this is silly and untrue, and that you probably shouldn't get your hopes up, unless you're a big fan of letdowns.