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10 years later, Saints’ trade for Morstead still smart move

PostPosted: Mon Apr 22, 2019 8:20 pm
by PonyPride
From the New Orleans Time-Picayune:

10 years later, Saints’ trade-up for Thomas Morstead still a smart move

By Christopher Dabe, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

There was a time before the 2009 season when Thomas Morstead started booming punts down the field when he should have been just in warm-up mode. Practice hadn’t begun, but the then-rookie wanted to show something to incumbent journeyman Glenn Pakulak.

“We just started banging balls back and forth for about 20 minutes trying to one-up each other,” Morstead said in a Times-Picayune story published in June 2009. “So it’s been a fun competition, but I probably shouldn’t do that regularly.”

Morstead came to the New Orleans Saints 10 years ago without any assurances of a job. He had plenty to prove. The Saints swapped two draft picks to move up two spots so they could select Morstead in the fifth round at No. 164 overall. Coach Sean Payton described the selection of the punter as fulfilling “a position on our grease board at the end of the season that was a need.”

The selection came with some skepticism from the public. According to Times-Picayune archives, the Saints faced “overwhelming reaction on message boards and chat rooms,” with many fans perhaps remembering the ill-fated selection of punter Russell Erxleben at No. 11 overall exactly three decades earlier. The trade also left the Saints with only four selections that year, which caused fans of a team coming off an 8-8 season to question the selection of a specialist such as Morstead.

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Re: 10 years later, Saints’ trade for Morstead still smart m

PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2019 1:23 pm
by Silk
No way he has been in the NFL that long...