Josh Rosen’s draft evaluations did not bring up the usual “concerns.”
Experts said he had picturesque mechanics, and some dubbed him the best pure passer in the draft. His critics asked if he cared about football enough. He has plenty of outside interests, could he devote his life to football for the duration of his NFL career?
His college coach Jim Mora made headlines when he said Rosen needs to know “why.”
“He wants to know why,” Mora said in an interview with Peter King. “Millennials, once they know why, they’re good. Josh has a lot of interests in life. If you can hold his concentration level and focus only on football for a few years, he will set the world on fire. He has so much ability, and he’s a really good kid.”
For the Cardinals, who traded up five spots to take the quarterback, this isn’t an issue.
“We all know this is the ‘Why?’ generation,” Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks said. “We want to make sure we get the guy that (asks) ‘Why? Why are we doing certain things?’
“The guy is extremely smart. He’s intelligent. He’s the best passer in the draft coming out this year, so we’re very fortunate to be able to move up and get a guy of this caliber.”
When general manager Steve Keim met with Rosen, those hobbies that some teams may have considered distractions made the quarterback all the more fascinating to Keim, whether it was what the signal-caller was reading or his interest in the stock market.
“The great news is a lot of this is a lot of this position is played between the ears,” Keim said. “This guy, in my opinion, is the most intelligent in this draft…These kind of guys are not only to me the types of guys that can have success in the National Football League but years beyond and you can’t say that about a lot of these guys.”
Now, the #10 will be attached to Rosen for the remainder of his career. It’s not the number he wanted, but he is thrilled at the opportunity.
“I thought I should have been picked at 1, 2 or 3, and I was pissed. I was really, really angry,” Rosen said.
“I got really happy and really motivated. All I wanted to do was get on a plane right then and get to Arizona.”
