Malcolm Kelly does crazy damage to his draft stock

Malcolm Kelly is one of the most anticipated arrivals of the 22 draft prospects Dallas will be hosting next week.

He's a big player receiver from OU. I'm sure the locals have seen plenty of him during intense UT-OU battles. He's been projected as a first round pick by some. He's 6'4 and 220 pounds. It's not a stretch to think he could come to Dallas with the expectation of being the next great Cowboy receiver.

Big expectations means big-time money. First rounders get paid millions of dollars more than second rounders. Kelly knows this. First rounders tend to have the total package: size, hands and speed. Kelly knows this too. It also helps to be considered a good kid. No one likes to give a jerk a bunch of their money.

Problem is he ran a slow time at the OU Pro Day. Not good. Then he popped off and blamed his slow time on the school. ProFootballTalk.com’s Mike Florio took Kelly to task for this.

Kelly says that he’d arranged to run on an Astroturf infield at the school’s indoor track facility.  

Instead, he ran on FieldTurf at the Sooners’ indoor football facility.

"I already had everything set up for where I want to do it at," Kelly said. "I get out here and it’s a whole different deal.

"People want to say surface is surface, but it’s a lot more to it than that.  You have to think about how much ground time you have running on this mushy surface here and how much ground time you have on Astroturf."
Fine, Malcolm.  But what you’re missing here is that the scouts are aware of this, and so they add time when the surface is believed to be too fast.  Besides, given that no NFL games are played on Astroturf and many are played on FieldTurf, it makes much more sense for prospects to run on the current generation of plastic grass.

Kelly didn’t run the 40 at the Scouting Combine, due to a lingering quad injury.  The surface at the RCA Dome is FieldTurf.

As to the quad injury, Kelly also criticized the Oklahoma medical staff for not accurately diagnosing the injury.

In our view, Kelly’s childish effort to push the blame for his performance to the school that invested plenty of time and money into him isn’t the best way to persuade an NFL team to invest even more time and money.  Because if/when things don’t go well for Kelly at the next level, it’s safe to say he’ll be looking to point the finger for his failures and/or frustrations at the team.

So now Kelly is doing some damage control and there are conflicting reports about what he plans to do about it. Harshmarks claims Kelly will hold another workout in Atlanta on Sunday April 13 without scouts. Apparently the Kelly camp will send out video and information from the workout to every team in the league.

ProFootballTalk.com is reporting he'll actually run April 16 not April 13 and that scouts are invited. The site is also reporting the workout will be on AstroTurf -- Kelly's preferred surface -- and it will take place in Norman on OU's campus.

Regardless, as this fiasco continues to play itself out, Kelly's stock has been irreparably damaged.

Key words from Matt Mosley:

In my mind, this is just another bad P.R. move from the Kelly camp. I think he's actually a great kid, but he's coming across as a brat right now. I know a lot of scouts around the league, and they'll be highly suspicious of a private workout. The bottom line is that they get paid to hunt down accurate information. If they had to sit around and wait for FedEx packages from Boyd Dowler, they wouldn't have jobs.

The best thing for Kelly to do is set up as many personal workouts as possible. I know he's in Pittsburgh today, but I don't think he's planning to run. Kelly had a highly productive college career, but it wouldn't surprise me if he slips into the third round at this point. It's hard to believe that a lot of us had him going No. 11 overall to the Bills just a few weeks ago.