ejthedj brought up two other great busts taken as high as RB Cedric Benson; Chicago's RB Curtis Enis and Green Bay's RB Brent Fullwood. It is still unbelievable that Fullwood actually made a Pro Bowl with 821 yards and 5 TDs in 1989. Enis was a complete bust on the field. Plus they had multiple chances to trade the pick, or take their number two choice, WR Randy Moss instead. I'm not going to name all the players the Packers could have selected instead of Fullwood, but he was a dud:
Credit him with making the Pro Bowl one year, but so much more was expected of someone taken with the fourth pick in the '87 draft. He was moody, unwilling to play with minor nicks and a straight-line runner. He was cut midway into his fourth season when he took himself out of a game against the Bears and then went out partying that night. Former defensive coordinator Dick Modzelewski, upon his departure from Green Bay, dismissed him as "a dud - a complete dud."
Grading him on a curve, Fullwood wasn't really that bad when compared to all the bad draft choices and trades the Packers made in the 1980s. Ron Wolf explained how bad it was when he took over the team in 1991, from page 31 of The Packer Way:
In 1987, when I was preparing to talk to the organization about running its football operations, I evaluated the players. The best one was tackle Ken Ruettgers. When I was flying into Green Bay in 1991, I took a yellow pad and drew columns. I had one for all-pro, another for star, another for starter, another for backup, another for can't-do-it, and so forth. I wanted to find out how much I knew about the current team. I put too many player in both the can't-do-it and need-information columns. They had too many athletes whom I hadn't considered seriously as draft possibilities for either the Raiders or the Jets. My evaluation of the current roster produced another startling result. The best players were Sterling Sharpe and Ruettgers. In four years, they had added only one more star.