Go back to page 325-327 of this forum's archives for some fun reading about the draft.
04/28/06 is still the highest number of people on this forum, and I remember that night well. Thunderkyss and I were two that I recall were defending the pick against a crush of Reggie/Vince manlovers and Bob McNair haters. Reading back is quite amusing.
I was a trade-down advocate, especially if we could get more value. I wanted D'brick or AJ Hawk, but had no problem with picking Mario after it was all said and done. I'm a defensive kind of guy, believing that championships are won with good defense. So Mario fit that mindset.
I lost a lot of respect for the local media - specifically Justice and Johnny McLame - after that draft. First was the hype of the so-called "Bush Bowl", where you had local fans/media hoping we would lose the last game of a dismal season in order to get the first pick. Then we had the Vince Young hype and David Carr hatred mixed together to form a perfect feeding frenzy. Justice and McLame were handing out pitchforks and torches to storm Reliant, and they've done nothing to gain my respect since then. They seem to have very selective memories these days, but I won't forget their obvious and overwhelming bias for individual players over the team. They could choke on chicken bones today and retire and I wouldn't care less (I'd probably celebrate with a KFC bucket of original recipe).
Then when fans didn't get what they thought they wanted, so many threatened to abandon the team and boycott games because of it. I lost a lot of faith in Houston's hometown fans during 2-14 and the subsequent whining of disappointment. I realized this is a town mostly made of front-runners and bandwaggoners. We have about 20,000 fanatics, but the rest are fickle, at best.
In the end, though, our new football minds prevailed and obviously made the pick that the team needed. And now the bandwagon fills up, which is alright with me. Some of us never left it.