Yes, I ranted about the NFL draft a year ago, and I am just so grateful I don’t have to pay any attention to this thing. That wasn’t the case for the first 17, 18 years of my journalism career, when Los Angeles had at least one NFL franchise (the Rams), and sometimes two (the Raiders).

Covering the draft is so massively dreary. A five-hour first round, or whatever. And your team gets one pick, and the rest of the time you’re just sitting there listening to draft wonks/idiots droning on. Of all the things in your life that make you think that you’ve just lost a chunk of time that you will never get back … covering the NFL draft ranks pretty highly.

Anyway, I have two thoughts about the first round … about the USC linebackers and Sports Illustrated jinx.

If you saw SI this week, it had USC’s three starting linebackers from the 2008 season on its cover: Brian Cushing, Clay Matthews and Rey Maualuga. It was the SI draft edition and the USC guys were out there because they were being touted as the first three linebackers from the same school to go in the first round of the NFL draft.

Well, if that was gonna happen, SI put the kibosh on it.

(And no, I don’t actually believe in the NFL draft.  It’s just fun to talk about. Including the time that SI did a story on its own jinx … and apparently couldn’t get an athlete to be on the cover, settling for a black cat, as I recall. My theory on the SI non-jinx is fairly straightforward, though I’m not sure I’ve seen it before. And it goes like this: You’re on the cover of SI because things have been going well for you. Probably remarkably well. Maybe as well as they ever will in your career. And where can you go from, presumably, the peak of your career? Right. Nowhere but down. So, that run of good fortune you just had — no major injuries, in a zone, maybe more than a little lucky, winning a championship or a gold medal — well, it’s not likely to hold, and then something happens. You get hurt or go into a slump or have some bad breaks, and you are perceived to have fallen off, fallen apart. Like you went bad. When, in fact, you simply were reverting to the mean. You went back to being a human being. You gave up being a superhero. So SI gets blamed when, actually, all it has done is ID guys at the top of their profession for that moment in time. So, sure, “bad” things happen to guys on the cover because there is almost no way they can keep up what they’ve just done. It’s not a jinx. It’s about returning to something regarding normalcy. Not that hard to grasp, right?)

Anyway, USC has loved its linebackers in recent years, and it has been talking about them all along, and the idea that three of them could go in the first round, well, that’s enough to make a Trojan blush with pride and bust out bragging. Not like that ever happens.

Then … it didn’t happen. Cushing went No. 15, to Houston, which is about right. He didn’t have a really great USC career, in terms of numbers, but Cushing is a beast. He was when he was a freshman. I remember seeing him on the practice field and thinking, “That guy looks 25.” He can run and he’s a load. Then Clay Matthews III (his father and grandfather played in The League) went No. 26, to Green Bat. So there’s two USC linebackers in the first round.

But the NFL’s talent people apparently were just a teensy bit worried about Maualuga. Who sat through the eternity of the first round (though I must admit they’ve sped things along, of late, “blasting” through the first round this year in a mere 3 hours and 28 minutes), waiting for his name to be called, and not hearing it.

Which actually doesn’t surprise me.

Rey Maualuga may be one of the last dozen people on the planet you want to have waiting for you in a dark alley, but he was persistently underwhelming as a Trojan. Aside from a couple of games, and the fact that he looked scary as heck, Maualuga never quite did what we expected him to do.

He had a couple of disciplinary issues, wasn’t exactly nimble out there and had a lot of blown assignments, if the rumbles out of the coaches’ offices were correct. To watch him was to see a guy overrun a lot of plays, apparently because he was more interested in the SportsCenter highlight reel kill-shot-hit than making play-stopping tackles.

And then there was this: Maualuga was horrible — horr-uh-bull — in the game that cost USC a shot at a national title, that 27-21 defeat at Oregon State in September when a 5-foot-8 (maybe) running back named Jacquizz Rodgers ran for 186 yards and two touchdowns on 37 carries. Just tore up the Trojans and that “greatest ever” defense. Maualuga was credited with five solo tackles, but with that little guy running between the tackles all night long, he probably should have had 10 or 15 solos, and in the SI story it is suggested that Maualuga was called in by coach Pete Carroll, after that game, and told he better start playing better or he would lose his starting job.

Anyway, Rey-Rey just never quite seemed to live up to the hype. I always felt that way. For all four of his seasons. And, apparently, the NFL agrees. Going in the second round to Cincinnati with the 38th pick is no shame, but it’s not first round. It’s not “you’re the best guy out there” reinforcement. Basically, going after Cushing and Matthews tells us that the NFL considered Maualuga only the third-best linebacker on USC’s team.

Thinking about it now, Maulaluga strikes me as the antithesis of Lofa Tatupu, the Trojans’ inside ‘backer from a few years before. Tatupu probably isn’t 6 feet tall. He isn’t particularly fast. He wasn’t some monster prospect out of high school. (Remember, he went to Maine before transferring to USC, where his father had played.) But Tatupu was/is smart. He doesn’t blow assignments. He makes all the routine plays, not just the big ones, and that is why he is a very successful pro — with the Seattle Seahawks.

Maualuga is bigger, stronger, maybe faster than Tatupu, and people have been oohing and aahing about him his whole career. But Lofa Tatupu is a better, more durable football player. So far.

Maualuga is vowing to “prove everybody wrong”  (don’t they all?). And maybe that proving stuff will get him to play up to expectations. Because he hasn’t done so yet.