NFL Draft Grades

[osu1322]

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=jc-c...t_grades_050111

 

This was an interesting article and for those of u who haven't seen it thought it was worth sharing.

 

I'm a fan that the Browns got an A cause I think they had a great draft.

 

Also the team that had the worst draft (according to the article) was the Bears. He really shot down them down for backing out of a trade.

[Jackass]

i'd love someone to do an analysis of these yahoo's to see if any of them know what they're talking about by looking at these articles 5 years later. These guys are just parroting what they read by the rest of the media and know 1/100th of the amount that the people making the picks.

[BeeR]

Hindsight is 20/20. But if you follow drafts and have a good memory, you can look at any draft from X years back (within reason) and see who where the big steals or big goofs were, more or less.

 

PS: haven't read it all but they aren't saying all the same things "everyone else is saying" that I could tell.

Edited May 3, 2011 by BeeR

[Square]

Also the team that had the worst draft (according to the article) was the Bears. He really shot down them down for backing out of a trade.

I thought the reason the Bears had problems was some snafu with getting it approved by the league. They were attempting to trade a 4th rounder so they could move up a couple and get Carimi. So it was a procedural screw up, but I haven't heard it described as "backing out" of a trade. Turned out that all teams ended up getting what they were going to in the first place, but I don't think that Angelo intentionally "backed out" of a trade. Jerry A deserves crap for some of his picks, but I'd need to hear more specifics on what the technicality was that submarined the trade before I jump to conclusions.

[Bronco Billy]

Chicago Bears

 

Picks: OT Gabe Carimi(notes), DT Stephen Paea(notes), S Chris Conte(notes), QB Nathan Enderle(notes), LB J.T. Thomas(notes).

 

Grade: F

 

I'm no Bears' fan by any stretch of the imagination. When I see this kind of grading, I know that any time that I spend reading this guy's crap is time in my life that was wasted with no additon of any value whatsoever and is time that I'll never recover.

 

Pass

[Big John]

And they have the wrong photo for Fairley (not even knowing he is not a Wode Out? )

[detlef]

I think the only decent measure of how well a team drafted is how well they managed value. At least if you're grading them the next day. The assumption has to be that we really have no effing idea which of these guys are going to be great and which are going to be busts, so the evaluator needs to remove his own opinion of who is good and who is not and rely on an average of what the mass of talking heads are saying.

 

Then, decide if a team kept on reaching for guys they could have gotten later. That doesn't mean they're going to miss on those picks, but rather that they could have traded back and still gotten that player or someone "just about as good".

 

It would still be a largely useless metric because there's also something to be said for getting the guy you want. If you truly have faith in your scouts and "overpay" for a bunch of guys in terms of where you take them but all of them pan out, then the joke is on everyone else.

 

However, it would be better than the BS you see.

 

Take my Niners, how is it that they earned a B+? They got stuck outside the run of players widely considered elite at the top and got stuck taking the first among a sea of guys who were all rated about the same. That's bad value and you'd think they could have traded with someone who was hell-bent on getting Gabbard, moved back to the low teens and still grabbed the DE they took. That would have more than paid for the picks they lost jumping up and grabbing Kaepernick.

 

Besides, who knows if they really wanted Kaepernick instead of Dalton?

 

The DB they took is big and fast, but character issues were pushing him into the 4th round, but they took him in the 3rd. And the only guy they took where everyone made a big deal about it was when they nabbed the RB from OSU a round or so later than he was "supposed to go".

 

All in all, that doesn't spell B+ to me. Not saying it was a disaster by any stretch, but I don't really feel, at least today, like they got over on anyone.

Edited May 3, 2011 by detlef

[Jackass]

Chicago Bears

 

Picks: OT Gabe Carimi(notes), DT Stephen Paea(notes), S Chris Conte(notes), QB Nathan Enderle(notes), LB J.T. Thomas(notes).

 

Grade: F

 

I'm no Bears' fan by any stretch of the imagination. When I see this kind of grading, I know that any time that I spend reading this guy's crap is time in my life that was wasted with no additon of any value whatsoever and is time that I'll never recover.

 

Pass

agree

[detlef]

Further, there were 5 grades below a C (and that counts one C-). How can that be? I mean, of course everyone got better this weekend because everyone added more talent. The question is, how did you do relative to everyone else? If there was ever a situation where grades should represent a perfect bell-curve, it's when you are in a finite body of competitors all going after a finite body of resources and trying to compete against one another using said resources.

 

For every team that got an A, there absolutely has to someone who got an F. And there shouldn't be that many of either.

[BeeR]

Both of det's comments pretty much sum it up for me. I have no problem with giving a team an "F" - or any other grade - as long as it's backed up. What's dumb about that grade is it wasn't backed up, seemingly based mostly on the "Angelo sucks" tirade.

 

But there were some good comments/etc there, even tho I didn't agree with some of them. Worth a glance IMO. PS even this guy admitted that these day-after-draft type things are a WAG.

Edited May 3, 2011 by BeeR

[piratesownninjas]

i'd love someone to do an analysis of these yahoo's to see if any of them know what they're talking about by looking at these articles 5 years later. These guys are just parroting what they read by the rest of the media and know 1/100th of the amount that the people making the picks.

Dude, we do the same stuff on the message boards here. It's reading material to get us through the off season.

[piratesownninjas]

Chicago Bears

 

Picks: OT Gabe Carimi(notes), DT Stephen Paea(notes), S Chris Conte(notes), QB Nathan Enderle(notes), LB J.T. Thomas(notes).

 

Grade: F

 

I'm no Bears' fan by any stretch of the imagination. When I see this kind of grading, I know that any time that I spend reading this guy's crap is time in my life that was wasted with no additon of any value whatsoever and is time that I'll never recover.

 

Pass

Jason Coles explanation.

 

This is a grade on principle. If you agree to a trade, you should follow through on it. GM Jerry Angelo’s wimpy way of backing out of his deal with Baltimore is just unmanly. This is the same guy who once complained about San Francisco tampering with Lance Briggs(notes). No GM in the league should ever trust Angelo again and to do that to a person as classy as Ozzie Newsome is just ridiculous. The Bears should have sent the pick to the Ravens simply as an apology. Beyond that, Angelo guessed wrong about who Kansas City was going to take and ended up getting Carimi anyway. Here’s even more bad news: Carimi isn’t that good and doesn’t fit what the Bears want to do. Paea in the second round was a solid pick, even if he cost a lot to get, but Conte was a stretch in the third round.

[osu1322]

Further, there were 5 grades below a C (and that counts one C-). How can that be? I mean, of course everyone got better this weekend because everyone added more talent. The question is, how did you do relative to everyone else? If there was ever a situation where grades should represent a perfect bell-curve, it's when you are in a finite body of competitors all going after a finite body of resources and trying to compete against one another using said resources.

 

For every team that got an A, there absolutely has to someone who got an F. And there shouldn't be that many of either.

 

This is going back to the whole Curve bs from HS.... Look I understand grading on a curve when u taking a test on something like Pre Calc... But its on draft picks and is objective... good grief

 

Yeah I agree that the bears got knocked he didn't man up. I posted this on here to have something to talk about and at the very least it has created discussion

 

I also think that it would have been better to rank each team by how their draft went. (The best is #1, then #!2 etc) That way we have an idea where each did in comparision to each other.

[detlef]

This is going back to the whole Curve bs from HS.... Look I understand grading on a curve when u taking a test on something like Pre Calc... But its on draft picks and is objective... good grief

 

Yeah I agree that the bears got knocked he didn't man up. I posted this on here to have something to talk about and at the very least it has created discussion

 

I also think that it would have been better to rank each team by how their draft went. (The best is #1, then #!2 etc) That way we have an idea where each did in comparision to each other.

Actually, it makes way, way, way more sense to grade on a curve here than it does in pre-calc. Your pre-calc class could be filled with the 30 smartest or 30 dumbest kids in the country taking that class. So, if it's in the former and everyone aces the test, does the kid who "only" got a 93 deserve to fail? He could be the 30th smartest kid out of the 1000s of kids taking that course in the country. So, failing that kid in order to preserve the curve may not make sense.

 

This is not the case. We have the entirety of the NFL before us. It is a completely finite sample. There are winners and there are losers and all of those occur within that group of 32 teams. If you are the 32nd best team in the NFL, it's of no consolation that you're better than any other football team in the world. You're last place. So, if you think about it, there is actually no more appropriate situation for grading on a curve than in this case. I guess it doesn't need to be a perfect bell curve, but it sure needs to be close.

 

And sure, it's subjective, but that doesn't change the fact that, taken out of context, nobody made their team worse this weekend by drafting a bunch of kids out of college. However, some failed to improve their team as much as average and, therefor, deserved a grade of less than C. So it comes back to the curve. Everyone couldn't have improved themselves relative to their peers, it's impossible. Yet, according to the grade distribution, way more teams won than lost this weekend, and that can't happen.

Edited May 3, 2011 by detlef

[BeeR]

Getting sort of off topic, but I have always thought the "bell curve grading" was stupid with rare exception at most. Judge someone on the material and how they did, not being smarter or dumber than Johnny X next to him, and for reasons det said above.

[keggerz]

Further, there were 5 grades below a C (and that counts one C-). How can that be? I mean, of course everyone got better this weekend because everyone added more talent. The question is, how did you do relative to everyone else? If there was ever a situation where grades should represent a perfect bell-curve, it's when you are in a finite body of competitors all going after a finite body of resources and trying to compete against one another using said resources.

 

For every team that got an A, there absolutely has to someone who got an F. And there shouldn't be that many of either.

if every team had the same exact needs then you would be correct about a perfect bell curve but not every team has the same needs so I think you are off base in making that statement

[Ditkaless Wonders]

As for the Bears, I normally appreciate a draft where the first two choices add up to 617 lbs of football player. 660 lbs might be even better, but damn that's some beef.

 

Here's my problem, they are the Bears, and they goofed on another team's goodwill. They screwed up and did not get their pick in on time as they were honor bound to do. They say there has been no harm to the Ravens, after all everybody got the pick they wanted. They are wrong, there is absolutely harm.

 

Every deal agreed to is information about your thinking and tendancies. Here the thinking and tendancies of Ozzie Smith were revealed for nothing. He did not get the benefit of the bargain. It is as if every GM in the league got a look at one of his hole cards without having to even be in the pot. They now have better insight for the next hand.

 

There was harm here. If not, I am sure the Bears would not mind having all their trade discussions which do not come to fruition made public. Had the Bears any honor they would have made Ozzie and the Ravens whole. Until they do they go in the category of the dishonored along with the cheating Pats, Broncos, and 49ers, and the dirty Jets and their dirty sideline coaches.

 

If this author wants to make the point that the Bears are a franchise without honor by goofing with a ratings article, so be it. It might be better to make the dishonor point in a separate article, but I am fine with heaping on the scorn.

[bpwallace49]

As for the Bears, I normally appreciate a draft where the first two choices add up to 617 lbs of football player. 660 lbs might be even better, but damn that's some beef.

 

Here's my problem, they are the Bears, and they goofed on another team's goodwill. They screwed up and did not get their pick in on time as they were honor bound to do. They say there has been no harm to the Ravens, after all everybody got the pick they wanted. They are wrong, there is absolutely harm.

 

Every deal agreed to is information about your thinking and tendancies. Here the thinking and tendancies of Ozzie Smith were revealed for nothing. He did not get the benefit of the bargain. It is as if every GM in the league got a look at one of his hole cards without having to even be in the pot. They now have better insight for the next hand.

 

There was harm here. If not, I am sure the Bears would not mind having all their trade discussions which do not come to fruition made public. Had the Bears any honor they would have made Ozzie and the Ravens whole. Until they do they go in the category of the dishonored along with the cheating Pats, Broncos, and 49ers, and the dirty Jets and their dirty sideline coaches.

 

If this author wants to make the point that the Bears are a franchise without honor by goofing with a ratings article, so be it. It might be better to make the dishonor point in a separate article, but I am fine with heaping on the scorn.

 

Hmm . .. Ozzie Newsome did the exact same thing and said "its not a trade until its go to the commish and it is announced by the NFL" Only Ozzie was the one that didnt get everything in on time . . .

 

Just sayin' . . .

[Ditkaless Wonders]

Hmm . .. Ozzie Newsome did the exact same thing and said "its not a trade until its go to the commish and it is announced by the NFL" Only Ozzie was the one that didnt get everything in on time . . .

 

Just sayin' . . .

 

 

If so add him to the list of the dishonorable. If, However, you are arguing that two wrongs make a right you will not find me a receptive audience. Excuses or explanations are just hot air until a man makes good on his word. Children rationalize and justify, men own up.

[detlef]

if every team had the same exact needs then you would be correct about a perfect bell curve but not every team has the same needs so I think you are off base in making that statement

Doesn't matter. You've either improved your team relative to your competition, lost ground to your competition, or just stayed even. And, given the finite sample, it can't be weighted one way or another. The average grade has to be a "C", just like the average win-loss record has to be .500. Because, for every winner, there's a loser. Or, in this case, there's winners, losers, and ties, but they still have to add up to .500.

 

And, again, I'm talking about value in the draft. If all you need is a safety and a punter, and there's no safety worth taking in the first round, then you should have gotten the hell out of the first. If you take some 2nd-3rd round graded safety in the middle of the first because "that's all you needed". Well, two things, you're high because there's got to be some other position where you could use a potentially elite prospect, and two, that doesn't change the fact that you reached. At very least, you could have gotten a pick in a future draft when the top talent might line up with your obvious needs. And I would consider stockpiling future picks because you don't see value in this draft as "improving your team". I also would see taking advantage of the fact that you don't have glaring needs that the first round graded talent is suited for as an invitation to simply take the best player available, which often means a great value.

 

The problem with that is that we hate seeing that our team got a "C". "What's wrong with their draft?" Nothing, really, they just stayed even. They didn't win, they didn't lose, they just improved their team on par with the league as a whole.

Edited May 4, 2011 by detlef

[bpwallace49]

If so add him to the list of the dishonorable. If, However, you are arguing that two wrongs make a right you will not find me a receptive audience. Excuses or explanations are just hot air until a man makes good on his word. Children rationalize and justify, men own up.

 

No, I agree with youon the principle. I dont agree with painting poor Ozzie as a wronged party, when he did the exact same thing in the past and basically said "tough chit, it wasnt announced so it didnt happen". Instead Ozzie is crying about compensation.

 

It is more a statement on Ozzie's behavior.

[T-Scorp]

Just want to point out that Baltimore was involved in the Vikings missing their draft slot in 2003 the year they got K Williams. If I remember correctly it was a similar circumstance with MN believing they had the trade done and Balt not calling it in.

 

From a SI article...

 

Here's what happened Saturday, according to Minnesota head coach Mike Tice:

 

 

The Vikings, in need of a dominant inside pass rusher to play next to emerging star Chris Hovan, targeted Williams as their top choice two weeks ago, assuming that Kentucky defensive tackle Dewayne Robertson would be taken. (The New York Jets traded up to get him at No. 4.)

 

 

They realized that Williams would be available a few slots later, so they started looking for ways to move down and get a late-round pick or two in return.

 

 

Also discussing deals with Jacksonville and New England, Minnesota agreed on a trade with Baltimore to get the Ravens' No. 10 pick, as well as a fourth- and sixth-round selection in exchange for the No. 7 choice. The Vikings submitted the deal to the league, but Baltimore didn't submit its part in time.

 

 

Meanwhile, the two teams immediately behind Minnesota on the board -- Jacksonvile and Carolina -- rushed their cards to the podium in New York and made their picks before the Vikings.

 

The Ravens, while acknowledging the trade was agreed upon, contended it was not made official because they didn't speak with league official Joel Bussert.

 

"The deal was not consummated," general manager Ozzie Newsome said at Baltimore's headquarters. "A deal is not a deal until I talk to Joel Bussert, and I never talked to Joel Bussert."

 

 

 

 

So to the Ravens I would say Karma is a Biatch!!!!

[WaterMan]

Dude, we do the same stuff on the message boards here. It's reading material to get us through the off season.

 

+1. Everyone is just playing a guessing game.

 

Tom Brady who?

[polksalet]

The Bears at a minimum got two solid lineman. That's no worse than a c-.

[Brent]

Further, there were 5 grades below a C (and that counts one C-). How can that be? I mean, of course everyone got better this weekend because everyone added more talent. The question is, how did you do relative to everyone else? If there was ever a situation where grades should represent a perfect bell-curve, it's when you are in a finite body of competitors all going after a finite body of resources and trying to compete against one another using said resources.

 

For every team that got an A, there absolutely has to someone who got an F. And there shouldn't be that many of either.

 

 

You couldnt be more wrong here.

 

The draft is a 3 day final exam. If there are 32 students taking the exam, all 32 can pass.

 

The draft isnt a competition like on the field where the avg is .500, and for every team who is a game over .500, another team has to be a game under.

 

 

The draft is about acquiring talent, improving your roster, and improving your overall football team. Most teams are going to succeed at this, while some will get cute and fail. But all 32 teams can have a passing grade if they pass the test. This has nothing to do with how you did relative to anyone else, its how you improved your team. This is the reason teams are given a grade, like a test, and not points like a competition.

 

Besides, draft grades are preliminary opinions. New England gets an A+ in the draft they got Tom Brady, regardless of whoever else they drafted that year. but I guarantee you, no one gave New England that grade at this time after that draft. So other than for conversation purposes, who cares about these opinions. Dont get me wrong, I read them and enjoy the effort put into them, but they are meaningless.