NFL Draft Grades

[detlef]

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.

 

This is going to be fun.

 

If everyone can, in fact get a a good grade and you're not looking at how they did relative to the field, then, by definition, nobody should get anything less than a "C" because nobody made their team worse last weekend. Everyone now has somewhere between 5 and 12 guys who will either be an asset to their team or not make the squad. Every team is, at worse, no worse off than they were going into the draft. Well, check that, if they completely whiffed on each and every pick, they're going to owe some money that they now can't spend on other players. Mind you, the new cap should make that less of a burden and, at this point, it's really anyone's guess if they even whiffed. So, given the fact that we can only guess at who is going to be good and have to rely on prevailing wisdom, you could only really make this argument if a team took someone in the 1st that absolutely nobody of consequence regarded as someone worth taking that high. Which, btw, would exclude basically every colossal bust in recent history. Maybe plenty didn't agree with Jamarcus Russel at #1, but it's not like anyone would have let him fall out of top half of the 1st round entirely. Same with Leaf. Everyone, and I mean everyone, saw it as Manning #1, Leaf #2. So, in terms of day-after evaluations, someone would literally have to draft their groundskeeper in the 1st to qualify for this version of "fail".

 

Or, hell, maybe an "F" means you didn't get worse but failed to get better. It doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, "getting better" doesn't mean dick if everyone got "more better" than you. So no, the draft is not a game where everyone can win, or even most. Your team is either more competitive relative the field, or you neither gained or lost ground to the average, or you lost ground. The aggregate must be .500. Mind you, that doesn't mean the bell can be skewed a bit one way or the other. But if that's the case, if more teams "won" than lost. The teams that "lost" had to have colossal screw ups. It would be the same as more than half the team being above .500, but only barely so and that being off-set by several teams with really crappy records. That's fine. If 10 teams drafted absolutely miserably, there's enough room at the top for 20 teams to have above average drafts.

 

But most draft grades don't represent this balance like they should. You've got 20 some-odd teams with As and Bs, most of the rest with Cs, and just a sprinkling of teams with Fs. Unless those teams literally gave good players away and drafted nobody, there's no way they lost enough ground to the field to make up for the fact that, seemingly, everyone got better with respect to that same field.

 

The NFL is a race to to the top. And accumulating talent is absolutely a part of that race. It's why the Niners dominated the 80s and the Cowboys dominated the 90s, because they each did a better job of winning the weekend-long competition that was the draft. It's not like the rest of the teams did such a poor job of drafting that their team, with respect to itself, got worse. They just did a poor enough job that they got worse with respect to the Niners or the Cowboys. So, they failed and the Niners and Cowboys won.

 

As far as not knowing who gets an A until the players pan out. I already addressed that. That's why the grades should be all about how you managed value. It's is the only way you can evaluate a draft the day after. History shows that far too many of these picks don't work out for any single person to pretend to know who will and won't be the great picks of the draft. People keep bringing up Tom Brady. Hell, Bellcheck himself is the first to admit, if he was so effing smart, why did he wait until the 6th? If he knew that Brady was going to be so great, why take the chance and let him fall that far? Grab him in the 3rd or 4th before there's any chance of missing out. But he didn't. Maybe he saw something others didn't. Maybe he was just saying "what the hell?", which is probably what a lot of draft gurus would admit starts going down at that point in the draft. Do you think they were "hi-fiving" one another after that pick because they had just stolen a HOF QB in the 6th? I doubt it. So, while that may be the single greatest steal in draft history, it was likely just them saying,

 

"Any thoughts?"

"How 'bout the QB from Michigan? I think he may have promise."

"Anyone else?"

"Nope, sounds good to me."

 

And, there you have it, genius in the making.

Edited May 6, 2011 by detlef

[Brent]

 

This is going to be fun.

 

If everyone can, in fact get a a good grade and you're not looking at how they did relative to the field, then, by definition, nobody should get anything less than a "C" because nobody made their team worse last weekend. Everyone now has somewhere between 5 and 12 guys who will either be an asset to their team or not make the squad. Every team is, at worse, no worse off than they were going into the draft. Well, check that, if they completely whiffed on each and every pick, they're going to owe some money that they now can't spend on other players. Mind you, the new cap should make that less of a burden and, at this point, it's really anyone's guess if they even whiffed. So, given the fact that we can only guess at who is going to be good and have to rely on prevailing wisdom, you could only really make this argument if a team took someone in the 1st that absolutely nobody of consequence regarded as someone worth taking that high. Which, btw, would exclude basically every colossal bust in recent history. Maybe plenty didn't agree with Jamarcus Russel at #1, but it's not like anyone would have let him fall out of top half of the 1st round entirely. Same with Leaf. Everyone, and I mean everyone, saw it as Manning #1, Leaf #2. So, in terms of day-after evaluations, someone would literally have to draft their groundskeeper in the 1st to qualify for this version of "fail".

 

Or, hell, maybe an "F" means you didn't get worse but failed to get better. It doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day, "getting better" doesn't mean dick if everyone got "more better" than you. So no, the draft is not a game where everyone can win, or even most. Your team is either more competitive relative the field, or you neither gained or lost ground to the average, or you lost ground. The aggregate must be .500. Mind you, that doesn't mean the bell can be skewed a bit one way or the other. But if that's the case, if more teams "won" than lost. The teams that "lost" had to have colossal screw ups. It would be the same as more than half the team being above .500, but only barely so and that being off-set by several teams with really crappy records. That's fine. If 10 teams drafted absolutely miserably, there's enough room at the top for 20 teams to have above average drafts.

 

But most draft grades don't represent this balance like they should. You've got 20 some-odd teams with As and Bs, most of the rest with Cs, and just a sprinkling of teams with Fs. Unless those teams literally gave good players away and drafted nobody, there's no way they lost enough ground to the field to make up for the fact that, seemingly, everyone got better with respect to that same field.

 

The NFL is a race to to the top. And accumulating talent is absolutely a part of that race. It's why the Niners dominated the 80s and the Cowboys dominated the 90s, because they each did a better job of winning the weekend-long competition that was the draft. It's not like the rest of the teams did such a poor job of drafting that their team, with respect to itself, got worse. They just did a poor enough job that they got worse with respect to the Niners or the Cowboys. So, they failed and the Niners and Cowboys won.

 

As far as not knowing who gets an A until the players pan out. I already addressed that. That's why the grades should be all about how you managed value. It's is the only way you can evaluate a draft the day after. History shows that far too many of these picks don't work out for any single person to pretend to know who will and won't be the great picks of the draft. People keep bringing up Tom Brady. Hell, Bellcheck himself is the first to admit, if he was so effing smart, why did he wait until the 6th? If he knew that Brady was going to be so great, why take the chance and let him fall that far? Grab him in the 3rd or 4th before there's any chance of missing out. But he didn't. Maybe he saw something others didn't. Maybe he was just saying "what the hell?", which is probably what a lot of draft gurus would admit starts going down at that point in the draft. Do you think they were "hi-fiving" one another after that pick because they had just stolen a HOF QB in the 6th? I doubt it. So, while that may be the single greatest steal in draft history, it was likely just them saying,

 

"Any thoughts?"

"How 'bout the QB from Michigan? I think he may have promise."

"Anyone else?"

"Nope, sounds good to me."

 

And, there you have it, genius in the making.

.

 

 

No point in even reading this novel, you simply dont get it. There is a reason most teams get a passing grade, because evaluators think they did well filling needs, and improving their team, and that is the point of the draft. End of Story. Its not an exact science like you want to push, where for every winner there must be a loser. I said all I needed to say on the subject, and unlike you, wont repeat it over and over for the sake of repeating it over and over.

 

 

ETA:

 

 

If you want to know how a team gets a failing grade, they reach at the bottom of round 2, and take QB Quincy Carter to be the Franchise QB, who many didnt even have a 4th round grade on as a QB, instead the player had a higher grade as a defensive safety.

Edited May 6, 2011 by Brent