The Happy-Making NFL Draft

Joe Posnanski had an interesting post about the reaction to the NFL draft. He comments on the GMs and draft runners "doing their annual 'I can’t believe he was still there' dance." Yeah, everybody's happy after the draft. Everybody's talking about the steals they got.

The thing is, if you think about it, it's pretty obvious why that is.

Nobody sees the players in the draft in exactly the same way. Go around the league and talk to the GMs of every team, and you'll get different evaluations of every single player. Now, there will be limits to this, of course. You'll be hard pressed to find an NFL talent evaluator who doesn't think Gerald McCoy is a terrific talent, for instance. However, you'll find lots of variation in how much that evaluator wants to get McCoy on his particular team, based on team need for defensive tackles, based on defensive scheme, based on their read of his character, and based on straight-up evaluation of football talent. Among other things. The end result is that nobody's evaluation on any one player is quite the same, and nobody's draft board is going to look quite like anybody else's. There will be a lot of variation.

So, here's a simplified experiment. Let's assume, just for the sake of discussion, that the value of every player in the draft can be quantified as a single whole number. To mimic the variation we just talked about, every player's value has to be seen by each team as filtered through the eyes of their scouts. No team's scouts will miss on a player's value by more than 20%. A player worth 50 might be seen as worth 60 by one team, and 40 by another, but no more or less than that. Teams will always take the player on their board with the highest numerical value, because in this simplified world, they don't have to worry about positional scarcity. Is this entirely realistic? No, but it's actually pretty similar to the way teams are forced to think when they set up their draft boards.

Let's say the top player in this year's draft was worth 100 points, the second best player was worth 99 points, and so on, down through the end of the first round where the 32nd player was worth 69 points. How might this theoretical draft play out?

Well, I used a random number generator to come up with a bunch of numbers between -20 and +20, which we'll use as our scouting filter to determine each team's evaluation of each player, with a negative number subtracting that percentage from each player's score, and a positive number adding that much. (So, a -10 for the player worth 80 would make his evaluation by that team a 72, a +10 would make it an 88.)

Our first team, we'll call them the Rams, rolled a -14 and -18 for the actual top two players in the draft, so their evaluations dipped dramatically. However, they rolled a +18 for player #7, making his evaluation in their eyes a 110.92.

#1 - Rams - Player7 - Actual worth, 94 - Perceived worth, 110.92 - Rank on team board - 1

The team picking second, the Lions, rolls a +14 on player2, giving him the highest value of anyone in the draft.

#2 - Lions - Player2 - Actual worth, 99 - Perceived worth, 112.86 - Rank on team board - 1

Picking third, the Bucs rolled a 19 on the top player, making him their no-brainer pick.

#3 - Bucs - Player1 - Actual worth, 100 - Perceived worth, 119.0 - Rank on team board - 1

Here's the top 16 picks done in this fashion, with team name, player, Actual worth, perceived worth, and rank on team board.

1. Rams - Player7 - 94 - 110.92 - 1
2. Lions - Player2 - 99 - 112.86 - 1
3. Bucs - Player1 - 100 - 119.0 - 1
4. Redskins - Player5 - 96 - 111.36 - 2
5. Chiefs - Player6 - 95 - 101.65 - 2
6. Seahawks - Player8 - 93 - 110.67 - 1
7. Browns - Player3 - 98 - 106.82 - 3
8. Raiders - Player4 - 97 - 116.4 - 1
9. Bills - Player12 - 89 - 103.24 - 3
10. Jaguars - Player10 - 91 - 102.83 - 7
11. 49ers - Player 9 - 92 - 104.88 - 7
12. Chargers - Player14 - 87 - 102.66 - 4
13. Eagles - Player18 - 83 - 98.77 - 6
14. Seahawks - Player16 - 85 - 101.15 - 5
15. Giants - Player11 - 90 - 108.0 - 1
16. Titans - Player19 - 82 - 90.2 - 10

Pretty interesting. It didn't go in order of actual value, of course. However, only two picks were made of players outside the top 16, and they weren't far outside. 20% variance didn't exactly create total chaos in how the draft played out. The Eagles and Rams reached, and the Browns, Raiders and Giants did very well for themselves. Out of 16 teams, 6 got the top player on their board, and most importantly, nobody got stuck with their worst case scenario, or anything very close to it. The Titans, who looking at the objective numbers, didn't do all that well, would still have cause to crow after this draft; they got their 10th rated player in the 16 slot, which doesn't seem bad. The Chargers, they got their #4 target at #12. Even though we, looking at the objective numbers, know they actually didn't do as well as they could have, from their perspective they'd have cause to celebrate.

So why are so many teams so happy after the draft? Maybe in part because they're putting on an act, sure. But almost certainly it's due in large part to the subjective nature of the draft, and the way very few teams ever get stuck with the player that they "should" get looking at their draft board ahead of time.

First round winners and losers.

Just to put down on the record what I think, so I can look back on it in ten years and laugh at how stupid I was:

First round Winners:
Seahawks - Russell Okung, LT, Oklahoma State, 6th. The Seahawks got another Walter Jones. Okung is going to have the best career of any of the tackles in this draft, and the Seahawks got him without having to do anything but wait.
Packers - Brian Bulaga, T, Iowa, 23rd. A tackle projected by many to go in the top 10, and he fell right into the Packers' laps in the bottom third of the round.
Cowboys - Dez Bryant, WR, Oklahoma State, 24th. Clearly the best receiver in this draft. I'm not saying he's a sure thing, but at #24, great value.
Cardinals - Dan Williams, DT, Tennessee, 26th. The kind of space-eater that teams long for in the middle.

First round Losers:
Redskins - Trent Williams, T, Oklahoma, 4th. Not that he's a bad player, but this is a pick based on upside and measurables rather than production. Williams wasn't a great college LT last year, and if he's not a LT, he's not worth picking at #4.
Bills - CJ Spiller, RB, Clemson, 9th. Reggie Bush. He'll be a useful player in the NFL, but he's not going to be a true feature back.
Jaguars - Tyson Alualu, DE, Cal, 10th. Who? What? Here? How? Why?
Giants - Jason Pierre-Paul, South Florida, 15th. A one year wonder whose year wasn't all that wonderful. Falling in love with potential is dangerous.

As for the storm around Tim Tebow going 25th, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think it's a good pick. In January, I thought Tebow was a 3rd rounder at best. However, his dedication in revamping his throwing motion impressed me, as did the result; a motion that will lead to better ball-security and gets the pass out of his hands much more quickly. Tebow will still have a lot of adjusting to do, but he came a long way in a hurry. For all the overblown talk about his character, his working as hard as he did in the weeks following the end of the college season says a lot about his character in a much more tangible form than the usual turgid panegyrics from the media.

Surprise, it's Bradford!

The Rams have their quarterback, and I wish I could feel excited about it. However, even though I'm not a Jimmy Clausen fan, I find myself thinking that the Rams could have gotten him with the 33rd pick, if they'd taken somebody else number one. Is Clausen a better bet than Bradford to succeed in the NFL? I don't think so, but I don't think the difference is so great that it makes any sense to pay Bradford so much more than what Clausen will get early in the second round.

On the bright side, the Rams have a chance to grab a player to complement Bradford with that 33rd pick, since the draft is very deep. A lot of smart people seemed to think Golden Tate was the second best receiver in the draft after Dez Bryant, and he's available, but he's hardly the prototypical West Coast receiver. Arrelious Benn is closer to the ideal for the Rams offense, with more size, better hands, and more consistent routes. Not that Benn's hands haven't been criticized, but he's still well ahead of Tate in that department.

Or the Rams could go for the offensive line... Bruce Campbell is on the board, and you have to love his athleticism, even as I cringe about his injury issues. He should be worth the risk as a second rounder, though. Charles Brown is on the board, but he might not be the best fit for the Rams' system, though I like his chances of gaining strength through his mid-twenties, which would shore up his biggest weakness. Brown will be able to pass block effectively in the NFL, which means his future is clearly at left tackle, sink or swim.

So what will the Rams do? I'd like to see Brown, Campbell or Benn, but I just don't have a lot of faith that they'll do anything sensible.

Sam Bradford scares me.

Billy Devaney says that the release of Marc Bulger doesn't mean the Rams are locked into selecting Sam Bradford with the top pick in the draft.

Billy Devaney apparently thinks that we're all idiots.

Lying is all part of the business in the NFL, as Ross Tucker pointed out a few days ago. You don't listen to what teams say, you pay attention to what they do. It's been obvious from what Devaney's been saying for a couple of months at least that Bradford was going to be the guy if his shoulder checked out. It apparently has, and what the Rams have done with the release of Bulger, is pretty obviously clearing the decks for Bradford's arrival, no matter what Devaney says with a microphone in front of him.

So why am I particularly scared? Well, let me say, I'm certainly not convinced that Bradford is going to be a bust. I see nothing in his record or his makeup that suggests that he's going to crash and burn. Ordinarily, any time I see "accuracy" at the top of a QB's list of positives in a draft report, I'm a happy man. Mechanics can and have been improved at the professional level. Systems can be learned, and everything that goes on between a QB's ears is going to have to improve anyway. But I've yet to see a QB who was a scattershot in college become a sharpshooter in the NFL. It just doesn't happen. So on that score, Bradford checks out.

The issue that nags at me is this, as expressed in another scouting report, is that "the Oklahoma system involves the team looking to the sideline to get the play. The reading of the D is done by the coaching staff in the booth, relayed to the sideline and given to the QB." Ugh.

Any QB who has worked in a spread system in college is going to have a sharp learning curve in the NFL, sharper than someone who played in a pro-style system. This is not insurmountable, of course, but anything that makes the learning process more difficult isn't something you can shake off, and the record of spread QBs entering the NFL suggests that it's a meaningful issue. In Bradford's case, while the Oklahoma system isn't exclusively a spread, he's coming from a college system that didn't ask him to make pre-snap reads on his own. He's been running an offense with training wheels, with a coach holding his hand along the way.

Again, this isn't insurmountable. There's nothing that says that Bradford can't adjust while he's earning a paycheck. However, it makes the learning curve that much steeper. Bradford will be entering a situation with no proven playmakers at receiver or tight end, with an offensive line that is at best suspect with regard to pass protection and has a cornerstone young tackle with concussion issues. And he'll do it with an epic learning curve for the mental side of the game.

By all accounts, Bradford is smart. He'd better be brilliant.