Zen and the Art of Draft Evaluation

Great post and a load of information I had never heard of. Judging by what I have seen of McDaniels so far in both the draft and in the mini-camps, I am completely impressed with his dedication to the game and to the details of the game and buidlng a team.

I think we are in very good hands and this article lays a good foundation for that feeling. Thanks.

Guys like you will forget more football than I will ever know. It’s very humbling to realize. Being what I considered an avid Bronco football fan, I watched tape, read scouting reports from some of the same generic services you mentioned, checked out the stats & the bio’s on the players, & actually thought I knew something. The more you learn the more you realize what you don’t know. On another note, Since McD had so little time to prepare for the draft, do you feel this class will be representive relative to future drafts?

It’s post like these that make me a more knowledgeable football fan, and it’s the type of thing you rarely see from a major media outlet. Thanks bear.

What more can I say, 90% of that is way over my head, but I can sure see why the Patriots have had success in the draft and FA with a detailed plan like that!!

As already said above, it’s amazing what you can learn about football from this site.

I had no idea about the Scouting organizations and that Scouts, Inc. and Insiders were a part of those.

Since coming to this site a few months ago and doing a lot of reading and learning, I feel like I know a TON more about football. I also have a much better grasp on how little I actually know.

That was a good read.

I’m not sold on the Pats draft picks though. If I look at the past three or four drafts by the Patriots, I’m less than impressed. New England is an aging squad in serious need of a transfusion of young talent or they’ll find themselves rebuilding in a few years. Just look at the strengths of their team (front seven and QB/WR). Other than Mayo (which they drafted with a Top 10 overall pick) there are no young stars in this group playing on rookie contracts. IMO, the Pats hit several draft home runs in the beginning of this decade, but their past few drafts (probably because they are always picking at the end of each round) have been uninspiring to say the least.

From 2006 thru 2008, a strong case can be made that the Broncos were the best drafting team in the NFL. Cutler, Marshall, Clady, Royal, Harris, Elvis, Hillis, Scheff, Kuper, Thomas have all significantly out produced the point at which they were picked.

Denver’s drafts from 2000-2005? Uhhh, not so much. As a University of Miami alum, I remember being near tears when Shanny picked Ashley Lelie over Ed Reed.

IMO, there are superior methods to scouting and approaching the draft (hopefully Josh uses these), but in the end, each pick carries significant risk. So very few college guys are sure things (Payton Manning) and Denver is never picking in the Top 5 in order to land one. Judging off their last decade of draft picks, I don’t think the Pats are much better than anyone else at building through the NFL draft. But I do think they are better coached (which should bode well for Josh if he was paying attention).

“A quarterback for the new England Patriots must make the right decisions and make them fast. Just because a person is smart does not mean that they can make the right decisions under pressure.” While that’s certainly true, a quarterback in their system also has to pass a 6 page written examination in the week before a game that will show that they have grasped the key specifics that relate the the opponent of the week. Both intelligence and decision-making are required.

I have heard from a few places, about the incredible hours that both QBs are putting in both in the classroom & directly with McCoy & McDaniels.

Let’s hope that classroom learning will translate ot on the field leadership.

WOW AGAIN – Great Post & rec

Thanks, very informative!

I wonder if this:

“(A QB must) Be the mentally toughest and hardest working player on the team.”

Is why Mr. Cutler is no longer a Denver Bronco…

Thanks for this. I was hoping never to have to hear anyone from WEEI again once I escaped from New England, but now it looks like I have to read Holley’s book. Sounds like the kind of thing one could read more as business journalism (always fascinating to me) rather than just a sports book.

Thank you for the research you did in this area. I had always believed the drafting process was probably more complicated than I thought and this helped me solidify that thinking. The NE way seems to work pretty well the majority of the time so that’s a pretty good foundation to work from….

ChiBronx: If you find fault with the Broncos 2006 and 2008 drafts, I’m speechless. 2007 was just okay and I’ll tell you why.

If the 2006 draft were recast with hindsight:

Cutler and Marshall are both Top 5 overall picks, Elvis goes in round 1 and probably Sheff as well. Kuper has vastly outplayed his 6th round pick and would get taken much earlier. Even the departed Hixon has done well for the Giants. That was an epic draft for Denver.

If the 2007 draft were re-held, Ryan Harris goes in the 1st round and Thomas goes well before his 4th round slot. Moss and Crowder are total busts, but we did get a 1st round talent out of this draft.

If the 2008 draft were reheld. Clady goes Top 5 overall and Royal goes in the Top 10. Hillis likely goes in round 1, Barrett goes much earlier, Woodyard gets drafted, Larsen also looks like a good pick. I don’t know about Jack Williams, Torain, Powell or the Kory L, but we are talking about 4th and 5th round picks which have a 70%+ failure rate.

Did we draft enough defensive talent? No, but those three drafts have given Denver (by far until the Cutler trade) the most talented young offense in the NFL. If McDaniels hit a home run with his 2009 draft, Denver will have enough talented ponies to be a Super Bowl contender in 2010 and beyond.

Thanks for the due dily Todd Jewell. I never understand the praise the Pats get for their draft record. Their last several drafts have been ho-hum at best.

You’re a machine!

I learned something, which is what definitely makes it great! It’s not every day you learn something from a blog, but MHR feeds my brain daily.

I knew about BLESTO and National, but the whole section on the Patriots was really, really interesting. Is Patriot Reign worth reading? If so, I might check it out.

No wonder Josh was getting migraines, dealing with all of this, FA an, existing player evaluations and the JC trade AND being a mile high would have given me a head ache as well!

Thanks for the Insight Bear!

why i came here. for info like this. very interesting post, and likely found nowhere else. i came away from this with a few questions, if i may. what happens if the qb “fails” the weekly exam, several times, or is this more just for studying purposes? can/has anyone been benched for this, really? and can you clarify what is meant by native intelligence, as opposed to standard?

on a side note, if anyone has missed the espn article on ernie adams, you should give it a read. don’t know how to post a link, yet, but if you use yahoo and type his name, it is currently link #2. i encourage everyone to read it, it is lengthy and very interesting. new england certainly does things differently, and apparently this guy is a big reason why. or so they think, this man is hard to nail down.

Something should be made absolutely clear, and McGeorge touches on it: NO system can accurately predict how players will do in the NFL. But then, that isn’t the point…

What stands out to me in this system is how it organizes data. From my own experience, any serious attempt at all to analyze college players for “fit” with an NFL team is a foray quickly doomed to informational overload. My first few years of doing it resulted in hundreds of notes spread out across countless notebooks, with no hope of finding a specific piece of info, or of comparing one player to another. In its latest incarnation it consisted of homogenous dedicated “stat” profiles of over a thousand names, and individual in depth player profiles of 140 players (my goal was 100 this year). And that 1000 names in the original list? I would estimate it has been culled down from around 3000 potential names, and those are just the ones I have access too! There are many prospects who are transfers, JUCO, military or any other number of mitigating factors that prevents them from being included in the standard lists. About two years ago I started entering prospects into th database straight out of highschool, which has had mixed results. Half of them are still in the database, and many more names have been added who weren’t popular high school recruits.

And that is just an initial list of payers to track.

Each player will have upwards of ten games per year, and 3-4 total years worth of games, with 10-20 plays per game that are “required” analysis, and many more that would be quite helpful to analyze.

And that is just the games.

These players also have articles and interviews written on them, chances to look into their personal character. They have roles at their schools and places in their families and communities which all have a bearing on what kind of people they are. They have controversies, injuries, grades and heroes stories, all of are essential to who they are.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Factor in performance combines and all star games and you are already well past informational overload. It is no wonder some front offices just go on “hunches”, or fail to consistently target good talents. When you are drowning in a sea of information, you will latch on to any flotsam that has a promise of keeping you afloat, thus the starry eyed admiration of certain prospects, almost to the exclusion of new information, which has all the attraction of yet another tidal wave to swamp someone. I think Al Davis is an eminent example of this type of foundering.

Bottom line is that we have potentially acquired a solid system (and at the very least the head cheese understands that such a system is probably necessary) for organizing all that data into something that can help instead of hinder.

Because the draft is an exercise in making choices, organizing data like this is meant to reduce the number of overall choices at any given moment. The “short list” that McDaniels spoke of is an extreme indicator of this principle in action: they weren’t choosing from a list of 6000, 3000, 1000 or even 242 potential draftees. This raises the chances that they will make the best choice for the goals they have set for themselves at each pick. What it doesn’t do is provide any guarantees that those goals have value.

That is another discussion entirely.

You’ve put what I was trying to say just above into far better terms than I could right now. I appreciate that, and yes – I was hoping that this would help folks to understand how incredibly complex the task, how thorough the process and how difficult the decisions. With all that in place, we will got to know exactly how we did in about 3 years ;-)

Mate that was one of the most informative posts I’ve read for ages. Kudo’s!!

This is AMAZING stuff. Thanks a lot for the opportunity to learn something of value.

Have you started any thoughts of,“Why He’ll Make The team” on any of our CFAs?

But I am now certain that becoming a draft expert is not a career choice I would pick, lol.

You always knew there’s more going on behind the scenes, thanks for the insight. But with all the “measurables” comes the one thing that just doesn’t show up untill game day and thats HEART. Some highly drafted players never seem to find it while lower picks just shine with it every game. TD comes to mind, his ability to reach for added yardage after the first hit was great. I do like our draft this year and how JMAC has kept/grabbed all of the players he belives will be the nucleus for better teams to come. I can’t wait for pre-season to see all the changes!

Great post and comments by all as well!

Great article. My only quibble is, "when the Broncos do decide on a player, I know that it is at the end of a yearlong process". For this year’s draft, the front office that made the draft decisions was not in place for a year. Or half a year. Hopefully, this will be a great draft regardless.

You’re right – but actually, I should have said ‘years long process’. Whether a certain management team was in place or not, the process of evaluation, collection of information and testing of the players was going on long before Shanahan and Co. were handed their collective hats. No matter who did the early scouting, BLESTO, National or an ‘in-house’ group, the process went on for a long time.

I can easily see the point that the system of putting scouts into the field as ‘entry level’ has serious weaknesses. Who would argue? But it’s also worth consideration that some of them make over $100,000.00 per year and have done it for decades, so it’s really not all cut and dried one way or the other. A good read about this is the book, The Draft, by Pete Williams. It’s a pretty dry read at times, but it’s well worth the effort in terms of understanding the process.

I asked Charles Dimry, former cornerback for the Broncos about the Combine. His insight was well worthwhile, I thought. H told me that you have to look at the draft as a long job interview. It’s where you establish a baseline of information that scouting cannot provide on the basic issues and skills that are needed for football (I tend to agree that the 40 for O linemen is pretty bizarre, and I’m not defending the institution). Measuring the hands, arms, learning how they do in a stressful situation, how they handle themselves in interviews, etc, is as important or more important than anything else. I also think that the ‘group-think’ can be of issue, but it’s not all cut and dried. Different teams are looking for different attributes – for example, Shanahan liked speed in defenders and was willing to ssacrifice size and power accordingly. I don’t agree, but it’s not important. Whatever you look for in a player, you can find it at the annual Meat Market.