2010 NFL Draft Players to Watch

I voted STs by the way…:) Just trying to have all the bases covered!

I view draft preparation in a particular way. Most MHR followers know that I have been pretty into covering the draft, and that has been the case since about 2003-2004 or so. My methods have changed appreciably form one year to the next, but certain core ideas have not. I wrote reports professionally for a year, and the access I found during that time significantly upgraded what I was able to do, but still, the core ideas remained the same.

Step One: Know the Seniors.
Every draft class has a fundamental “feel” to it, and this is established by the Seniors. i maintain a database, upgrading college players every year as they matriculate, and this alone, keeping track of height, weight, stats, school, is amazingly useful, because when their senior year rolls around, I feel like I have a general familiarity with that draft class. Through this process names are highlighted, mainly as sophmores and juniors, with some freshmen thrown in, and this is where the “notes” begin. I don’t watch college football, except to follow Boise in the WAC, so what I am looking for here are “cues” that warrant further investigation. Your point on time management is critical here, since a person could waste a phenomenal amount of time getting into this stuff, with mild at best prospects for production (re:dollars). this isn’t a thought process in the early stages, it is simply streamlined database management. A good database speeds everything up. Then as the senior season plays out I track names off the wires, big games, interviews, that sort of thing. This is like absorbing horsetracks in the morning, lots of speedreading throughout the year. Still nothing intensive. Mostly I busy myself with watching and analyzing the Broncos. I also try to see a couple fo games a week, on torrents. With a good database, you can design a schedule picker that selects games from the schedule that give you a lot of bang for your buck, allowiing you to watch multiple prospects. By the time the season is over, the names, positions and general impressions of all the seniors are familiar, and you have even had a chance to watch many of them for a firsthanded opinion. If you ever get to the stage of trying to present data based off of what you are watching, my advice is to avoid reading analysis on the players. Just read reports on their games, articles, interviews, that sort of thing, since any lack of confidence in your abilitites to accurately scout will show up as being influenced easily by “pro” reports. to this day I try not to even look at a mock draft until around the Senior Bowl.

Step Two: Add the Juniors.
Some juniors just stand out, and you will most likely have an easy time keeping track of them in the news. Tebow is a guy who I have been keeping a full report on since he was a sophmore. Regardless, you know for sure who needs to be covered around the middle of January when the players have to declare. All of these names need to be moved to your front page (or equivalent) in your system. I spend January looking at Juniors almost exclusively, plus any top performers at the all-star games, or surprising names, that sort of thing. This isn’t as tough as it may sound, as a good target is right around 30 or so Juniors. We had 50+ this year declare, but a lot of them can be ignored, except to scan their school stats, that sort of thing. Their reasoning for declaring is because of the CBA mostly, so the bottom half of that class isn’t particularly relevant. When you get the Junior class layered in, you now have a very thorough grasp of this years draft “flavor” for lack of a better word. You can feel how strong it is, what positions it is weaker at. I get sidetracked all the time by late-night analysis of things like how many late round DBs are available, which are just ways of further familiarizing yourself with the ebb and flow of likely draft day scenarios.

Step Three: Build a Big Board
I give myself a deadline for this, where I start on the day after the Senior Bowl (the official first day of Draftivus:) ) and this year my deadline is March 12th. Whether a player fits or not, and where they rank overall are things you can determine in advance of Free Agency, but you probably need about a week to adjust “need” considerations after free agency starts.

Step Four: Familiarize yourself with the draft process.
Lots of ways to do this, but my preferred way is to test the big board out in mock drafts. I can only say wonderful things about Draftek and last year I had a lot of fun running simulations on it. I must have ran about thirty, with different criteria, and I published two of them and my thought process in each one here on MHR. The feedback from that was a blast, and worth the time that was needed to get there. I couldn’t have been more wrong about team needs, but that was an amorphous concept last year with the new coaching staff. I didn’t forsee at all the heavy targetting of Oline and Dbackfield, but I think MHR as a whole will be much clearer on these issues, which will help all of our analysis.

Step Five: Have fun.
There is no limit to the creative ways you can use the data you collect. And it doesn’t end on draft day. Knowledge is the gift that keeps on giving!

Good luck Sharpe, and keep us up to date. The feedback from the community is probably the greatest reward for the work, so don’t hold nuthin’ back! The steps I outlined above aren’t intended to get you to do something similar, it is just to point out that no matter what I have tried in the past, from guessing who we are taking to profiling every player, to writing WAC reports for a few bucks a pop, some things have always stayed the same: know the seniors, know the juniors, make a shortboard or bigboard(impossible without knowing who is who), and know the context of the draft. And of course, have fun. Looking forward to seeing what names you manage to distill in the process.

And if you could, get those punter and kicker reports up asap? :) I admit to having never watched them or paid any attention to them. I wouldn’t even know what to look for…