Position to Succeed

 

We are fourteen games through the NFL season and fourteen games into the careers of the players from the most recent draft class. Rookie of the Year awards are still hotly in contention, but by this point we have a good idea of who has been successful and who has struggled. It's easy to point and say that CJ Mosley and Odell Beckham have been good while Dee Ford and Marcus Smith haven't lived up to expectations. A more interesting subject is why. Why have some highly touted players gotten off to great starts while others have been disappointments through their first season?

In a lot of cases it does just come down to talent. Good players are going to play well, and busts are going to be busts. But when we’re discussing the immediate success and the growth of a player, we often overlook the importance of coaching. Too often we get wrapped up in ideas like “I can’t believe the Jets chose Calvin Pryor over Ha Ha Clinton-Dix” or “Why did the Browns choose Justin Gilbert when Kyle Fuller was available?” We just assume that good players would be successful no matter where they end up and that bad players would fail one way or another.

It is almost impossible to separate good drafting from good development, but just by looking at a rookie season we can get a good idea of which players were used well and which were used poorly by their coaching staffs. This is still a tricky task. It’s easy to look at a talented player like Eric Ebron and say that he struggled because he wasn’t put in a position to succeed. It’s less easy to say that he’s struggled because there is something inherently flawed in his game. Some of these failed players may be true busts, others may just be waiting for the right coaches to arrive. Only time will tell, but that’s boring. So instead, here are some of the players who I believe have failed or flown on the strength of their coaches and their schemes.

No team is better embodies the gulf between drafting and development than the St Louis Rams. Thanks to the RGIII trade they have been inundated with as much fresh talent as any team in the league over the past three years. Yet they are still mired in mediocrity, with little reason to be hopeful for the future. A couple weeks back they received a great deal of praise for walking out the six players received from the picks in the trade as captains for the game against the Redskins. It was clever, and it was timely, but take a look at the players they sent out. Stedman Bailey, Janoris Jenkins, Michael Brockers, Greg Robinson, Alec Ogletree, and Zac Stacy. All these players are young with room to grow, but none of them have lived up to their draft billing. Right now it looks like the Rams won this trade, but it has nothing to do with the players they received themselves.

Perhaps the worst case of developmental woes in recent memory is that of Tavon Austin. The most dynamic playmaker available in the 2013 draft, he has somehow failed to have any impact outside of special teams in the NFL. Brian Schottenheimer seems to have no idea how to use a talented player who dominated at West Virginia out of the backfield, a deep threat, and as a runner in the open field. It’s unfair to say that going to St Louis is a death sentence for the career of a young player, but prior to this year it wasn’t entirely inaccurate.

The Rams had two first round picks in this past year’s draft. They used those picks to select offensive lineman Greg Robinson and defensive tackle Aaron Donald. Neither played a major role at the beginning of the season, but both have emerged as starters as the year has gone along. Donald has been by far the more impressive of the two. In fact, he’s probably been the most impressive rookie in the league this year, offensive or defensive. He is already one of the five best defensive tackles in the league, and the fact that it took until the middle of the season for him to get the majority of the snaps is laughable.

The Rams coaches deserve criticism for not getting him on the field sooner, but they deserve some grudging recognition for not being stupid in how they use him. Donald fell as far as he did because of his less than ideal size. Had he been a couple inches taller and twenty pounds heavier, he would have been the first player off the board without much discussion. But because of his size there were concerns that he would be limited in terms of the schemes he could play in the league. Fortunately for St Louis, he fits their attacking, penetrating style perfectly. It’s impossible to say how good he would have been if asked to play in a different scheme, but I think there is a good chance that he wouldn’t be the same dominant force he has been so far.

Robinson is a slightly different story. He was one of the most raw prospects coming out of college, and it took until Week Six for him to earn a starting role at guard. But when Jake Long went down for the season he was forced to slide out to left tackle, a position he definitely wasn’t ready to play. With an unprepared player and a coaching staff renowned for their stubborn headed stupidity, disaster seemed imminent.

But to great surprise, Robinson has held his own so far. The knock on him coming into the draft was that he struggled with edge pressure when put on an island, and the Rams have compensated by rarely leaving him on an island. He almost always has a tight end or a running back to help him protect the quarterback’s blind side. The Rams are allowing him to adjust to the NFL without exposing his greatest weakness, and he has found startling success because of it.

Not every story is as uplifting as the one in St Louis. To find a more depressing case, we need only look where most people go for depressing things: the New York Jets. With their first round pick they selected safety Calvin Pryor (yet again choosing to forgo improving their offense, because Rex Ryan is barely aware that his team has an offense) out of Louisville in order to shore up the back end of their defense. This seemed like a smart move. After the loss of Antonio Cromartie to free agency and the rookie struggles of Dee Milliner, the back end of their defense was a pressing hole.

Unfortunately, Pryor is not the sort of player to fill such a hole. The talent is absolutely there, and I think in the long run he will turn into a great player. But he is not the sort of safety you want to build a secondary around. He is aggressive and instinctive, and he takes a lot of gambles going for big plays. With solid players around him these gambles could pay off, but with the secondary in New York it could only lead to problems. Nonetheless, the Jets gave him a try defending the back end of their defense. And, as expected, he regularly found his way out of position and let receivers run free behind him. These mistakes led to trouble getting onto the field, and by this point of the season he is only a part time player in their defense.

The Jets were placed in a bad position due to injuries and other issues in their secondary, and there is no easy answer for what they should have done with Pryor. But they definitely shouldn’t have given him as much responsibility in deep coverage, where every mistake is amplified by the flaws around him. Rex Ryan is gone after this season, and whoever replaces him will have a lot of work to do rebuilding the Jets secondary.

Pryor is not the only safety who struggled through his rookie season. It was considered a slightly strange move when the San Francisco 49ers used their first round selection on safety Jimmie Ward, a player who fit no recognizable need on their team. Last year’s first round pick Eric Reid was coming off a phenomenal rookie season, and the 49ers paid sizeable money to bring Antoine Bethea in to replace the departed Donte Whitner. Both their safety spots were locked up for the next few seasons, and it didn’t make sense why they would take a player like Ward.

The only explanation was that they hoped to use Ward much in the way their division rivals in Arizona had used Tyrann Mathieu the year before. Ward had some experience playing cornerback at Northern Illinois, and it was expected he would offer some depth as a slot cover man in the nickel package. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that his skills weren’t what San Francisco was looking for. But rather than resigning themselves to failure, the 49ers forced him into a major role on their defense. Their secondary suffered through the early parts of the season thanks to Ward’s struggles, and it wasn’t until a foot injury ended his season that their defense stepped up its game.

To see how to properly handle a unique rookie talent we need only to jump across the NFC West. I mentioned above Arizona’s success in using Mathieu last year, and at the end of the year their secondary was the strength of their team, a strength that only grew with the addition of Antonio Cromartie. Their decision to reach for safety Deone Bucannon was one of the shocks of the first round, and most people spent the offseason wondering how they would fit him into their loaded secondary.

Arizona’s secondary remains the deepest and strongest part of their team, and there is still no clear path for Bucannon to receive playing time in that unit. But that hasn’t stopped the wonderfully creative Todd Bowles from getting him on the field. The Cardinals don’t need help at safety, but they are rather thin at linebacker. That is where Bucannon has found most of his playing time, and that is how he has become one of the most productive rookies in the league.

If there is a lesson to be found in this, it’s that versatility may be even more important than talent in determining a rookie’s immediate success. Not every team is as willing as St Louis to shift its scheme to benefit a single player. Coaches usually try to draft players that will fit their system, but at a certain point it becomes difficult to justify passing up on a superior talent just because he makes your job more challenging. General managers and owners expect their coaches to be able to find success with whatever talent they’re given, and in these cases it is up to the coaches to identify players who can slid from one system to another with ease.

Of all the players to be drafted this past year, none has shown more versatility than Anthony Barr. Barr was a tremendous but raw pass rusher coming out of UCLA, an athlete who had only spent two years on defense after arriving to college as a running back. He piled up sacks and tackles for loss based on brute physical skill, and many looked at him before the draft as a player truly only suited to play as an edge rusher, someone who still had a lot of work to do before he could be an every down player.

The Vikings saw something different. They saw a raw athlete who had translated immediately to being an edge rusher, and they saw skills and intelligence that they believed could do the same for any number of positions across the defense. They scooped up Barr with the ninth pick despite playing a 4-3 scheme (Barr was considered a better fit as an outside linebacker in the 3-4) with two quality defensive ends already signed long term. All offseason people speculated about Barr’s role, but most assumed he would see time only as a situational pass rusher.

It was a pleasant surprise when the season rolled around and we saw what Mike Zimmer truly had planned for him. Barr was installed as the starting strongside linebacker, a position designation that doesn’t mean a whole lot in Zimmer’s scheme. In passing situations he would rotate up to the line and play as a pass rusher, but most plays he found himself drifting around various positions in the box. Sometimes he would walk up to the line across from a tight end. Sometimes he would stay several yards back. Quite often he found himself lined up on the line in the A Gap between the guard and the center, capable of either blitzing or dropping back into coverage.

Barr’s performance has fallen off over the past month thanks to injury issues, but before that he was one of the front runners for Defensive Rookie of the Year. A player who was thought to be among the most raw in the draft was one of its earliest success stories because he was paired with a coach who knew how to use him correctly. Rather than relying on his limited pass rushing skills play after play, Barr was a weapon meeting blockers in the hole and chasing screen plays from sideline to sideline. Barr was at his best when blitzing through the A Gap, an opportunity he rarely would have received had he been installed as a pure edge rusher in another scheme.

If there was one player in the draft capable of matching Barr’s versatility it was Khalil Mack. Mack was a much more polished player after years of dominating at Buffalo, and because of that he ended up going off the board fifth overall to Oakland. Like Barr, he projected best as an edge rusher at the next level. Unlike Barr, he showed enough in college that everyone knew how versatile he could be.

No one was at all surprised when Oakland made him an outside linebacker in their system. The pass rush was arguably the strength of their team (Lamarr Woodley and Justin Tuck are hardly a strength, but this is the Raiders), and people trusted that they would find a way to get Mack involved. And they did, eventually. It took an injury to Woodley for them to turn to him as a pass rusher, by which point he had already established himself as one of the best run defending linebackers in the NFL. Over the second half of the season he has been one of the best all around defenders in the league, and he is one of the only players who might push Donald for Defensive Rookie of the Year.