Draft Season

Four teams remain alive for a Super Bowl championship, but for the other twenty-eight it is already time to look ahead to next season. We still have nearly eight months before the first regular season game is played, but the time between is packed with events. Free agency, training camp, and—perhaps most significantly—the draft.

The NFL Draft is a long and tedious process, with the actual selections not being made until late April. The field of draft eligible players has already been whittled down, and now we have three months to spend on the countless rounds of speculation and criticism. The first of these occurs a week from Saturday with the playing of the Senior Bowl.

The Senior Bowl is a game held each January pitting the top college seniors against each other as a display for professional scouts. Every team sends multiple representatives to this game and to the practices in the week leading up to it. A lot of the top prospects are underclassmen who aren’t invited to this event, but it can still have major influence on the shape of the draft. Eric Fisher’s success at the Senior Bowl in 2013 led to him becoming the first overall pick. Aaron Donald’s dominance last year began his climb into the first round. There is a lot more that happens during this week than people realize, and it is probably even more significant than the better known Combine.

It is also the start of a brutal stretch that sees players torn to pieces in ways we previously couldn’t conceive of. There has been a lot of criticism in recent years of the long predraft process, ridicule involving its overemphasis on physical ability and its apparent indifference to the production we’ve all seen on the field. It’s this sort of nonsense that led to Vernon Gholston and Troy Williamson going in the top ten. It’s this sort of bizarre overanalysis that caused Teddy Bridgewater to drop to the very last pick of the first round. To a lot of fans and media members outside the mainstream scouting community, the draft would be a much more effective tool if we did away with this other nonsense.

 

It probably doesn’t need to be said, but the best way of determining whether a player is good at football is to watch them play football. Film is the number one tool used by the scouting community, both within NFL organizations and by outside analysts. Those truly involved will study every play of a player’s college career, searching for minute strengths and weaknesses to try to project what will or will not carry over into the NFL.

In a lot of cases, these match up. Teddy Bridgewater dominated the college ranks by controlling the 10-20 yard intermediate range, but he struggled with deeper throws. In his rookie season he quickly became one of the best quarterbacks in the league between 10 and 20 yards but struggled to complete the ball over the top. Aaron Donald’s explosive strength and quickness allowed him to make regular plays in the backfield at Pitt, and he was able to do the same in the NFL. CJ Mosley and Khalil Mack made plays all over the field when they were in college, and they made plays all over the field their first year in the NFL. A football player is a football player, and the games played in college and the NFL are not different enough to fundamentally change who people are.

So why do NFL teams spend time and resources on the exhaustive and misleading process of the predraft routine? The Combine fooled us into promoting players like Justin Gilbert while letting others like Chris Borland fall. Was Teddy Bridgewater’s performance against air at his Pro Day really worth throwing out three years of productivity against real defenses? Surely it would be better if we skipped all this nonsense and drafted players based on what we saw from them in college.

Over the years we’ve convinced ourselves that the draft process leads people astray, but if we look closer it becomes clear that this is largely the result of selection bias. We remember the players who don’t work out, and we forget those who benefited from this process and proved well worth their draft positions. Often times, film can be every bit as deceiving as the workouts these players are put through.

Watching a player’s college film can provide a lot of information about that player, but there is no way to strip that film from the context around it. They are almost always playing in the same system, handling the same responsibilities, and surrounded by the same talent. And the film itself can only tell us so much about what happened. It can’t tell us exactly what a player was supposed to do on a given play, or what his teammates were supposed to do. It can’t tell us what thought process led to a particular outcome, or what outside factors may have affected the play. Film presents a lot of information, but there is still plenty that it leaves out.

No position suffers more from this shortage of information than quarterback, the hardest position to scout and the most crucial to get right. Watch a quarterback play in college, and there is plenty you can pick out. You can see arm strength, accuracy, athleticism, mechanics, and responses to different coverages. You can see the routes the receivers run, and you can pick out which players were open and where the ball should have gone. You can see whether the quarterback puts the ball where it had to go, and you can see when he makes a mistake.

This is the trap most fans and media members fall into. Quarterback is the most highly analyzed position on the field for any team. Almost everyone who watches the game keeps their eyes on the ball, and on pass plays they see just about everything a quarterback does. These observations combine with the most thorough statistics for any position to make outside analysts believe they know everything about a quarterback. This is why Teddy Bridgewater was so highly thought of prior to the predraft process last year, and this is why he remained the top player available in the minds of many outsiders even after scouts across the league had downgraded him.

There is a lot more to playing the quarterback position than what is seen on film. Much of the action takes place between the quarterback’s ears, and he alone knows what exactly was going through his head. The film can show us what routes were being run and what coverage the defense played, and we can sometimes get an idea where a quarterback is looking based on the movement of his head. But nothing about the film itself can tell us what the exact read was or why the quarterback ended up making the decisions he did.

This is where the interviews with the teams can be so crucial. In these interviews scouts and coaches have the opportunity to speak with the quarterback and to break down film to get an idea of how he makes reads. These are the conversations that outsiders aren’t privy to, and these play a huge role in the movements of quarterbacks up and down draft boards. Struggles in interviews were a major reason for Ryan Mallett’s fall to the third round in 2011, a result that looks like a reasonable outcome in retrospect. Interviews in that same year showed Cam Newton’s football intelligence, making him the first overall pick despite only a single year of major college football. Now he is one of the best young quarterbacks in the league, with two straight playoff appearances to his name.

These offseason activities are crucial for enhancing understanding of a quarterback prospect, but it's clear that the process has gone over the top in the past few years. After Bridgewater’s successful rookie season it seems inevitable that we’ll spend at least the next five years hearing fans boast their superior knowledge over NFL personnel. The criticisms that hit Bridgewater were ridiculous—small hands, Pro Day issues, and “skinny knees”, whatever that means—and the ones being lobbed at Marcus Mariota and Jameis Winston now have earned plenty of eye rolls already.

These criticisms are unfair and inaccurate, but they come from a genuine, understandable place. Drafting a quarterback is an essential task for building a team, and getting it wrong usually leads to another three or four years of failure. Below I’ve listed every quarterback taken in the first round in the five year stretch between 2008 and 2012, and beside it I’ve indicated whether they are still a starter for the team that drafted them and whether the coach and GM who made the pick are still employed by the team.

Quarterback	Starting?	Coach Retained?	GM Retained?
Matt Ryan	Yes	No	Yes
Joe Flacco	Yes	Yes	Yes
Matthew Stafford	Yes	No	Yes
Mark Sanchez	No	No	No
Josh Freeman	No	No	No
Sam Bradford	¯\_(ツ)_/¯	No	No
Tim Tebow	No	No	No
Cam Newton	Yes	Yes	No
Jake Locker	No	No	No
Blaine Gabbert	No	No	No
Christian Ponder	No	No	Yes
Andrew Luck	Yes	Yes	Yes
Robert Griffen III	¯\_(ツ)_/¯	No	No
Ryan Tannehill	Yes	Yes	No
Brandon Weeden	No	No	No

The first thing that stands out is the brutal attrition rate for quarterbacks, coaches and GMs. The second is that if you fail when drafting a quarterback in the first round, you’re doomed. Only Rick Speilman in Minnesota survived a failed first round quarterback (partially because even though he was the GM in 2011 he didn’t have complete control over personnel decisions), and now that Rex Ryan has been fired no head coach has lasted through a quarterback bust. The message the NFL has given over the past few years has been very clear. If you invest in a quarterback and he doesn’t pan out, you lose your job.

Under this kind of pressure, it is understandable that these people go over the top with the analysis. What appears on the film is important, but no general manager wants to be known as the person who didn’t realize that JaMarcus Russell cares more about food than football or that Ryan Leaf had the emotional maturity of a four year old. If a team isn’t completely certain a player will be a solution at quarterback, the system is set up to incentivize delaying this career defining moment.

Essentially, the entire predraft process is an exercise in team officials tying to convince themselves not to take a quarterback. The Tennessee Titans have already started trying to talk themselves into liking Zach Mettenberger, and I’m sure Tampa Bay is picking apart the top options as we speak. The process that led to Bridgewater’s fall will repeat again because it is the only rational way for this to go. You don’t have to like it, but you have to acknowledge it as the inevitable result of fan pressure for immediate results and the position of culpability that coaches and general managers find themselves in.

The quarterback analysis has gotten out of hand, but we shouldn’t use this one position to discount the valuable information gained by studying other college prospects. While we can’t use the same arguments about the mental aspects of the game to justify the offseason analysis of running backs and wide receivers, there is plenty of valuable information to be gained.

Every year we hear the same stories over and over about the same failed prospects. Darrius Heyward-Bey was the first receiver off the board because of his performance at the Combine. Jason Smith ended up second overall because he had the athleticism of a tight end in an offensive lineman’s body. Calais Campbell, Antonio Brown, and Navorro Bowman all fell because their athletic numbers didn’t match their performance on the field.

We remember these stories because they fit the narrative, and we forget the ones that get lost in the shuffle. Von Miller leapt to the second overall pick thanks to his dominance at the Combine. Da’Quan Bowers was considered the leader for the first overall pick in 2011 before poor offseason workouts. Just last year we saw players like Kyle Fuller and Aaron Donald make late pushes towards the top of the draft, players who went on to have strong rookie seasons.

And that brings me to one specific player, one I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. During the draft last year I broke down each and every first round pick based on what I knew the teams needed and what I had seen of the players on film. Some picks I was highly positive on, most I kept fairly neutral, but there were three that I was heavily critical of. The first was Greg Robinson to the Rams, a move still very much up in the air. The second was Justin Gilbert to the Browns, which is not looking good after a disastrous rookie season.

The third was, unfortunately, probably the biggest error in my short time writing about football. Here is what I wrote about the twelfth overall pick, which the New York Giants used on a receiver out of LSU by the name of Odell Beckham.

“I don’t like Odell Beckham, and I really don’t like him to the Giants. They already have a player who can do everything he does in Reuben Randle. There is no justification for taking a player in the top twelve who tops out as only a number two receiver, especially in a draft where a number two receiver can be found in the second or third round. They absolutely should have taken Aaron Donald, and if they were committed to the idea of a wide receiver they should have gone with the higher upside of Brandin Cooks or Marqise Lee.”

When making predictions you are bound to get stuff wrong, but I think I may have set a new record for density of statements that are regretted in retrospect. This year Beckham put together one of the best performances ever by a rookie wide receiver, and he will likely run away with Offensive Rookie of the Year. He does far more than Reuben Randle, he is absolutely a number one wide receiver, and he is much better than Cooks or Lee. (The Giants still probably should have taken Aaron Donald, so at least I wasn’t wrong in everything I said.)

Looking back at this, the question I have to ask is how I managed to be so completely wrong about Beckham. I remember watching the tape of a couple of his games when he was at LSU, and I remember being only mildly impressed. He spent most of his time at LSU running small variations of deep routes, occasionally springing open for a long bomb but not contributing to the game on a consistent basis. He didn’t display quickness to create separation in tight areas, and he rarely did anything with the ball in his hands.

That was the player I saw in college, not the player I saw in the NFL. When I first put together my prospect rankings about a month before the draft, I remember Beckham being pegged as a late first or early second round prospect. As the process wore on he slowly crept up draft boards, to the point that I saw him occasionally making it into the top ten. I didn’t understand this at the time. What I had seen was a limited player who was really only a danger as a deep threat, someone who best case scenario turned into DeSean Jackson. That’s a useful player, but it isn’t the type to spend a high first round pick on.

It has become clear now that he was limited at LSU not because of himself but because of the team around him, specifically the quarterback. Beckham ran almost exclusively deep routes because those were the routes quarterback Zach Mettenberger was best at throwing. Mettenberger doesn’t have the anticipation or the accuracy to take advantage of the windows Beckham can create with his quickness on timing routes, the sort of throws that made up the bulk of his production this year in the NFL.

Beckham climbed in the draft not because of the Senior Bowl, or a Pro Day, or the Combine. His climb was due to the other part of the draft process we often forget about--the individual team workouts. Each team is allowed to bring thirty prospects in for personal workouts at their facilities, an opportunity for the coaches to work with the players and to see what they can do that might not have showed itself on film.

Previously I wrote about the success found in new roles by players like Anthony Barr and Deone Buchannon. Nothing about the college tape suggested that Barr could play off the ball as a linebacker or that Buchannon could survive so consistently playing in the box. These are traits that reveal themselves in these private workouts, outside the view of the fans and the media. It’s a well told story that in Teddy Bridgewater’s workout with the Vikings he was asked to make a subtle change to his mechanics, a change that erased many of the flaws revealed by his disastrous Pro Day. It was this workout that convinced the Vikings to trade back up into the first round to pick him.

Only the coaches, scouts, and players know what truly happens in these workouts, but I suspect that Beckham flashed abilities few people realized he had before, the sort of abilities that rocketed him up every team’s draft board. Had the draft been held immediately at the end of the college season, there is a decent chance he wouldn’t have made it into the first round. After the predraft process that everybody complains about, he settled into a more appropriate spot in the top fifteen.

Beckham is just one of many examples, and I’m sure there will be several more to add the list after this year. There is still a lot we don’t know about the players in this year’s draft. The next few months will be long and exhausting, but on the whole they will allow the talent evaluators in the NFL to make smarter decisions when it comes time to select the players on April 30.