Potential or Production

The 2013 NFL Draft was never expected to be one that would be remembered fondly for years to come. From the moment the field of eligible players was set, we knew that the talent available was not up to the level of a normal year. There was no elite quarterback prospect, no clear and obvious top pick. The first player taken was an offensive lineman from Central Michigan, and the most discussed player prior to the draft was Manti Te’o, an unathletic linebacker who ended up falling to the second round. Many people actually pitied the Chiefs for ending up with the first selection in this draft, the one year there was not a definite game changing player available.

The most obvious shortcomings were at the offensive skill positions. The only quarterback to go in the first round was EJ Manuel, a pick that was panned at the time and looks even worse now. No running back was selected in the first round, and only three wide receivers and a single tight end went in the top thirty-two. It was as thoroughly unsexy as a rookie class can get, and so far it has lived up to that reputation, with only DeAndre Hopkins and Tyler Eiffert saving the skill players of the first round.

We knew the talent at the skill positions was mediocre coming into the draft, but that alone did not make the class bad. The lack of exciting skill position players hurt casual interest, but the real problem was the absence of great players at the other positions. There were no dominant defenders, and no offensive linemen who could be considered top notch talents. But while there were no sure fire options, there were plenty of interesting prospects, most intriguing of all among the defensive linemen. 

Over the course of the first thirty-two picks we saw five edge rushers and five interior defenders taken, starting with Dion Jordan third overall and going all the way down to Sylvester Williams at number twenty-eight. 2013 was a big year for pass rushers in the draft, but it wasn’t because the group was particularly good. There were no players who combined the raw tools and productivity of someone like Von Miller or Khalil Mack. Every player had tantalizing strengths and glaring weaknesses, and there was a great deal of heated debate leading up to the draft surrounding each player.

I’ll start with the defensive tackles, saving the more interesting case of the edge rushers for the end. The last two off the board were Datone Jones from UCLA and Sylvester Williams from North Carolina, and so far neither has done much in the NFL. In college they were the type of defensive tackles you’d expect to see go at the end of the first round, solid but far from dominant. Williams has earned his way into the starting role after a couple years behind Terrance Knighton, but he’s lost among the talent elsewhere on Denver’s defense. Jones’s hurdles thus far have been all about himself, as he’s struggled to make any impact on a Packers team constantly in search of defensive linemen.

The first three defensive tackles off the board are a much more interesting story. The first taken was Sheldon Richardson from Missouri, a prototypical run stuffer whose size and strength made him impossible to move in the middle. He had only played two years of major college football after transferring from a junior college, and while he had done enough to earn his way into the first round, his pedigree did not match up with the other top linemen, making it a surprise when he was selected ahead of Sharrif Floyd and Star Lotulelei.

Lotulelei was one of the most interesting stories of the draft. He rose steadily through the early part of the process, his explosiveness on tape earning him recognition usually not available to players from Utah. In some early mock drafts he was even projected to go off the board first overall, until disaster struck at the Combine. Before he was even able to participate in the tests, he was sent home after doctors detected a possible heart issue during their physical. He was later cleared and performed all the needed workouts at his Pro Day, but the health concerns were enough to scare teams into dropping him to Carolina at fourteen.

The highest touted prospect in the leadup to the draft was Sharrif Floyd from Florida, yet he ended up going behind both Richardson and Lotulelei. Some mock drafts had him going as high as third overall, and at twenty-three his fall was the most notable of the first round. Many of the concerns surrounded his physical capabilities, particularly his unusually short arms. As usual, this explanation was met with ridicule from the public, who jump at the opportunity to disagree with the NFL’s overanalysis of prospects.

The order these three were taken in came as a surprise, yet if you were to rank them now, they would probably end up in that same order. Richardson has clearly been the best of the three, winning Defensive Rookie of the Year and consistently dominating since stepping on the field. But he’s done so in a surprising way, showing far more ability as a pass rusher in the NFL than he did in college. It’s a bit closer between Lotulelei and Floyd. Lotulelei was clearly the better player during his rookie season, and though Floyd has been among the best defensive tackles in the league since the middle last season, health has kept him from truly breaking out. His short arms haven’t stopped him from exploding into the backfield in much the same way he did at Florida, just as the health concerns that caused Lotulelei to fall out of the top ten have proven unfounded.

Scouting is a messy process, and there is a great deal of pressure on scouts, coaches, and general managers to get things right. A single small flaw can cripple a career and bring ridicule towards the team that staked everything on grabbing that player. Fans laugh when teams overanalyze a good player, but they laugh even harder when a high draft pick flames out of the league, even if they were among the group defending that player from criticism a few years earlier.

And that brings me at last to the edge rushers. Two and a half years into their careers, no one is looking back on this class with a great deal of fondness. Depending on your willingness to write a player off before the end of his third season, four of the five could already be categorized as busts. One is suspended for the entire season, and two have played fewer than a quarter of their team’s defensive snaps this year. Even as one of the best parts of the class, very little was expected from the edge rushers in 2013, and so far they are living down to expectations. How this happened, however, remains a very interesting matter, and it reveals a great deal about how we approach the drafting process.

The first edge rusher taken was in many ways the embodiment of everything fans hate about the draft. The Miami Dolphins traded up to the third pick in order to grab Dion Jordan out of Oregon, a high upside pass rusher with all the tools to be a dominant player in the NFL. Many were skeptical off the bat, concerned about his thin frame, his lack of a defined position, and most of all his production. In four seasons at Oregon Jordan collected only 14.5 sacks, and of these only five came during his senior season. The Dolphins made a reasonable deal to move up from the twelfth pick, but it still seemed like a questionable move from a team without a great need at pass rusher.

Three years later, these doubters are nodding their heads in self congratulatory disappointment. Jordan has been the biggest flameout of the entire draft, collecting only three sacks over his first two seasons before being suspended for all of 2015. Of course,  the biggest problems for him have been off the field, something that wasn’t mentioned in a single one of the scouting reports I read. There were no character concerns about Jordan prior to the draft, but those who were skeptical are still plenty willing to take credit for seeing this failure coming.

The story of Jordan is very familiar to us, and we don’t even have to look beyond the top ten to find another example of a prospect built on physical ability. Barkevious Mingo was a stellar player his first two seasons at LSU, showing great progress from 2.5 sacks his freshman year to eight as a sophomore. He was one of the highest touted prospects coming into the season, and it was a major disappointment when he only mustered 4.5 sacks as a junior. Despite this dropoff, he decided to declare for the draft, and against popular wisdom he rose back into the top ten. The potential of his sophomore campaign was enough to get the Browns to overlook the problems that arose in his junior year, but through two and a half seasons he looks much more like the player we saw in his final season, his career NFL sack total of seven still not matching his best year in college.

These two prospects walked similar paths, and they are prime examples of the folly of drafting for potential. In their final year in college they failed to reach double digit sacks combined, so why should it be a surprise that neither can rush the passer in the NFL? This is the narrative we hear every single year when the draft comes around, and with every Dion Jordan and Barkevious Mingo, the voices shouting it only become louder and more numerous.

By now I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, so I’ll just come out and say it. This narrative is bullshit. It’s the sort of thing we like to tell ourselves as casual followers of college and professional football, the story that makes us feel like we know more than the so called experts running these teams. We are trained to think that the two levels are similar, that a player who succeeds at the lower will also succeed at the higher, and when we find examples of this it only reinforces the biases already in place. We prop up players like Vontaze Burfict and Russell Wilson, while ignoring those like Manti Te’o and Montee Ball.

There really isn’t a better example of this out there than the pass rushers of the 2013 class. While high upside players like Jordan and Mingo went in the top ten, a pair of high productivity college stars fell into the latter portions of the first round. There was a great deal of outcry when it happened, outdone only by the silence since as these players have struggled to find a place in the NFL.

The last of the pass rushers to go off the board was Bjoern Werner of Florida State, taken by Indianapolis one pick after Floyd. After twelve sacks his junior year of college, there were expectations that he would find his way into the top ten of the draft. But as the process went along, he slowly slipped down the board, his lack of athletic upside pushing him to the end of the first round. Thus far in his career, that upside seems even more limited than expected, as he’s bounced between positions and failed to find a place in Indianapolis’s shaky defense.

There wasn’t a great deal of outrage around the Werner's fall, but that was mostly because it was all directed towards Jarvis Jones. Jones remains one of the most accomplished college pass rushers of the past ten years, collected 27 sacks over his final two seasons after transferring to Georgia from USC. Throughout his entire junior season he was considered a lock to go in the top ten, yet, as seems to happen with at least one player every year, he ran afoul of the predraft machine. An abysmal forty time and concerns about a chronic back issue caused him to fall to seventeenth overall, where he was finally taken by the Steelers.

It’s understandable why followers of college football were stunned. Jones was the most productive pass rusher in the nation, with nearly as many sacks in his final season as either Jordan or Mingo had in their entire careers. It was considered a major steal when the Steelers grabbed him, yet after two years the Steelers found themselves once again spending a first round pick on an edge rusher. Jones has shown signs of improvement this year, but he still is far from the dominant edge force that many expected.

There was a great deal of agreement in the scouting world that Jordan and Mingo were can’t miss players, just as there was a great deal of agreement among fans that Jones and Werner were unappreciated stars. Two and a half years in, it’s probably safe to say that both sides were clearly wrong. Four players, all with their upsides and their downsides, combining for 21 sacks so far in their careers, fewer than the edge rusher who went fifth overall in the draft.

Of all the pass rushers available in 2013, Ziggy Ansah was by far the least polished. Born in Ghana, Ansah didn’t come to America until enrolling at BYU in 2007. Originally he came with the dream of playing basketball, and football wasn’t even his second choice when that fell through. He was recruited off the BYU track team as a pure athlete, playing only three years of organized football before entering the NFL draft with 4.5 career sacks.

This is the sort of résumé that would earn laughter from many armchair scouts, but the staggering athleticism of Ansah was enough to bring him into the top five of the 2013 class. And two and a half years into his career, it isn’t even controversial to say that he has been the best player to come out of the first ten selections. Ansah has improved every year he’s been in the league, collecting 22.5 sacks as he’s worked to harness his potential. Last year he was a piece beside Ndamukong Suh and Nick Fairley on one of the best defensive lines in the league, and this year he’s showing that he can hold his own as a star with those two gone. Even with Suh and Fairley on other teams and DeAndre Levy mysteriously injured, he has been a consistent force for the Lions defense, and with seven sacks he trails only Chandler Jones and JJ Watt this season.

The stories we tell ourselves as fans are often colored by what we want to believe. For the next ten years we’ll hear the tales of Jordan and Mingo, players who revealed the folly of the NFL’s scouting machine. We won’t hear about Werner or Jones however, and we certainly won’t hear about Ansah. People will remember the minute concerns that caused Lotulelei and Floyd to fall, but they won't remember how much of a surprise it was to see Richardson chosen ahead of them.

In most years there are a few players available who combine both skill and production, but in 2013 this was not the case. Every player available carried risk, whether it was the risk of not being able to match the athleticism of NFL competition or the risk of simply not being very good at football. Drafting is a very difficult process, and as fans we need to understand when to ignore a player’s college success. Choosing a player in the draft is all about projecting into the future, and in order to do this we often need to learn to forget the past.