Survey results!!
Need and Value
Two concepts that play into discussions of the NFL draft are positional need and positional value.
Positional Need is a pretty straightforward concept. If you lack players of the needed quality (and that could be starters or backups), then you have a need. If you have a depth chart that is fully loaded at a position, you probably don’t have a need; you may even be in a position to trade players away.
Positional value is less straighforward, but most committed NFL fans have an intuitive grasp of the concept. The position in football that has the greatest positional value is that of quarterback. Get a great quarterback and championships are possible, even if the rest of the team is not star-studded. Without one, championship rosters are much harder to build. By contrast, the long-snapper has pretty low positional value — though Washington fans know from recent experience that the wrong guy can make it much harder to win games.
While there are many sophisticated ways to assess positional value, I thought I’d simply rely on a graph that has the advantage of having been published just this past week by the guys at Over the Cap, who were addressing themselves to the question of positional value in draft strategy.
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A quick glance shows that the most valuable position — way out on the bottom-right side of the graph — is quarterback, while low-value positions like fullback, long snapper, punter and kicker are found at the top-left corner.
Reacts Results
In this week’s Reacts survey, we asked which position the Commanders should NOT draft in the first three rounds.
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Running back
The most popular answer, selected by a majority of those who responded to the survey, was running back. I think this reflects both the relatively low value of the position (it’s in the top-left quadrant of the Over the Cap graph) and the relative solidity of the position group at the moment. In other words, with Brian Robinson, Austin Ekeler, and Chris Rodriguez in the running back room, there is not a glaring hole that needs to be filled.
Defensive Tackle
The second-most popular answer— defensive tackle — is not really about positional value (IDL is in the lower-right quadrant of the OTC graph). Instead, this is a reflection of the fact that the Commanders boast a pair of pro-bowl starters with Daron Payne and Jonathan Allen, backed by a reliable John Ridgeway and 2022 second-round pick Phil Mathis. While the position group could certainly stand to be bolstered with more talent, it is probably the most complete position group on the Commanders roster, so other positions are seen as higher priorities at the moment.
Predictions for the hell of it
In the series of Reacts surveys published this offseason, we’ve already asked multiple times about whether Hogs Haven members think the front office should trade up or down from the #2 overall pick, and whether you think the team should or will trade back into the first round.
This week, we took aim at the same issues by synthesizing them into a different question: How many picks will Washington make on Day 2?
At the moment, Washington has 5 Day-Two (2nd & 3rd round) picks in hand.
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Trade expectations
The votes were fairly evenly spread, but the most popular answers were “four” and “three”, combining for 62% of all responses. This seems to indicate that roughly 6 out of 10 fans think the Commanders will trade up to make another pick in the 2nd round. If they trade a pair of Day 2 picks (say, 36 & 40), then they would have 3 selections remaining; if they package a pick with a 2025 pick, then they would have 4 remaining.
No-trade expectations
The next most popular answer — that is, that the team will make 5 picks on Friday — indicates that about a quarter of respondents think that the team will not trade up to the latter half of the 1st round to make another pick. I guess it’s possible that they think that Adam Peters will engage in trades up and down that will end up back at 5 Friday picks, but Occam’s razor and all that.
With just 8% of respondents choosing the option of ‘more than 5’, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of expectation that Adam Peters will be trading down to accumulate Day 2 picks.
In any event, the draft starts at 8pm Eastern Standard Time tonight and continues tomorrow night at 7pm. Tune in both nights to find out how accurately these survey results predict what Adam Peters will do.
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