You are very bad at draft analysis

Yes, you.

I’ve been covering the draft for like a decade now, and the one thing I think we can all agree on is that covering the draft is bad. It is mid-April, and the draft still isn’t until next week, and basically every Packer analyst is spending their time on Twitter arguing about whether Batman could defeat Goku if he was able to sit on the bench for a few years to develop, while some other draft analysts yell that it’s not worth thinking about, because Batman doesn’t meet the correct arm-length thresholds.

Most of you are normal football fans who simply start following the Packers once training camp begins and have the extremely pleasant experience of enjoying all of the new players that appeared during the summer while cracking a High Noon on the porch, and let me just say that I envy you. I was once like you. I hope, with enough self-reflection, that one day I will be like you again. For now, I am extremely into the draft, and not just because I cover it. My motivation for writing about the draft has shifted drastically over the last four or five years into a much healthier obsession.

When I started covering the draft, I was the equivalent of a college student who just turned 21, irresponsibly chugging metrics in the hopes of partying harder than the popular tape-watching jocks across the room, culminating in the violent expulsion of any number of opinions tinged with flecks of Brian Brohm and Brett Hundley. (Please note that I was not a 21-year-old college student in real life. I have always been an old man, even when I was a young man). I viewed the draft-industrial complex as mostly incompetent and borderline corrupt, and I saw most actual NFL front offices as antiquated Pony Express operations, relying on gut feel while baseball executives sat around mocking their football counterparts via telegraph.

I knew I could win this.

That was stupid. Stupid isn’t even the right word. Stupid and arrogant. Stupigant. Billy Beane thought that he could scout with statistics on the Moneyball A’s, and while the A’s did a great job of identifying inefficiencies, defining how wins are created, and signing bargain basement free agents, they sucked something awful at drafting. The lesson I should have taken was in the famous baseball book that I once obsessed over and was very well known! Jeremy Brown sucked, barely cracked the majors, and couldn’t hold down a position! Scouting with stats exclusively absolutely did not work!

And so, I did that mature thing and doubled down. I built my own statistics because the basic ones didn’t work. I’ll bet the A’s never thought of that! Of course, WROPS and QBOPS actually work pretty well, but they’re hardly perfect. Every elite tier contains at least a few guys who just won’t work out for whatever reason, but the process of actually building out my spreadsheets and playing around with adjustments, something happened. I was forced to dig into WHY certain stats, and certain players, just didn’t fit into any of my projections, and when you do that, it often brings you back around to scouting. To tape.

I am not now, nor will I ever be a sophisticated NFL tape watcher. I hear my APC cohorts use words like “Bendy” and “One Technique” and “ankle stiffness” and I just zone out and go back to wondering how Jayden Daniels took SO many sacks in 2022. But, while I’ll never be anything close to cromulent when scouting linemen, there are many lessons that anyone can learn about college football film that will make them a better scout, and make their numbers make sense. Perhaps the biggest lesson, especially with wide receivers and tight ends, is that how they win is at least as important as actually winning. Sharp, squared routes are good. A high number of contested catches is bad, but being able to make contested catches is good. Catching deep balls is good but catching ONLY deep balls is bad. There are dozens of other small factors, and which are important – and which are not – are different for everyone.

And if you spend enough time on tape and analysis and just consuming football in a smart way, you quickly realize just how high the error bars are. If you haven’t already, you should read this post in The Athletic from Alec Lewis, which goes into great detail about how little process, and how much gut feeling is still involved with many NFL front offices. Even the guys making million-dollar investments with million-dollar jobs on the line and access to far more information than anyone outside of a front office environment still make inefficient mistakes and hugely overrate their own opinions on prospects. The people entrusted with real NFL teams, real resources, and tape/analytics beyond our wildest dreams still do a poor job. Do you really think you can do better?

I won’t lie. While I’m leaning into a humble persona here, there are a few NFL teams that I believe to be absolutely terrible in how they run the draft process, and more than a few public scouts (yes, including me) could step in and improve them. However, I would caution about having too much pride about being able to, maybe, outdraft, for instance, the Jacksonville Jaguars. Because you’re not up against the Jaguars, you’re up against the consensus boards. And beating the consensus board is extremely difficult. If the Jaguars just used the consensus board, you probably couldn’t beat them.

I’m no longer trying to out-chug every other draft analyst. A bespoke cocktail of small school ingredients that you’ve probably never heard of is far more satisfying and less likely to result in waking up the next day covered in bad Jordan Love takes, but a ton of guys are definitely still in this business for the wrong reasons. Generally speaking, you’ll find:

1. The TapeKeeper

Tapekeepers claim some form of expertise in watching tape, developed over decades spent in a converted garage with one monitor on some form of “All-22” tape, which they acquired on a message board from a poster named @StudyinScarlet claiming to be a prospect’s uncle’s cousin who was negotiating on the prospect’s behalf with the boosters at Rutgers. On the other monitor, they are studying the intricacies of the game by playing Madden, where you can learn the meaning of important football words like Dagger, Stick, Probe, Robber, Terror Cone, Grave Robber, and RodHammer, in a purely football context.

TapeKeepers like to pretend they have secret knowledge unavailable to the average person, and that staring at that secret information for hours on end (which definitely did not come bundled with the RodHammer computer virus) has given them a secret level of understanding about football. They will talk down to those they engage with and frequently say things like “You don’t know ball” or “I’m a certified ball-knower,” or “Have you ever even played ball?” They spend a lot of time thinking about balls. Mostly because the steel folding chair in the garage doesn’t have much give.

They are among the worst gatekeepers and they never let you forget that they’ve watched far, far more football than you, that they played it in high school, and that if you want to know what real NFL teams are thinking, they are the closest you will get. They also think that one day, a team is going to come calling and they’ll finally get to upgrade the garage, and maybe even be allowed back in the house.

2. The Threshold Guy

I think this is pretty specific to the Packers, who were, under Ted Thompson, pioneers in enforcing athletic performance tiers on their potential draft picks, most famously in the 3-cone drill. This all started innocently enough, with the public scouting apparatus doing a fantastic job of sussing these metrics out, and indeed, when making considered use of the known thresholds, it did lead to better accuracy in projecting Packer picks.

But it has since turned evil, and has now become its own form of gatekeeping, which is silly for several reasons. For starters, the Packers have strayed from their thresholds many, many times over the past several years, but aside from that, teams are increasingly getting non-publicly available metrics from tape analysis. Last season at the combine, Puka Nacua didn’t test well, but led all receivers in top speed during receiving drills. We all see how that turned out. This year Keon Coleman did the same. But that is just a small taste of all of the data that every team has and that we do not.

The NFL also changes quickly, and I can tell you from my own work that shorter, smaller receivers have become more valuable recently compared to four years ago. These types of sea changes, based on newer defenses taking away different routes, can completely upend previous thresholds. Jayden Reed is, after all, now on the team.

After they were discovered initially, the thresholds no longer represented any kind of special knowledge or the result of any serious research. It’s literally just taking a look at whether or not one number is bigger than another number, and any analyst expressing any kind of arrogance or performing any gatekeeping is just telling you that they’re all set for kindergarten.

More than anything, there is a lot of overconfidence in this area based entirely on selection bias. Good athletes, as it turns out, are drafted higher than poor athletes. And good college football players who played at big programs, and are good athletes? Turns out, they go even higher. Teams LOVE those guys. And so, even an unsophisticated use of athletic testing, or threshold metrics, will make you correct a huge percentage of the time because, and I want to be clear about this, the good athletes who are good football players are good at playing football.

3. Analytics Man

This is me, but it’s also several other people including PFF people, their alumni, Sumer Sports, SIS folks, and many, many more. The internet is lousy with us, mostly because we’re on computers all day. And people HATE us, and they should, because what we’re really best at is telling you all the things that you’re doing wrong. And you are doing SO many things wrong.

We, on the other hand, are doing things correctly. Do our correct ways of doing things always produce superior results? Well, no. One of the great ironies of football is that one of the most incompetent organizations of the last several decades, the Indianapolis Colts, have incompetented their way into several franchise quarterbacks, while one of the most competent organizations in football has given multiple huge contracts to Kirk Cousins. It’s an odd business.

And aside from knowing how much you’re doing wrong, we’re also VERY bad at telling you this information. We are VERY annoying, and while we haven’t played football, we bring our own sense of smug superiority to the table based on being really, really, really good with Microsoft Excel. While you were “looking up” information about prospects, I was Xlooking them up. Suck on that, loser.

Anyway, analytics people are good at figuring out what characteristics matter, and which don’t, as well as adding some rigor to a given process, but even we data nerds are limited, severely, by, well, data. I remember a few years ago I was extremely high on Notre Dame receiver Kevin Austin, an athletic freak who put up extremely efficient numbers in college. I wrote several articles. Thousands of words, WROPS underrated stuff, etc.

A few days later, several very nice Packer draft people DM’d me that while they appreciated the Austin analysis, that I should know he had several off-the-field issues. Serious ones. You know, the kind you cannot say out loud because of silly things like “defamation laws.”

Allegedly.

I very much appreciated this intel and tried to carefully walk some of my analysis back, and ultimately, Austin wound up with the Birmingham Stallions after a short stint with the Jaguars, but the point is, this kind of data can only be gleaned via old fashioned investigative journalism. It is data that is as useful as anything I could ever put to a spreadsheet.

I have been wrong enough to have consumed several heaping teaspoons of humble pie over the last several years, which led me to completely redo WROPS this year and focus more on uncovering hidden gems than making grand pronouncements about prospects and where they will or should be drafted. That humbling was only reinforced by a Packer draft class in which Brian Gutekunst and his charges basically made no mistakes. Just nailed it. Sometimes you have to tip your cap and be glad you don’t cover a dumber team.

4. Everyone is Great Man

This grift has been going on forever and it used to drive me insane. The idea is quite simple: you just praise every prospect and come up with scenarios where any prospect can wind up on your team. Then, no matter what happens, you will have been right.

There’s an old trick that gambling services once used, where they would give free picks to, say, 1000 people, with 500 people getting one pick and 500 getting the opposite. Then they would do the same the following week to the 500 who received the correct pick the week before. After four iterations they would have 62 people convinced that they could accurately pick games every time. This is essentially the same scam, but for ego boost instead of money.

I’m not really bothered by it anymore because it’s so transparent at this point, and the one benefit of this group is they tend not to bother anyone else, because doing that would mean stating an actual opinion.

So if this is you, no worries. Enjoy your thousands of mock drafts, and universally positive scouting reports, where everyone is a “great fit” and a perfect replacement for the teams’ departing all-stars. If nothing else, you’ll be great the next time “Remember some guys” comes up.

5. Loud Rubes

UGGGGH. If I may bring back the smug superiority for just a moment, there are also a huge number of “analysts” who seem more inspired by talk radio/ESPN talking heads where it is better to be loud than correct, or to use any kind of reasoning, or tape watching, or technology, or proper English, at all.

You can’t really argue with Loud Rubes because they’re not interested in anything other than arguing, loudly. Facts don’t matter to them, and your attempt at speaking any facts will be met with the assertion that they are obviously right, and that you don’t know ball, and maybe a LOL. They want you to keep coming, because that’s how they draw energy. They’re little insecure energy vampires who need to tear others down in order to appear taller.

Their opinions are also 100% mainstream, though they pretend they are actually the opinions of an insightful rebel speaking truth to even louder rubes. Which is, I think, a good lesson in life.

We all know loud rubes in positions of power and wonder how they got there. The answer is often either nepotism or confidently yelling the conclusions of whatever the equivalent of the consensus board is, as if they’re the only ones smart enough to read it, or at least understand the color coding.

Loud rubes do not accept the existence of expertise or excellence, and simply assert their obvious claims to garner the largest share of attention possible, right or wrong. They totally won their fantasy league last year, and win all of their many bets at Draft Kings. They really want your team to sign the 31-year-old free agent that everyone has heard of. Not doing so cost the team at least three titles. This type may also randomly tell women who analyze football that they just like football to get attention.

Just the worst.

The Draft Needs to Get Here, Now.

I think one of the reasons for the success of Dane Brugler’s annual Beast, aside from the amazing thoroughness, is that despite analyzing and ranking hundreds of prospects, it’s extremely nonjudgmental. Brugler presents interesting facts about each prospect, but rarely offers an interpretation of how an upbringing impacted someone. He is honest about red flags, but they are only one data point among many. Strengths and weaknesses are put on full display, but in a way that doesn’t antagonize or court controversy.

We have several excellent analysts here as well, and Tyler’s big board, and Justis’ analysis take a similar tone in presenting exactly what they see, and what may and may not work for a prospect. When they disagree with each other or a widely-held opinion, they will often start with “I get it, but.” The primary goal of the best of draft analysts is to help everyone understand what each prospect brings to the table, not to “be right” about them.

And so, if you are a fellow draftnik that falls into any of the above categories, and you’re planning to interact with one of my opinions, or “takes,” please note that my goal this year is entirely on finding undiscovered gems, parsing out quarterbacks, and enjoying the actual draft weekend, and not justifying my opinion to you. I am aware of the thresholds. I understand how Keon Coleman looks on tape. I do. Really.

I’m sure you will all be right in your own ways, and I look forward to hearing all about it the following week, and if you’re wrong, I look forward to hearing about how you were still right, actually. Just as long as I never have to hear about arm length again.