Quote:
Originally Posted by over the mountain
in another thread you said its stupid to pick a QB at value. so if you need a qb, theres a qb with a top 5 grade and your picking 4th, you dont pick the qb? b/c that would be picking him at his value?
i get wanting to draft a qb with a pick later than his value but good luck finding that buggy with a porsche engine under the hood. i think every team would love to draft guys later than what they have them graded as is, but while players might slip here or there, its just not realistic.
|
Okay, I think I get what you're saying here. Let me explain.
Top five pick
in the draft and top five player
at his position are completely different concepts that I've erroneously referred to simply as "top five". If I were to give a quarterback a top five grade in the draft, it would imply that there are fewer that five players who have as much draft value as this player in the entire draft. On this principle alone, i.e. there's no one better available, the pick could make sense. If there's no one out there that fills a need, picking a quarterback isn't an inherently bad thing.
When I go to the numbers from 2009, I get about 11 players who, this season, provided more value to their teams than the expectation for Campbell. I get: Manning, Brady, Rivers, Brees, Romo, Schaub, Roethlisberger, Rodgers, Manning, Warner, and Favre. Going back one year adds Matt Ryan, Jay Cutler, and Chad Pennington (with McNabb on the very fringe), and drops Roethlisberger and Favre. I think that's a pretty exhaustive list of active players I'd take over Campbell. It's also about half the league.
I don't doubt that either Bradford or Clausen will someday be on this list of "top half" QBs. I doubt they will both be on it, just playing the probabilities. Unlikely, but certainly not impossible. The premise I'm going on is that not all of the above players were worth a top five pick.
Brady, definately. Peyton, sure, Rivers, Brees, Favre, Warner, and then
maybe Pennington and Ryan are the cream of that crop. 8 active quarterbacks drafted between 1991 and 2008 might have deserved top five pick status. I'd be willing to throw Steve McNair and Trent Green onto that list as well if you want to expand it to 10 quarterbacks.
How many of the 10 were actually drafted in the first round? I count 5, including McNair. How many were actually drafted in the top five? Four of the five.
I think this shows if you're after GREAT, you're not really more likely to get GREAT performance in the first five picks than in the rest of the draft. You're very likely to get
great if you pick up a Brady, Warner, or a Brees and also have great structure and talent around them. Now, performance on the whole is quite relative to draft position, so top ten quarterbacks outpeform quarterbacks from the lower half of the round, and while the second round has produced some great steals, the vast majority of second round quarterbacks are backup types.
I do not know how good Matt Ryan will be, but I think the Dolphins would have been justified taking him at No. 1 in 2008. Still, the Dolphins ended up better off not taking him, because Henne was a first round value that they took in the back end of the second round. And they got Jake Long. So given what they knew, it made sense to pass on Ryan. The Rams, on the other hand flat out made a mistake. It's fine that they wanted to work on their defense, and Chris Long is a great prospect still, but they banked heavily on Marc Bulger to bounce back and lost. He was even worse in 2008 than in 2007.
The Rams, of course, should have added offensive help via the draft if they were going to commit to Bulger. By drafting defense, even a great talent like Long, they sort of sealed Bulger's fate. 2008 was the terrible receiver year, and the Rams ended up being the first to take one, but tackles were plentiful (they would address this in 2009, but too late).
Most teams do draft most of their picks later than where they have them rated on their board. In the event that a QB comes out with tools and production (a rare combination in the age where coming out early means $), then teams shouldn't hesitate on pulling the trigger. It's key though to know that when players like this aren't around, that you have to make due with what you have.