I can’t believe we’re actually engaging on this lazy garbage.
That’s their frickin jobs, though. That’s the very reason they’re making millions of dollars: to avoid busts and build a contending team. Yes, part of the job involves projecting the unknowable future, but to say that GMs shouldn’t be condemned for their draft picks is nonsensical. That’s their job.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have a generally good track record evaluating talent. I’m saying that any individual flop isn’t indicative of bad judgement. If you can show me a GM who’s never drafted a player that disappointed relative to their college-level evaluations, then I’ll show you a rookie GM.
His success is not an absurd statistical outlier, except in the sense that it’s a statistical outlier regardless of draft position. Nobody has won that many Super Bowls regardless of where they were drafted.
Dan Fouts, Joe Montana and Fran Tarkenton went in the third round. Drew Brees and Brett Favre were second-rounders. Warren Moon, John Unitas, Kurt Warner and Tony Romo were undrafted. Steve Young was taken in the supplemental draft (albeit previously having been a first-round pick in the USFL).
When you factor in the reality that non-first-round quarterbacks rarely get a chance to start in the modern NFL absent injury (and that first-round quarterbacks get to keep starting for a couple of years even when they are clearly not the best player at the position yet), it’s not surprising that fewer low-drafted QBs pan out.
None of that is to suggest that we can donk Pace for not drafting Mahomes. Nobody knew how good he was going to be.
I never actually took statistics, but here’s what I meant. All values are off the top of my head.
Say a first round pick at any position has a
- 70% chance of becoming an everyday starter
- 20% chance of becoming an All-Pro
- 2% chance of having a Hall-of-Fame-caliber career
A second-rounder’s odds go down to
- 50%
- 10%
- 1%
And so on. For any 6th rounder at any position to have a HOF-caliber career has to be a 0.01% bet.
If you were going to bet on a round for drafting the GOAT at the most difficult, most important position in the game, first round would be 3-5, 2nd round 4-1, etc. 6th round would be lottery territory.
I sure didn’t.
But I do think it’s more than fair to criticize Pace for a) trading up against no one, b) drafting a one year starter QB with the #2 pick.
I thought Trubisky had the best chance to succeed in the NFL of all the QBs, but still didn’t think he merited the #2 pick in the draft. He was clearly a developmental QB, with very little experience, couldn’t beat out Marquise Williams for the starting job, , and had big question marks about his ability to read defenses. To draft him at #2 was just another example of the insane overvaluation of questionable QBs in the NFL draft.
We will see it again this year, where 5 QBs are projected to go in the first 10 picks. But that’s a topic for the NFL draft thread. Which someone should get on creating.
Great player, fun to watch, sorry to see him go. But bone-on-bone is a bad place to be and he’s never going to be able to play the game the way he has over the past 12 years. There’s a slight possibility he ends up in Tampa but there would be no reason for him to retire in order to do that.
My recollection, going into that draft, was that while Trubisky was one of the top QB prospects, the fact that he’d only been a one-year starter (as good as he was in that year) was something that made a lot of analysts question how high he should go in the draft.
It became clear that Pace (and probably Nagy) fell in love with the guy, and went all-in to get him; unless the Bears pull a rabbit out of their hat this year and turn it around, both men are likely to be fired, and the miscalulation on Trubisky will be the primary reason why.
Nagy wasn’t the coach yet – he was still an assistant in KC, helping draft and train Mahomes.
I stand corrected, thank you!
Worth emphasizing again that Pace paid a lot to move up one spot in the draft and that there was no competition for the pick.
Talent evaluation is part of the job of the front office. But so is evaluating the competition. Pace had totally the wrong read on several other GMs and teams. And GMs in the NFL don’t get mulligans because it’s their first time in charge of a draft.
The team on the other side of that deal - San Francisco - by contrast got their top picks and were able to get them lower in the draft than they thought they might. The results of those 1st round picks is mixed to positive (McGlinchey still plays for them and Reuben Foster got dumped due to personal issues and plays for Washington now) but the consensus is they had a very good draft. In hindsight, they get graded lower because there aren’t the big generational talents (though George Kittle is very good) but their decision making and deal making was absolutely spot on.
We really don’t know if that’s true. No one else is going to admit if they were also trying to trade up for Trubs.
[quote=“Great_Antibob, post:271, topic:932489, full:true”]…
The team on the other side of that deal - San Francisco - by contrast got their top picks and were able to get them lower in the draft than they thought they might. The results of those 1st round picks is mixed to positive (McGlinchey still plays for them and Reuben Foster got dumped due to personal issues and plays for Washington now) but the consensus is they had a very good draft. In hindsight, they get graded lower because there aren’t the big generational talents (though George Kittle is very good) but their decision making and deal making was absolutely spot on.
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McGlinchey was the next draft and unrelated to the deal with Chicago. Solomon Thomas was a tweener that never found a spot to play pro football. That was clear pretty quickly (it was my concern when he was picked). The 2017 draft ended up as a disaster for the 49ers. Yes, Kittle is great, but that hardly makes up for eight of the ten selections no longer on the roster. We had no QB and still passed on Mahomes and Watson (and Trubsiki for that matter). Traded away the chance to draft Alvin Kamara… many bad choices.
I guess my standard for success is different. I wouldn’t by any stretch call it a disaster.
After 4 seasons, a majority of draft picks no longer being on the roster is not exactly surprising. The average NFL career length is shorter than 4 seasons, i.e. more than half the average NFL team’s 2017 draft picks aren’t playing football at all, much less for the team that drafted them.
By that measure, outside of Mahomes, Kansas City has a disastrous 2017 draft as well. Worse than the 49ers at any rate. But they get judged highly for that single picks rather than the rest of their boards.
By that argument, prudent investors who underperform the market one year are worse money managers than day traders who have one really great day.
SF knew what Jimmy Johnson knew 3 decades ago - few teams are going to be much better or much worse at drafting than other NFL teams. So, get a lot of picks so you have more chances. Their decision making was fine, even if their picks didn’t end up working out as well as hoped. They did better than the average team. They can’t all be winners.
That’s sort of cherry picking stats. The Bears 2017 draft is largely considered a disaster and they got Eddie Jackson and Tarik Cohen out of it. The general argument that everyone is terrible at drafting and more picks is better is mostly true, but that doesn’t mean that the right tactic is to always trade down or to always trade away proven players for lottery tickets.
Where Jimmy Johnson was smart was not that he understood the inefficiencies in the draft, it’s that he was early in understanding that one great player (especially a RB) on a mediocre to bad team is worth less than a bunch of picks over the long term. In fact you could argue that Jimmy’s famous draft value chart strongly favors having fewer high picks over many mid-round picks which is the exact opposite of the point you’re making.
I suppose?
Take a look at the other teams in 2017 and in hindsight SF, at worst, had an above average draft compared to the average NFL team by making solid decisions to get 10 picks and not trading up for players they wanted. Several of the teams who in hindsight did better essentially got lucky with a generational talent, not necessarily through superior talent evaluation or decision making.
Chicago’s draft is considered poor for doing the opposite - giving up several picks, including one the next year, for little to no return. There’s the difference between judging the decision and judging the result but they failed that first pick both ways, voluntarily paying extra for draft security they didn’t need and then getting a flawed franchise QB out of it for their efforts.
A couple of years ago Seattle drafted Rashaad Penny in the first round. He has turned out to be a fine running back but almost definitely not worth the first round pick; this is complicated by the fact that he has been injured for much of his NFL career. Note that Nick Chubbs was drafted later by Cleveland in that draft, so Seattle missed out on that, and was criticized for it even at the time, it’s not just a hindsight thing.
Seattle claimed that when they made the pick for Penny, multiple teams privately let them know that they had planned to draft him just after that and they even had a trade offer for him on draft day. If that’s true, then it doesn’t seem as silly a pick. But I don’t think there’s any way to know whether that is true or if that’s just a rumor that was started to justify their decision-making. We really don’t know what kind of wheeling and dealing is done behind the scenes; we only get to see what happens when people make the picks and make trades.
I suspect it’s a little of both. My belief is that there are LOTS of conversations going on amongst teams before and during the draft. Lots of players are mentioned and lots of trades are hypothesized. I don’t think teams tend to outright lie in most cases, but I suspect that they leak favorable examples and by holding back the rest it elevates the leaked example. The net result is that a off-the-cuff conversation or a wild ass proposal that never gets past the sniff test suddenly gets discussed like it was on the verge of happening.
I firmly believe that more teams than the Bears were talking to SF about trading up for a QB. Some may or may not have been targeting Trubisky explicitly, but that SF pick was likely on the move. The Bears making the blocking move of trading up is terrible in hindsight but at the time is was a reasonable hedge. But, being wrong on the player renders it all moot. Had they traded up for Mahomes they’d be geniuses.
To be fair, Trubisky appeared to be the best talent in a QB-weak draft (see Blake Bortles). And Pace would certainly have been criticized for coming out of the draft without a QB. It admittedly makes little sense to give up picks to move up one spot.
So apparently Jacksonville fans, expecting Trevor Lawrence to be the first pick, bought him a wedding gift. I’m a pretty big sports fan but this makes little sense to me. The dude is about to become a very rich man and you’re giving him your money? Oy vey.