This is something that’s always bugged me, how a guy can look unbeatable in college, all the scouts agree he’s one of the best they’ve ever seen, he gets signed to a huge contract and then… splat.
Sometimes it’s obvious, the person has serious personality issues that make success impossible. Drugs, gambling, just not being able to get along with people, trouble with the law, an unwillingness to work. And sometimes there are just injuries.
But that seems to be a minority of cases. Most of the time, guy gets drafted, he gets an opportunity to start, he works hard, he stays healthy, and it just doesn’t work. And in most cases, there doesn’t really seem to be a postmortem of why it didn’t work. Why wasn’t Todd Van Poppel’s 99 mph fastball good enough to make him the next Roger Clemens? He was the very definition of sure thing. Why wasn’t Tony Mandarich a dominant offensive tackle? Why wasn’t Heath Shuler in the Hall of Fame instead of in Congress? What happened with Brian Bosworth? He had more endorsement deals than sacks.
The conventional wisdom is that, thanks to using steroids while at Michigan State, Mandarich was relying on his strength to push opponents around. When he came to the NFL, he stopped using steroids (due to drug testing), and his strength wasn’t the same.
It also appears that he had a bad attitude, and not much of a work ethic, during the first part of his NFL career, which may have contributed to becoming a bust.
First round picks are really, really good against other College players. But most professional players are much, much better athletes than most college players, so dominance against what in professional terms is ‘sub-par’ college opponents doesn’t always translate to dominance against ‘par or better’ professional opponents.
Making matters worse, first round picks are often expected to excel, in an way that second-or-lower rounders are not. So if they are just ‘average’, that often equates to ‘failure’…whether in the eyes of fans, teammates, or just on a personal level. And once they have ‘failed’, it doesn’t much matter how ‘good’ they really might be…
Football is far faster at the NFL level than college. Enough so that some never make the adjustment despite talent.
Van Poppel failed because he had nothing but a 99 mph fastball. Overwhelming in high school, really fast for MLB but hittable once his *lack of any other pitch *became evident.
Without a curve, slider, change, etc, it’s nothing but high velocity batting practice.
That’s not a very satisfying explanation though for Van Poppel. How can you call a guy “cant’ miss”, a “once in a generation prospect” when he had nothing but an arm?
I also recall a scouting report from around 1991 saying his fastball was “straight”. WTF? Did his fastball have good movement in high school? What happened to his fastball?
Possibly “regression to the mean” - many of the candidates for the draft are just about equally talented, but the first round picks are those that are very talented, and also happened to have a great few years in college, due in part to their talents (of course) but due also to good fortune. In the pros, the talent is still there, but the good fortune might not be.
What happens with quarterbacks is that the skills needed to win in college are not necessarily those needed to win in the pros. NFL plays are more complex and faster, plus you don’t spend most of your season playing against patsy teams.
But another big factor is this: if you’re drafted high, you’re going to a team that’s pretty bad to begin with. And that team usually doesn’t have an good offensive line or receivers. A QB depends on both to be successful. No matter how good you are, if the defensive linemen are in your face, and the receivers can’t get in the clear, you’re going to do poorly.
With baseball, players usually take several years to develop. You just never know if something will hinder their development. Maybe they can’t learn a third pitch (needed for a starter). Maybe they can’t develop plate discipline. Maybe they don’t develop any power. It’s easy to be mistake.
There are a ton of guys who were “stars” since they were little kids based on raw physical prowess alone. They were simply bigger and stronger than the other kids, all the way through to high school. Most of them are exposed by the time they hit college when suddenly everyone else is just as big, strong, and fast as they are.
Some guys have enough raw talent they can still skate by in college, or even dominate in many circumstances (go to a small school, play against sub-par competition, etc.), but once they get to the professional level, hard work and dedication are now required, and if they don’t have that, they will fail.
Yeah, the competition is just harder in the pros. Entering the pro ranks they are no longer stars, even if they some physical superiority they are young and inexperienced. And on top of that they are suddenly rich, and maybe for the first time in charge of their own lives.
And, today, many (most?) major colleges run the spread offense. Being a spread QB apparently does fairly little to prepare a QB for the NFL, and NFL scouts struggle to assess which successful spread QBs will be able to make the leap. (And QB has historically been a position in which scouts and GMs have a poor track record for predicting NFL success, anyway.)
Or, as we used to call it, Archie Manning Syndrome.
I have to wonder if Heath Shuler would have been a success if he had been drafted later by a better team. He really did have a ton of talent and a great makeup as well. There was nothing wrong with him. I guess his confidence just got destroyed by getting killed out there.
It’s like freshmen at MIT. Every last one of them was the smartest person in their high school. Top of the class, builds robots, friends with local engineers, etc. But once they get to MIT, half of them all the sudden are below average. And one of these hot shots has the honor of being at the bottom of their MIT class. People who are used to being big fish in a small pond often have a difficult time adjusting to being in the middle or back of the pack.
Okay, but the idea, the reason scouts get paid, is to be able to project these guys. And in many cases, they don’t just say, “Well, with a little bit of adjustments, another pitch, a better throwing motion, a better jump shot, 10 extra pounds, etc. he could be great”. Many times the consensus is, “This guy is ready to dominate on Sundays RIGHT NOW and it’s a SURE THING!” And sometimes that does end up being true. Lots of rookies do actually perform very well right away.
So is the consensus simply that sometimes scouts, numerous scouts who all seem to agree, on a prospect, just get it wrong? And if so, doesn’t that also mean there could be a lot of star players out there who never got a shot? I guess that’s certainly true, given that some people, like Kurt Warner, had to go play arena football because no one saw his talent.
It’s possible of course, but if one has talent and wants to play college/pro sports, the scouts will find them. These people are, as a whole, very good at what they do. Scouts had already identified LeBron James as a future star when he was still in middle school, playing AAU ball.
It’s very likely Warner simply was not ready for the NFL, and also quite possible he would never have become a viable NFL QB had he not gained experience in the AFL.
I do think so. I also suspect that the intangibles, such as how the prospect is able to handle stress and enormous expectations, factor in, as does his maturity level. It’s why NFL teams (and, I presume, other pro sports) now conduct interviews, and work with psychologists, as they evaluate prospects (particularly prospective first-rounders).
Hell, Warner even had a cup of coffee in the Packers’ training camp in 1994, before heading to the AFL, and they let him go. Granted, they were a little stocked at QB at that point (their other QBs in camp that year were Brett Favre, Mark Brunnell, and Ty Detmer), and apparently Jon Gruden (the Packers’ QB coach) told Warner that he had potential, but wasn’t ready yet (and clearly wasn’t going to get a chance to gain experience in Green Bay).
Teams have gotten good at looking in unusual places for talent, and the proliferation of social media has given more players a chance to be seen (like Moritz Boeringer, the German wide receiver who was drafted by the Vikings this year), but undoubtedly, there are still guys who never even get that shot.
I believe another part of the equation, at least for football, is that the high draft choices are often (if not always) forced into immediate playing time without the benefit of a couple of years of development behind an experienced mentor. After all - that’s why they were drafted so high (and paid a lot more money) to begin with. This may not be such a big thing for running backs and a few other positions, but I think it certainly factors into the situation for quarterbacks. It’s very much a sink or swim proposition, and without the supporting cast as mentioned above, they are much more likely to sink than not.
Well, he didn’t make any ourageous claims. Sure there are some failures every year, but overall the scouts do a good job:
The numbers show us the following outline for finding consistent starters:
1st Round - OL (83%) LB (70%) TE (67%) DB (64%) QB (63%) WR (58%) RB (58%) DL (58%)
2nd Round - OL (70%) LB (55%) TE (50%) WR (49%) DB (46%) QB (27%) DL (26%) RB (25%)
3rd Round - OL (40%) TE (39%) LB (34%) DL (27%) WR (25%) DB (24%) QB (17%) RB (16%)
4th Round - DL (37%) TE (33%) OL (29%) LB (16%) WR(12%) DB (11%) RB (11%) QB (8%)
5th Round - TE (32%) DB (17%) WR (16%) OL (16%) DL (13%) RB (9%) LB (4%) QB (0%)
6th Round - TE (26%) OL (16%) DL (13%) WR (9%) DB (8%) RB (6%) LB (5%) QB (0%)
7th Round - DB (11%) OL (9%) QB (6%) WR (5%) DL (3%) LB (2%) RB (0%) TE (0%)
Baseball is tougher, because a miniscule number of players are capable of playing in the Major Leagues before age 21 and most players are drafted at 17 or 18. Most “can’t miss” players are just being hyped.
Re: Von Poppel. The average fastball in High School is in the high 70’s mph. Put a kid in against a high 90’s fastball and he can barely get the bat off his shoulder.
Why aren’t the All-Star teams exactly the same every year?
Like, seriously, why does a guy make the All-Star team one year and not the next? Why does a guy lead the league in scoring one year and not the year after? Why does a guy score 43 goals one year and suddenly 21 the next? Why did Corey Kluber win the Cy Young Award one year and go 8-16 the next? Obviously there’s some consistency; Tom Brady doesn’t go from being Tom Brady one year to being Ryan Leaf the next.
The answer is simply that athletic performance is unpredictable. Even for players within the same league you do not know for sure what might happen next year. When you add in the difference between NCAA play and the big leagues, it’s more unpredictable still. You can even dismiss the notion of the game being fundamentally different, because the same thing happens in sports where it’s NOT fundamentally different. There is no difference of any consequence at all between the styles of play of the AHL and the NHL, but still you never know.