One of the biggest traps you can fall into as a professional coach is to draft based on accomplishment at the level below without taking into account potential for growth. Every athlete peaks at some point. For the 5’7" point guard, that point may be in middle school and for the 6’7" ‘tweener’ sized basketball forward, that point may be in college. You may be the absolute best there is at your sport at a particular spot in your development, but if that is your peak, you will not successfully transition to the next level.
It is very tempting to grab the ultimate achiever on the college level and expect him to keep developing, but if this player has been performing at peak level (ie not showing growth) for the last two years, he is probably not a good prospect, not matter how bright and shiny he looks in the here and now.
Far and away, I think it’s because the expectations placed on a first round pick seem to put them in the superstar bucket, or the sucks bucket, and there’s no middle ground.
To use the Tim Tebow example, how good would he have to have been to NOT be considered a first round bust, instead of the spectacular bust he turned out to be. I mean, I think had he ended up a competent, if unspectacular backup quarterback a-la Jon Kitna, he’d still have been considered a bust, even though that’s about where his very best outcome would have been in the NFL. So merely being OK means that he’s a first round bust. Flaming out like Ryan Leaf or Johnny Manziel is something entirely different- those guys literally threw it away, as opposed to merely not living up to possibly unrealistic expectations.
Beyond that, I think that NFL player evaluation is not quite as awesome as people assume it must be; they just now started doing Sabermetrics-ish things for choosing football players, for example. Personally, I think that far too much emphasis is put on the purely physical- height, weight, speed, strength, and the mental aspects of the game are at best, considered within the context of watching game footage.
A symptom of this kind of thinking is what Adaher describes- trying to pick players to fit a system or scheme, instead of picking the scheme to fit the players they have, or can get.
There’s also a sort of reliance on ‘lore’ in the football world; everybody almost ALWAYS punts on 4th down, despite statistical analysis showing that something like 60% of the time, it’s in a team’s best interest to go for it. I don’t doubt that similar flawed bandwagon thinking comes into play when choosing players as well.
Another thought: sometimes teams fall in love with the physical attributes of a player, and it usually takes more than just those physical attributes to be successful in the pros.
The Oakland Raiders, particularly during Al Davis’s twilight years, were the textbook example of this. They would go for players who scored very well in the “underwear Olympics” at the Combine (such as JaMarcus Russell and Darrius Heyward-Bey), but who probably lacked the full package of skills (and, at least in Russell’s case, the mindset) for success in the NFL.
I was thinking last night while watching the Giants preseason opener something similar to the point about going from a big fish in a little pond to the other way around. Is football unique in that most of those big fish have to come in and do something completely different?
For all their lives up until drafted – in any round – these guys were the among the very best players on any field they set foot on. But once they get to the pros, all of a sudden they get relegated to special teams. Ha! That’s a whole 'nother job. Does this happen in any other sport?
For example, the best wide receiver on his high school and college team is now running punt coverage, trying to break through two guys to tackle the returner at full speed. This is a skillset he’s probably never seen in his entire life, and there’s a good chance that mastering this skill is the only way he can make the team.
The Giants fell prey to that somewhat during the Coughlin era. He just loved players who were very large. I think he took the team name a little too much to heart. This is, of course, the most minor of quibbles; it’s hard to argue with his results.
It’s not stupid, it’s that coaches nearly always match the personnel to their system. Buddy Ryan was running the 46 defense, and if his players were ideal for a traditional 4-3, then he’d be making some trades.
Building an offense around Tim Tebow got the Broncos into the 2nd round of the playoffs. What did Kyle Orton do for them? How many QBs on supposedly good teams failed to get their team to the playoffs? And how often do young QBs get saddled with new systems that don’t fit their talents, and then get blamed?
Offensive coordinators are brilliant. And they want you to know it. They don’t get head coaching jobs by just competently guiding a unit to glory. THey get head coaching jobs by innovating and being able to take credit for having brilliant game plans.
Does Josh McDaniels have an ego? I’ll take your word for it. But where he’s worked, he’s fit the offense to the talents of the personnel. He’s not doing stupid things like trying to make Tom Brady manage the run and shoot, unlike a couple of coordinators in the 90s who shall go down in infamy.
It’s just an oddly specific example to bring up considering what an inaccurate view you’re taking of it.
This is the guy who famously took over the #2 ranked offense in the NFL and immediately fired the entire staff and deliberately ran the starting quarterback out of town while trying to acquire the quarterback from his previous team, which failed. Kyle Orton was his guy, not somebody McDaniels got saddled with. He traded for Orton, then started him for a full year. Then he drafted Tebow, and eventually started him over Orton. I don’t understand what building an offense around Tebow is supposed to demonstrate – he went and got the guy in the first place. If he was such a wizard at building an offense around the talent, why didn’t he just keep the very talented but frustrating 25 year old Pro Bowl quarterback who he inherited?
Yeah, they should’ve stuck with Cutler, but he’s notoriously not a particularly outgoing character (or leader). However, you can look at it this way: if they hadn’t dumped Jay, there’s a good chance Peyton would never have gotten his second ring. For me, that’s a win, even if it took a while.
Another answer to the OP: because these athletes are unformed. It’s not like a video game, where each rookie has a hidden “Potential” rating and it’s just a matter of making sure her gets enough experience to reach it.
I’ve linked to this article before, but it bears repeating (skip down to “The Development Secret”).
I have relatively recently (over the last decade or so) become friends with a retired NHLer. As a total non-athlete but lifelong sports fan, one thing I have slowly (reluctantly?) come to recognize from talking with him about hockey is that sports is way more than stats and ratings and numbers and measurements.
Forget about numbers for a minute and think about how complicated the universe can be, how many factors come into play to determine any given result. Could you use statistics to predict who would be a good parent? A good computer programmer? A good artist? I think what I’ve come to realize is sport is an art as much as (if not more than) a science.
Sports statistics can be interesting and fun as a descriptive tool, but (I’m guessing) are probably near-useless (similar to chance?) for making predictions. Are there any studies on that? Could a study be done? Is there a way to prove whether sabermetrics et al. are demonstrably better than astrology at predicting success?
Well, sure. If you gan get an NFL or College team to eschew punting altogether for a season, you can measure average ending field position of drives based upon where an average punt + return would give you.
You can measure goal scoring efficiency (minus goals given up) by pulling the goalie with five minutes left instead of with one or two.
A baseball team that has the first and third basemen “hug the line” to prevent extra base hits late in games start to play in regular position, you can measure the scoring effects of that.
So it seems to me then that scouts should never say, “ready to play on Sundays right now” or “can’t-miss”. The problem for the fan is that you buy these preview magazines and they analyze the draft and scouts who aren’t even being paid by the team in question use all kinds of superlatives to describe these guys and half the time they end up not succeeding.
