Friday, April 13, 2007
The edge of reason?
The NFL Draft is coming up, which means that Mel Kiper slithers out of his chamber and loudly informs us which players will become the next Curtis Enis or Ryan Leaf. I was reading some previews of the draft and came across one in particular, on ESPN, entitled "The edge of reason."
The article is about how the three-year-old daughter of LSU coach Les Miles has a huge crush on JaMarcus Russell, the former Tigers' quarterback who could be drafted No. 1 overall.
Since this is a sports website, they actually talk more about Russell and why coaches and scouts view him as the best quarterback in the draft. He's 6-foot-6, weighs more than 250 pounds and can reportedly throw a football 80 yards. Therefore, he appears to be physically gifted. From the scouts, we get the typical talk about how they've never seen anyone who has the same physical gifts as Russell.
I think the word "never" should be banned from scouts' vocabulary. They say it all the time, and it's ... umm, never true.
Anyway, the best quote in the whole article comes from Brad Childress, the Minnesota Vikings coach:
"Have you seen his gosh darn hands?. They're huge. It's like the kid has an extra knuckle. Sure, there are lots of things I'd like to know about him. But physically, he's off the charts. It's exciting. You just simply can't deny his physical gifts. It all starts with that."
His hands are huge. Therefore, he will be an amazing quarterback.
I don't get it.
I don't get why physical gifts are now the most important aspect of any athlete when being drafted. I think it started in the NBA with all of the high-upside high schoolers who entered the draft in recent years, and it's now filtered over to the NFL and baseball.
Athleticism is great. You need to be athletic in order to succeed in athletics. But you still have to be able to perform finely-tuned tasks and have specific abilities in order to be good at the game. The fact that JaMarcus Russell has freakishly large hands will not help him in any way in the NFL, unless the league changes the game ball from an oblong pigskin to a 14-pound bowling ball.
The ESPN article has a great stat (from Football Outsiders) that says the greatest predictor of a quarterback's ability in the NFL is not his hands, or his arm strength, or his 40 time; it's the number of starts he made in college. In recent years, the quarterbacks with the most starts in college have been Philip Rivers (51), Donovan McNabb (49) and Carson Palmer (45). Russell made 29 starts in college, which places him among Rex Grossman, Joey Harrington and Akili Smith -- another physically gifted signal-caller who had "all of the tools" to succeed.
For the record, Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn made 46 starts in college, and was widely thought to be better than Russell up until the last game of the season. Before the Sugar Bowl, Russell had only thrown for more than 269 yards once in his junior season -- Quinn failed to reach that mark just twice last year.
So why do people in sports continually look past performance and focus on tools and upside? Just the other day, I was reading an article that talked about how athletic the Devil Rays are. The writer talked about how if baseball were to implement a decathlon competition, the Rays would win, hands-down.
That's pretty cool. Except, the Rays play baseball. And they suck at it.
I think that the biggest reason for this approach is just pure arrogance. Every coach thinks they can be the one to coax and teach a physically gifted player to become a star. It's why teams will reach for Russell over a sure thing like Calvin Johnson. It's why Vince Young was taken over Matt Leinart. It's the reason Darko Milicic was drafted ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade and Kirk Hinrich.
I understand the idea of taking a higher risk player in some situations. I think the Bulls were OK in taking Tyrus Thomas last year; it was a weak draft and there were no players available that filled an immediate need for them, so they went with upside. But for teams who have holes all over the place, there's no reason to take a project when a safer bet is available.
I'm curious if this is going to continue, or if sports teams will eventually learn from all of the mistakes. Either we're going to see this trend eventually level off and GMs revert back to drafting players based on their actual ability, or it's only going to get worse, and we'll see football teams draft Olympic sprinters with no competitive football experience to play wide receiver.
Yeah, now that I think about it, this will probably keep getting worse. I can't wait until Jim Hendry drafts Justin Gatlin to replace Matt Murton.
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The funniest thing I've heard regarding the draft, is to pretend that Mel Kiper is not analyzing college football players, but rather Adult Film stars.
Thus when you hear him say "I really like the way he uses his hips" you can laugh...because not only is Mel Kiper's entire existence tragically hysterical, it's also pretty damn funny to twist everything.
And you know what they say about guys with big hands (and extra knuckles)
That they'll be Hall of Fame quarterbacks?
It always cracks me up that the best teams (the ones drafting at the end of each round) seem to get the best, most well-rounded, professional-ready athletes. I think of the Patriots and the Colts in particular. The Colts have gotten guys like Mike Doss and Marlin Jackson; the Pats have Laurence Maroney and Logan Mankins. Would they get those unproven athletic freaks if they were available at that point or are they just that much better at drafting than the shitty teams?
Also, I guess it should be noted that because those teams are better, they can afford to bring their players along a little more gradually, even if they are thrust into starting spots fairly early in their careers. That, to me, is the greatest factor in why guys like Ryan Leaf fail miserably and guys like Tom Brady succeed. Not the only factor, clearly, but the biggest.