NFL Draft Prospects Are Potential, Not Potential Rounds

It's time to change the conversation around the young men who are about to enter the National Football League. 

With most Pro Days in the rearview mirror, and with roughly three weeks remaining until the NFL draft takes place in Chicago at the end of the month, NFL fans can look forward to hundreds if not thousands of mock drafts and endless speculation about which college prospect will go where. 

I know I should love this sort of thing. As someone who works at NFL Network told me the other day "It's great for business!" 

Yeah, I know. I could seriously put up a different mock draft every other day on this site and they would probably get twice the traffic of all our other posts combined. But throwing stuff blindly against a wall just isn't my thing. 

Not to mention, there's something else about the whole NFL draft silly season that has always bugged me. Chiefly, the way that the Draft Industrial Complex talks about prospects. This guy is a "sure first rounder." That guy is a "Third day guy." Never mind the fact that after the top 10 to 15 players there really isn't that much of a difference between the next forty or so. At that point it's all about a prospect fitting what a program needs from him. 

With NFL fans bombarded by this idea that a guy is "worth" a particular round, when he is inevitably chosen in a different round, all sorts of ignorant bluster gets thrown out and regurgitated from pretty much the end of the draft until the preseason begins. 

Former Browns general manager and current Executive Director of the Senior Bowl, Phil Savage, recently wrote about this on the Senior Bowl website and I absolutely loved what he had to say. 

During my time in the NFL, we utilized a grading system that essentially divided the players into five different levels on our draft board. In truth, this is the way that all of us should be talking about prospects in the days leading up to the draft. 

STARTER/ALL-PRO PLAYER
Starts day one or during rookie season, a prospect whose physical abilities create mismatches that have an obvious impact on the game, a future All-Pro.

EVENTUAL STARTER/QUALITY NFL PLAYER
Expected to start during rookie season, a prospect who should be productive within his first two years, a quality NFL player.

POTENTIAL STARTER/FUNCTIONAL NFL PLAYER
Anticipated to start within three seasons, has a deficient area of play that should be overcome, a functional NFL player.

BACKUP/NFL ROSTER PLAYER
Would only start due to team/injury circumstances, his playing deficiencies cannot be overcome, backup or spot player only.

FREE AGENT/NFL CAMP PLAYER
Capable of a respectable showing in preseason, has too many playing deficiencies to make a 53-man roster, a camp player.

Doesn't that make a whole lot more sense? The whole post is well worth your time and I highly recommend you read it. 

I'll definitely be adopting this terminology when covering the draft here at Cheesehead TV and over at Sports Illustrated. I hope you'll join me. 

 

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Comments (12)

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Alex Tallitsch's picture

April 11, 2015 at 03:55 pm

Would you agree that one player can change categories over his career?

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PackerAaron's picture

April 11, 2015 at 04:12 pm

I think that can happen, sure. Aaron Kampman is a good example of a player who a lot of evaluators probably would have put in the 3rd or 4th category who worked his way into the 2nd.

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@ballark's picture

April 20, 2015 at 05:13 pm

Linsley another good example.

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Clay Zombo's picture

April 12, 2015 at 12:01 am

There are so many variables and things that cant be measured its impossible to be right everytime, no matter how you slot players.

Whether GMs slot players by round or not, you can bet plenty of them pay attention to mock drafts. Its the nature of the beast, you want all the information you can get. Even if its just a bunch of opinions.

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Thegreatreynoldo's picture

April 12, 2015 at 01:54 am

Thinking in terms of tiers makes a lot of sense and is nothing new. NFL.com uses 11 tiers. I don't like their tiers (too top heavy) and I don't particularly like your tiers (too concentrated). I use 4 tiers just to reach roughly the middle of round 2.

Tier 1: Usually there are 1-4 players who should be elite. Tier 2: Maybe another 7 or 8 players with a chance to be elite, and should be instant good starters. Tier 3: Perhaps 10-14 players who should be average or better starters year one and develop into good starters year 2 (depends on position). I had Clinton Dix and one other player in Tier 3 still available when GB picked Clinton Dix at #21. Tier 3 is also synonymous with Solid 1st round grade for me. Tier 4 (where GB often picks) can have 12 to 15 players, more or less the 1st/2nd round grade types. There is a tremendous difference picking #30 versus picking 7th, 12th or even 16th most years. Tier 5 might have 30 to 50 players and so on. These tiers are elastic. Some years there is a deep draft, or one with great talent at the top, or not so great talent at the top but good depth, etc.

Regarding rounds, I think since GMs have to make picks during certain rounds, it is the handiest way to characterize players, particularly in the later rds. I would guess this isn't going away anytime soon.

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PackerAaron's picture

April 12, 2015 at 09:21 am

To be clear, they're not mine. They're Phil's.

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D.D.Driver's picture

April 12, 2015 at 11:54 am

It also makes sense because it is a system that is less prone to get swallowed up by the NFL fads. I would put Melvin Gordon on the borderline of the first and second tier, but he may not even get drafted until the second round because NFL teams don't value RBs as much as they used to.

Similarly, sometimes you have a really deep draft at a particular position. In those years ranking a player based upon what "round" you think they will go in is a completely useless exercise.

Remember when Thompson traded down to draft Greg Jennings and the Patriots draft Chad Jackson (a name I had to look up because he was such a forgettable player) and fans went nuts because Jackson was a projected late first round pick and Jennings was a projected third round pick? The truth was they both had similar potential. (Jennings lived up to his potential and Jackson didn't.) It was completely arbitrary to rank one of them as a first round player and the other as a third round player.

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Doug_In_Sandpoint's picture

April 15, 2015 at 06:35 pm

Not sure that it really matters how you talk about it leading up to the draft. It ends up being the same thing, doesn't it? We'd expect tier one players to go at the beginning of the first round and then we work our way down the list as "tiers" turn into "rounds." Think that the key for the Pack is value. Get the highest tiered player on our list at the time our turn comes. Being a reach or a steal is just getting a higher tiered player at a later round or a lower assessed player at a higher round.

It is all just language designed to assess players. The mock drafts do suck me in because I like to see what others see as our needs and how that intersects with possible scenarios.

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greenngold's picture

April 15, 2015 at 07:19 pm

In my mind, it's potato/potahto. Clearly those STARTER/ALL-PRO PLAYER's are generally going to be considered round 1-2 players. EVENTUAL STARTER/QUALITY NFL PLAYER's - 2-3 rounders and so on. Now there are differing opinions by each team on exactly where each player falls, and there are always some that surprise. If you have a player that you consider to potentially be a pro bowl or even immediate starter, he's certainly going to be considered a 1st or 2nd. It still comes down to evaluating each players pluses and minuses and whether you classify them by numbers or words is merely semantics.

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Turophile's picture

April 17, 2015 at 03:01 am

Trying to shoehorn players into a handful of categories will create problems.

Firstly the above categories cannot deal with talented players with serious red flags, so you would have to rate such players higher than they are likely to go.

Second, there is no proper place for the "immediate starter but limited upside" player. Only the first tier is an immediate starter, which is not representative of a limited upside guy who can start game 1.

Thirdly, some teams have better quality players than others, so a starter quality guy for one team is a clear backup on another.

Tiers are better, because you can put anyone into any tier for any reason, no misleading descriptions.

Even this has drawbacks. You have to put the cutoff of a tier somewhere. When the top guy in a tier is clearly better than a guy 30 picks later they should not be in the same tier, but if the talent drops slowly, in tiny increments, the placement of that tier end is pretty much an arbitrary process.

Perhaps the best method is simply grading a player with a number, but without getting too tied up with what that number means, beyond setting a maximum achievable grade by anyone (for example, 10, with variations down from there to one decimal point as they do on NFL draft tracker). This allows absolute flexibility, while allowing many players to have an identical grade (which is why this system is better than attaching to each prospect a notional draft spot (as CBS does).

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joepacker's picture

April 17, 2015 at 09:28 am

btw Aaron, thank you for not posting mock drafts.

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Handsback's picture

April 17, 2015 at 04:21 pm

The different tiers makes a lot of sense when looking at the player's history and measureables. Obviously players can improve and move up to the top tier with proper training and desire. Finding lower tier players that will do that is the Holy Grail of Scouting.

Green Bay (TT) has been willing to select players from small schools or UDFAs that have developed into All-Pro performers. They had talent, but it was either not developed or they had been injured and their capabilities were hidden from their last season. I'm not sure there are a lot of teams that can pull it off as effectively as Green Bay has over the past few years. This year will be no exception. I'm not sure who the next Mike Pennel or Jayrone Elliot is in this year's rookies, but rest assure TT will try like the devil to find him.

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