First Impressions
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Take it all in with a grain of salt
That's my advice as we get closer to the 2013 NFL Draft later this month. I know most of you love it and I'm truly glad that you are so into it because that is good for me and my profession but it really amounts to very little.
I'm talking about the pre and post-draft analysis of NFL prospects. NFL fans get inundated with information on this year's crop of players no matter where you turn whether it is television, radio, magazines, or especially the internet. Heck there are seemingly hundreds of people in the media that make a living solely based upon sizing up and scrutinizing these kids.
That's not me being critical of the people providing the analysis. They all for the most part do a very good job evaluating these players the best they can. So do the teams. Thousands upon thousands of man hours go into preparing for this single event.
And despite all of that time and effort the draft is still an educated guess at best and the reality is you really don't know how your team did for at least four years. Nobody does. And yes, I said four for a very specific reason which we will get to.
Even the first impressions the players make in their first action with their professional team can be misleading. Very much so. Let me give you a textbook example to illustrate my point.
My third year in the NFL the team I was on selected a junior tight end out of Tennessee in the third round who pundits said was talented but raw and should have stayed in school another year. They also signed an undrafted rookie free agent quarterback out of Eastern Illinois after the draft that nobody cared about. I still remember their first minicamp vividly.
The quarterback was undersized and youthful looking, didn't get any repetitions from what I recall, and wasn't even a blip on the radar screen for me or any of the other veterans. The tight end was most certainly on the radar screen ... because he was terrible. I mean bad. I can remember thinking he was soft physically, unsure of himself mentally, and a bad draft choice. He was the worst drafted rookie at that minicamp and couldn't have made a poorer first impression.
That was almost exactly ten years ago, back in 2003. That "terrible" tight end is a perennial Pro Bowler who will almost certainly be in the Hall of Fame someday. The afterthought quarterback just signed a 6 year, $108 million extension that makes him the highest paid player in the history of one of the NFL's most storied franchises.
Yes, as many of you have no doubt figured out by now, the tight end was Jason Witten and the quarterback was Tony Romo, both of whom have become stalwarts of the Dallas Cowboys.
There's a lot of lessons to be learned here.
First of all, there wasn't a ton of pre-draft hype or conversation surrounding Witten and none for Romo. Fans and even draft analysts focus so much attention on the first round that they lose sight of the fact that good, and sometimes great, players can be had in the later rounds and even after the draft.
Even after the draft when fans, draft experts, and local beat writers evaluated (and graded, which is really funny) the Cowboys first haul under new head coach Bill Parcells there was not a ton said about Witten other than him being a developmental prospect. Again, nothing at all on Romo at that point.
Usually you can at least garner some sort of idea as to what a rookie class might have in store based upon the first impressions they make the first time they get out on the grass. Even that, especially in Witten's case, was fool's gold.
So it takes four years before you can really begin to evaluate a group. Why four? Well, Tony Romo didn't get a chance to start any games until his fourth season in Big D. If we evaluated the Cowboys 2003 draft class after three years we would have been doing it a huge disservice. Romo has become the best quarterback for the franchise since Troy Aikman and well deserving of the contract that he just received. Would Cowboys fans rather be trying to make a trade for Matt Flynn or Carson Palmer like some other NFL franchises have been recently? Didn't think so.
Romo brings up another point. Undrafted free agents count. I always think it is funny when people evaluate draft classes and don't mention the undrafted free agents. Those players are scouted thoroughly and often recruited intensely towards the tail end of the draft. They are part of that draft class and, in Romo's case, a vital part.
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Take it all in with a grain of salt
That's my advice as we get closer to the 2013 NFL Draft later this month. I know most of you love it and I'm truly glad that you are so into it because that is good for me and my profession but it really amounts to very little.
I'm talking about the pre and post-draft analysis of NFL prospects. NFL fans get inundated with information on this year's crop of players no matter where you turn whether it is television, radio, magazines, or especially the internet. Heck there are seemingly hundreds of people in the media that make a living solely based upon sizing up and scrutinizing these kids.
That's not me being critical of the people providing the analysis. They all for the most part do a very good job evaluating these players the best they can. So do the teams. Thousands upon thousands of man hours go into preparing for this single event.
And despite all of that time and effort the draft is still an educated guess at best and the reality is you really don't know how your team did for at least four years. Nobody does. And yes, I said four for a very specific reason which we will get to.
Even the first impressions the players make in their first action with their professional team can be misleading. Very much so. Let me give you a textbook example to illustrate my point.
My third year in the NFL the team I was on selected a junior tight end out of Tennessee in the third round who pundits said was talented but raw and should have stayed in school another year. They also signed an undrafted rookie free agent quarterback out of Eastern Illinois after the draft that nobody cared about. I still remember their first minicamp vividly.
The quarterback was undersized and youthful looking, didn't get any repetitions from what I recall, and wasn't even a blip on the radar screen for me or any of the other veterans. The tight end was most certainly on the radar screen ... because he was terrible. I mean bad. I can remember thinking he was soft physically, unsure of himself mentally, and a bad draft choice. He was the worst drafted rookie at that minicamp and couldn't have made a poorer first impression.
That was almost exactly ten years ago, back in 2003. That "terrible" tight end is a perennial Pro Bowler who will almost certainly be in the Hall of Fame someday. The afterthought quarterback just signed a 6 year, $108 million extension that makes him the highest paid player in the history of one of the NFL's most storied franchises.
Yes, as many of you have no doubt figured out by now, the tight end was Jason Witten and the quarterback was Tony Romo, both of whom have become stalwarts of the Dallas Cowboys.
There's a lot of lessons to be learned here.
First of all, there wasn't a ton of pre-draft hype or conversation surrounding Witten and none for Romo. Fans and even draft analysts focus so much attention on the first round that they lose sight of the fact that good, and sometimes great, players can be had in the later rounds and even after the draft.
Even after the draft when fans, draft experts, and local beat writers evaluated (and graded, which is really funny) the Cowboys first haul under new head coach Bill Parcells there was not a ton said about Witten other than him being a developmental prospect. Again, nothing at all on Romo at that point.
Usually you can at least garner some sort of idea as to what a rookie class might have in store based upon the first impressions they make the first time they get out on the grass. Even that, especially in Witten's case, was fool's gold.
So it takes four years before you can really begin to evaluate a group. Why four? Well, Tony Romo didn't get a chance to start any games until his fourth season in Big D. If we evaluated the Cowboys 2003 draft class after three years we would have been doing it a huge disservice. Romo has become the best quarterback for the franchise since Troy Aikman and well deserving of the contract that he just received. Would Cowboys fans rather be trying to make a trade for Matt Flynn or Carson Palmer like some other NFL franchises have been recently? Didn't think so.
Romo brings up another point. Undrafted free agents count. I always think it is funny when people evaluate draft classes and don't mention the undrafted free agents. Those players are scouted thoroughly and often recruited intensely towards the tail end of the draft. They are part of that draft class and, in Romo's case, a vital part.
