Agreed, the guy has an unbelievable personal brand and is the most educated expert when it comes to the draft. His 25 years of experience back up that statement. I do find the age discrimination McShay gets comical however...I know exactly how he feels.
i agree with kiper on this one. he knows his stuff and truly cares about this subject unlike the moron pats blowin retard from yahoo and most of the guys at cnnsi
I think this is the best way to describe Mel. http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2008/04/fjms-least-fun-annual-tradition.html Grading a draft the day after the draft is held is possibly dumber than anything else done by sports fans.
I agree with those who say it takes a few years to evaluate a draft, but here's something for those who have a shorter time frame. This link will take you to a summary of the ratings for last year's draft. With the benefit of hindsight we all know that the Giants' draft was amazing, and had a lot to do with them winning the Super Bowl. Well, guess what - their consensus rating after last year's draft was a B-, in the bottom half (around 20th) of the league. Cleveland was top (and had a good year), but after them the top-rated teams were SF (who then went 5-11), Oakland (4-12), Atlanta (4-12), Arizona (8-8), Minnesota (8-8), and Carolina (7-9), a pretty disappointing group that taken together won exactly one more game in 2007 than they did in 2006. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the draft gurus, I would say.
That wsa a part of the deal for being allowed to move from Cleveland. IIRC there was still time left on the lease and the city fought the move. The NFL compromised by leaveing the Name, colors, and a promise of an expansion team in the city.
I'm not saying I don't understand your point...but most fans really ignore the fact that that years draft affects more than just that year. Basically all those teams with good 2007 drafts but bad records (including us) are hardly worried. 2007 happened. It's in the books and theres nothing that can be done to change what will be written about 2007. Thats why San Fran, the Jets, Oakland, Arizona, Minne., and maybe even Carolina are all happy their 2007 draft picks will be there for '08 and on. Can't judge a draft after one year.
I started out saying that I think it takes more than one year to evaluate a draft, but there is something much more fundamental going on. To a large extent, these draft gurus are just going by name and hype, and are adding nothing of value. If you look at the consensus ratings, the teams that draft earlier get the better grades, since they get the shot at the bigger name players. Since the teams that draft earlier are generally worse, just by random chance (regression to the mean) you would expect them to do better the next year, even if they had the exact same players; in other words, the teams with the "better" drafts last year actually did even worse than expected. I found the 2006 consensus draft results, and you see the expected pattern when there is no information in the ratings: the top 10 consensus draft teams averaged 8 wins last year (two seasons later), the middle 12 averaged 8.2, and the bottom 10 averaged 7.8. I couldn't find a 2005 draft consensus site, but the "A" rated teams on this site averaged 7.5 wins last year (3 seasons later) while the "C" and lower rated teams averaged 8.8 wins. You would do no differently by flipping a coin. There is no real information in these ratings one year later, two years later, three years later, or (I'm sure) any other number of years later. This is exactly the same as all of the stock analysts who actually have no clue what the market is going to do.
