After we posted a similar list last year, Reilly and I started to feel a bit depressed with the results. There were just so incredibly few defensive tackles last year, about whom we felt any real confidence, that we started to wonder if we were being overly harsh and pessimistic. Perhaps we should have been a bit more open minded about the subject. Maybe, we were setting the bar a bit too high.
It's hard to say why we are sometimes so difficult to please. It's not like we had parents who failed to love us, and constantly made our accomplishments feel insufficient, leading to a tendency to harshly judge others as well. No, that can't be it. I vividly recall being a young child and gluing some macaroni onto construction paper, to depict our childhood home, and having my father respond with one of the most heartwarmingly dismissive and blank expressions that I've ever seen from him. He was clearly restraining himself from displaying the sort of cold disapproval that he normally broadcast to the rest of the world. Surely, that's pretty much the same thing as love, isn't it?
Hmm, maybe we are operating under the influence of some sort of childhood neglect. Still, my parents aren't getting any younger, and with their inevitable and rapid decline looming on the horizon, I'm sure we will only grow much closer. As they physically collapse, and become more dependent on me to do things that their withered, and shriveled bodies can no longer perform, their appreciation for my efforts should steadily grow. Hell, they could break a hip at any moment! Then, right when I have them where I want them, and their dependency is at its peak....that's when we'll toss them in an old folks home, declare them mentally incompetent, and throw away the key. Any weekend visits we deign to throw their way, will be viewed as a great relief from the Jello slurping doldrums of their everyday life, and I will be seen as a brief ray of sunlight in their sad, lonely, Bingo playing existence. I will be loved...like a mid-round 3-technique defensive tackle, with modest physical skills.
But enough about the tightly knit bonds of my wonderful family. Let's talk about angry fat men in unflattering and tight fitting pants.
As I've mentioned recently, we've been trying to somewhat rebuild our database of players, and reexamine what their statistical production in college could tell us about a prospect. To some extent, we're trying to separate the noise of their surrounding circumstances, and get a better grasp on whose results were exceptional, and whose results might be artificially inflated or inappropriately valued. Unfortunately, this is a bit tricky, and I suspect it could be a while before we really complete this task. Still, we're taking a stab at it. We see some potential with these experiments, and we're going to start to quietly and surreptitiously
apply it to some of the players in this year's class, at least on somewhat limited basis.
There is a bit of a problem we've run into with these efforts. Instead of making us feel more open minded about defensive tackle prospects, I think it has had something of an opposite effect. We're actually seeing more and more mediocrity than we really hoped to find. In the end, this really shouldn't be too surprising, since what we consider to be average does naturally tend make up the bulk of any group. Still, this just makes us feel more and more uncomfortable with a lot of the hype that surrounds so many of the prospects, and somewhat underscores the true uniqueness of the really superior and rare monsters that we think should be the high priority targets in the NFL Draft.
Let's give some examples of DTs who were selected in the 1st round in the past few years. What do you think of Panther's defensive tackle Star Loutlelei? To us, he appears to be a potentially above average run stuffer, with limited effectiveness as a pass rusher. What about Viking's DT Sharrif Floyd? Well, he seems to finally be showing signs of life, but is he really what you would call a terror? How about Lions' DT Nick Fairley? He appears to have become a moderately above average pass rusher, though perhaps to a lesser degree than you would expect based on the talent that surrounds him, and where he was selected. What about Cardinals' nose tackle Dan Williams? People don't seem to be calling for his blood, and fans generally appear to be reasonably satisfied with his efforts.
In all of these cases, the players seem to be making some reasonable effort to satisfy their team's (and fan's) expectations. It's probably unlikely that you would call any of them busts, though our computer suggested that they all presented some significant risks. At the same time, you probably would have a hard time arguing that any of these players was terribly unique, or especially valuable, which is arguably what you should be hoping for when you select somebody in the 1st round of the NFL Draft. It seems to me that these are the sorts of players that you give a team's GM a 'pass' for selecting, simply because things could have been much much worse. The possibility of making a truly embarrassing decision is obviously significant, so there is something to be said for finding a serviceable, but perhaps not sterling, type of prospect. They are also probably the types of players that local fans may love, because we all tend to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. While that may be a perfectly acceptable viewpoint, I'm still not entirely comfortable with the idea of hanging your hat on Mister In-Between.
Now, let's get back to our normal business of being unreasonable assholes...
As always, I will include the player's Kangaroo Score (our measure of lower body power), and the Agility Score
(which comes from their short shuttle drill and 3-cone drill). Each
score is given in the form of how many standard deviations that a player
is above, or below, the average result for someone in their position
group. If you want to, you can also read the post on Athleticism and the Defensive Tackle, to see why we think these traits might have an impact on a player's likelihood of succeeding. Based on the role we expect a player to play, and the type of defense we expect them to be in (3-4 vs 4-3), we will sometimes shift the degree to which we value one attribute over another. I will also list the average number of tackles for a loss (TFL)
that a player had in their last two years in college, just to provide
some rough measure of how disruptive they were.
This list will continue to be modified/updated as new data and
prospects come to my attention. I won't list every prospect
here, but will just focus on the ones that I think are interesting for
one reason or another. Last updated: 4/17/2015
Leonard Williams, DT, USC
Kangaroo Score: -0.183 Agility Score: 0.379 TFL: 11.5
It would probably be unwise for us to bet against most peoples' top rated DT prospect, despite his fairly pedestrian measurable traits. Still, it does make me a bit wary. At the same time, his statistical production was typically somewhat above average, and very consistent over the last 3 years, especially for a player who is still only 20 years old. If I had a concern with his stats, it would be that USC generally got to play with a lead, increasing Williams' opportunity to rush opposing QBs, who needed to throw the ball to keep up. His high tackle count also leaned a bit more towards the 'assist' variety, rather than the 'solo' tackle, at least relative to some other prospects. The rate at which he disrupted plays behind the line of scrimmage also appeared to steadily decline over the past 3 years. When I've watched him play, I thought he looked fairly quick, and perhaps better than his results might indicate. Still, I have my doubts about whether he really is the monster he has been portrayed as. For someone who is apparently a lock to be a top 5 pick, I would prefer to see him tick off a few more boxes.
Danny Shelton, NT, Washington
Kangaroo Score: 0.604 Agility Score: -0.576 TFL: 10
Don't you love it when the steroids kick in just in time for your senior season? Prior to his surge in statistical production in the 2014 season, I suspect Shelton would have been seen as little more than a 5th or 6th round prospect. Now we're left to wonder if he is a freak or a fraud. Well, I'm not really concerned about his below average Agility Score, because nose tackles almost always do horribly there. For nose tackles, I am much more concerned with their lower body power (the Kangaroo Score), where Shelton produced just a moderately above average result. Unfortunately, there were some inconsistencies here, and his Kangaroo Score in the vertical jump was actually significantly better, at 1.260 standard deviations above average, and more in line with what I expect out of a nose tackle. Even if we accept that possible explanation, we would still have some concerns with his wretchedly poor 5.64 second 40-yard time. Yes, he's a nose tackle, and it might seem ridiculous to be overly concerned about this, but my god that is a slow man. In the end, I have to question the value of drafting a nose tackle as highly as Shelton is supposedly going to be selected. As the league becomes more and more tilted towards the passing game, picks like this just seem to make far less sense than they might have in the past. I also think there are a number of other players, that can be had for less, who can probably fill the 'immovable fat man in the middle' role in a perfectly adequate manner.
Malcom Brown, DT, Texas
Kangaroo Score: -0.117 Agility Score: -0.148 TFL: 13.5
While Malcom Brown's statistical production might appear somewhat similar to that of Leonard Williams, and perhaps even superior in some ways, we don't think that is actually the case. The Texas pass rush was significantly more productive than the one at USC, making Brown's contribution to things somewhat less impressive than it might initially appear to be. While his athletic results aren't much worse than those of Williams, there are fewer positive anomalies to make me wonder about hidden potential here. While landing on a team with a highly talented defensive line could obviously aid the eventual perception of his performance, the computer would suggest that a 1st round pick is too much to spend on someone like him.
Jordan Phillips, NT, Oklahoma
Kangaroo Score: 0.964 Agility Score: -0.473 TFL: 4.5
Phillips' statistical production is fairly run of the mill stuff for a nose tackle, though he only appears to have been a starter for one year. While his athletic traits generally line up with what we hope to see in a nose tackle, nothing really leapt out at us when we watched him play, and we found him to be a bit uninspiring. While CBS seems to be projecting that Phillips will go in the 1st round, we think they might have lost their minds. If he goes before the 3rd round we'd be somewhat surprised.
Eddie Goldman, NT, Florida State
Kangaroo Score: -0.938 Agility Score: -0.402 TFL: 5.5
Based on the initial reports from his pro day, I am now selling Goldman stock at an all time low price. Who will give me a ham sandwich for this barely used defensive tackle? Okay, okay, how about a pickle? The first bidder to offer me a pickle, even a slightly dried out one, can have this fresh off the showroom floor nose tackle.
Arik Armstead, DT/DE, Oregon
Kangaroo Score: 0.896 Agility Score: 0.412 TFL: 4
Because of his physical dimensions (about 6'7" and 292 pounds) people are naturally jumping to the conclusion that Armstead will wind up as a 3-4 defensive end. That actually seems fairly sensible. Teams do tend to position players somewhat predictably in that way. While his lower body power, and agility also fit the mold for a guy who is going to play this role, I do have to wonder if some degree of insanity is creeping into the Arik Armstead hype parade. I've been seeing a number of people making comparisons between Armstead and the somewhat similarly proportioned Calais Campbell. The problem here is that Campbell was a vastly more productive player than Armstead has ever shown himself to be. In his last two years at Miami, Campbell averaged 16.5 tackles for a loss, to Armstead's piddly average of just 4. Campbell also brought in a total of 16.5 sacks in those two years, to Armstead's 3.5. With the sort of leads that Oregon typically played with during the past few years, it's hard to say that Armstead would have been suffering from a lack of opportunity here. If anything, I think the situation he found himself in was much more advantageous than the one Campbell found himself in. Then we throw in the issue of DeForest Buckner, who played opposite from Armstead, and accumulated 13 TFLs and 4 sacks in this past season. It makes me wonder if Armstead was even the most talented defensive lineman on his own team. While Armstead's physical potential is very appealing, I'd have a hard time justifying how a team could spend a 1st round pick on someone with these sorts of question marks surrounding his statistical production. Armstead strikes me as a very interesting prospect, but the risks do appear to be significant.
Carl Davis, DT, Iowa
Kangaroo Score: 0.912 Agility Score: 0.008 TFL: 6.5
Like his former teammate, Brandon Scherff, Davis appears to have been another Leisure Studies major. When the NCAA investigation into Iowa begins, I think we know which department is going to be getting the most scrutiny. I've run across some criticisms of Davis, that question his lack of production as a pass rusher. This seems like a fairly odd bit of nitpicking to have of a player who is basically a nose tackle, even if he isn't always listed as such. Davis seemed to play as the power guy, opposite to Louis Trinca-Pasat's more nimbly-toed penetrator role. It's just this sort of pairing that I think is sort of the key to getting the most out of some of the more agile types of DTs that we'll end up discussing as we go along. Regardless, I thought Davis looked fairly good, in the little I have seen of him. He seems to play with the sort of power his numbers would suggest, and is relatively nimble for a nose tackle. The rumors seem to be suggesting that Davis has interviewed rather poorly, when talking to teams, and I have to admit he does strike me as a someone who might potentially be a dimwit. Once again, I think the guys at CBS might have gotten into the bad acid, when they projected Davis to be selected in the 1st round, and suspect he could slide a bit. If he is available closer to the 3rd round, I might be interested in him.
Michael Bennett, DT, Ohio State
Kangaroo Score: ? Agility Score: ? TFL: 12.75
Still waiting for data.
Preston Smith, DE, Mississippi St.
Kangaroo Score: 0.174 Agility Score: 1.860 Avg TFL: 10.75
While his listed weight of 271 pounds might make his inclusion in this group seem a bit peculiar, we think that his height (6'4.7") and arm length (34"), along with his other athletic traits, might make him an interesting prospect to convert to the 3-4 DE position. Unfortunately, that might mean his rookie season could a bit of a waste, since he'd spend it being locked in seclusion being force fed cheeseburgers through a funnel. Still, it might be worth it down the road. How does this work exactly? Well, after 80 quarter pounders with cheese, we could probably have Smith weighing closer to 290#, a fairly ideal weight for a 3-4 DE. While his Agility Score is obviously excellent, his Kangaroo Score doesn't really suggest an amazing amount of lower body power (at least compared to DTs). When we remove weight as a factor, his explosiveness appears to be 1.923 standard deviations above average for a DT. Of course, this is a less power oriented measure of explosiveness. As he gains weight, I would expect this result to drop a bit, along with his Agility Score (though his Kangaroo Score should remain somewhat unchanged). Fortunately, he's far enough above average in these areas to give up a little ground, and still be ahead of many of his peers. His statistical production was fairly weak, prior to the 2014 season, though some of that might relate to the way he was moved around on the defensive line, sometimes even playing as a quasi DT. While he might end up playing as a 4-3 DE, and we would view his results very differently at that position, we'll examine that in a different post. Overall, we think he is an interesting prospect, even if there are some areas that concern us. As a potential 3-4 DE, we might consider him worth a 3rd round pick, though that seems to be a bit lower than where he is often projected to be selected. If we judged him solely off of his final college season, our rating would be even higher, but we don't like to make those sorts of exceptions. Even though we have some concerns, we really do like him, and might take a bit of a risk here to acquire him.
Mario Edwards, DT/DE, Florida State
Kangaroo Score: 0.276 Agility Score: 0.573 TFL: 10.25
We're not really sure what to do with Mario Edwards. At 279 pounds, the question seems to be, do you bulk him up, and turn him into a proper DT, or slim him down, turning him into a 4-3 DE? At this point, we're leaning towards the DT option, but we thought we should include him in this list anyway. Regardless of the role he winds up in, we have some doubts about how well he would end up doing. Almost nothing about his statistical production really stood out to us, and we somewhat wonder whether playing alongside Eddie Goldman might have aided him a bit too much. Even if he was available in the 2nd round, we probably wouldn't feel comfortable with all of the risks he might present.
Xavier Cooper, DT, Washington State
Kangaroo Score: -0.339 Agility Score: 1.371 TFL: 11.5
While I'd like to see Cooper's Kangaroo Score be a bit higher, I'm not sure if this is a huge concern. In college he was used as a 3-4 defensive end, but I think those days are over. I just don't think he has the arm length (31.5") or lower body power to continue playing that role. With his exceptional agility score, playing as a general run of the mill 3 technique is probably a better fit. Opposing interior offensive linemen generally are a bit lacking in lower body power themselves (though their agility scores tend to be above average), so it seems like a better match up for someone like Cooper. His statistical production, relative to his team, was a bit above average in most areas, and generally quite consistent from year to year. I would probably give him some additional credit in this area for playing on a team that typically wasn't operating with a lead, and the possibility that he wasn't playing a position that truly suited him. Because of his relative lack of power, I wouldn't expect him to become much of a run stuffer. I suspect his best role would be playing alongside a larger nose tackle type, and being used as more of a slippery pass rusher. In the little I have seen of him, he seems to play like the quick and nimble individual that his numbers would suggest. He also struck me as a reasonable and amusing guy in interviews, unlike some of the mentally unhinged individuals that many teams employ. While I might not bet on him becoming a star, I think he has a reasonable chance of becoming at least a decent player within this new role, and wouldn't mock a team that selected him in the 2nd or 3rd round.
Gabe Wright, DT, Auburn
Kangaroo Score: -1.195 Agility Score: 0.075 TFL: 6.5
I really have no idea why some people are projecting Wright to be a selection in the first half of the draft. I've seen ham sandwiches with more athletic ability than this guy.
Henry Anderson, DT/DE, Stanford
Kangaroo Score: -0.068 Agility Score: 1.876 TFL: 9.5
CBS currently seems to be listing Anderson as a 4th round prospect, but we somewhat doubt that he will last that long. Because of his unusual physical proportions (a little over 6'6" and 294 pounds), it seems likely that some team will view him as a 3-4 DE, and take him a bit higher than some might expect. While his Agility Score is exceptional for a player of his size, the computer would suggest that his lower body power and raw explosiveness is a bit more on the fringe, relative to some of the players who have achieved acclaim at this position. Athletically, he is probably somewhat similar to players like Brett Keisel or Derek Wolfe. His statistical production was slowed by an injury in 2013, but overall the computer also thinks his results were probably inflated by the surrounding talent at Stanford, except for his 2014 season, which was a bit above average. We've only seem a small sample of him actually playing, and had somewhat mixed feelings about him. While we probably wouldn't bet on him becoming a star, we do suspect he could have a long and useful NFL career. If he is still available in the 3rd round, we'd probably give him some serious consideration.
Marcus Hardison, DT, Arizona State
Kangaroo Score: -0.606 Agility Score: 0.796 TFL: 8
I have to admit that I am a bit disappointed with the initial reports of Hardison's pro day results. His results were all over the map, so the scores we have listed here may conceal some debatable potential. There is a possibility that these numbers are also flawed since he is coming off of an injury, but they are all we really have to go on. While his production was fairly impressive in his final year, I do tend to fret about one year wonders. In many ways, he is in a similar position to his former teammate Will Sutton who was drafted in the 3rd round last year, but with a less established history. While I find Hardison to be a somewhat interesting prospect, I'd have to toss him into the pile of players that I would avoid. There are just too many risks and unknown factors at play with him.
Grady Jarrett, DT, Clemson
Kangaroo Score: 0.606 Agility Score: 0.662 TFL: 10.25
Athletically, Jarret might be a mildly interesting prospect, even if he is a bit on the smaller side. The problem is that the computer thinks his stat sheet could have been heavily inflated by the talent that surrounded him at Clemson. In the little we have seen of Jarrett, he looked like a passable prospect, who might do okay in the right circumstances, but not somebody we would view as anything more than a 5th round pick. Currently, that appears to be a bit lower than he is supposedly going to be taken.
Xavier Williams, DT, Northern Iowa
Kangaroo Score: -0.761* Agility Score: -1.552* TFL: 13
Hmmm, we were very curious about Williams, but it looks like we are going to have to scratch him off of our shopping list. There's just a bit too much risk here for our tastes.
Louis Trinca-Pasat, DT, Iowa
Kangaroo Score: -0.393 Agility Score: 1.271 TFL: 9.75
The yin to Carl Davis' yang. While Davis appears to have been Iowa's powerful mauler, Trinca-Pasat seems to fit more in the mold of the nimble 3 technique. Athletically, he is almost a clone of Xavier Cooper, right down to his somewhat short arm length of 31.875". Again, similar to Cooper, I think Trinca-Pasat could have a reasonable chance of becoming a respectable DT, if he continues to be paired with someone to play the power role that Davis provided for him in college. Otherwise, I think opposing teams might just run over him. His statistical production generally wasn't too remarkable until this past season, at which point he was already 23, so that is a mark against him. The biggest difference between Cooper and Trinca-Pasat, at least in our eyes, is that Cooper appeared to be in a significantly worse situation, and yet managed to routinely outproduce Trinca-Pasat. If he continues to be viewed as a late round draft pick (at least that is where I typically see him projected to be selected), there might be some upside here.
Rakeem Nunez-Roches, DT, Southern Mississippi
Kangaroo Score: 1.374 Agility Score: -0.155 TFL: 10
People are probably going to look at Nunez-Roches very average size (6'2.25" and 307 pounds) and classify him as a typical 3 technique DT. I'm not sure if that is really the best view to take of him. Despite the odd fit of his physical dimensions, his athletic traits actually have much more in common with what I would expect to see in a nose tackle. He's kind of like the sexy librarian of defensive tackles, if you know what I mean. Once you get past your preconceived notions about a nose tackle needing to be a 350 pound tub of lard, and actually watch this guy play, I think this starts to make much more sense. Despite his smaller size (god, it's weird to refer to a 307 pound man as small), his Kangaroo Score suggests that he has the power of a much bigger player. In the little I have seen of him, I am perfectly willing to buy into the idea that this is true. Compared to some of the other DT prospects, he is still relatively young (21 until July), which is a point in his favor. His statistical production was hindered a bit by an injury that forced him to miss most of his 2013 season, though his results were quite excellent in 2014. I suspect people will downplay his accomplishments due to playing at a somewhat lower level of competition, but as long as he remains a late round prospect, I think this factor has already been discounted enough to compensate for that concern. He majored in biological sciences, which has to be seen as some improvement over the vast number of pottery majors you usually deal with. If the NFL doesn't work out, he supposedly aspires to become a veterinarian, so he gets Reilly's vote. My biggest concern might be that he was born in Belize, so he could have a paralyzing fear of the chupacabara. While I generally see him listed as someone who might not be taken until the end of the draft (some say he won't be drafted at all), I'd probably start to target him in the 5th round. I might even be willing to argue that he should go even higher than this. While his eventual success or failure will hinge on many things beyond his actual abilities, I think he might be one of the more underrated prospects in this draft.
Quayshawne Buckley, DT, Idaho
Kangaroo Score: 0.782 Agility Score: 0.092 TFL: 15.75
I suspect that Key and Peele were responsible for giving him his name, but let's ignore that. Let's start off by listing some of Buckley's negatives. He is older than we would like, and will be turning 24 in August. His level of competition wasn't exactly awe inspiring. He seems to have a bit of a reputation for collecting unsportsmanlike conduct penalties. He was also suspended after receiving a DUI, when he crashed his vehicle into a pair of parked cars. So, he might not be the sharpest of individuals. On the other hand, his Kangaroo Score suggests that he has good lower body power and explosiveness. In fact, this might be underestimating his abilities, since the results from his vertical jump would have been 1.281 standard deviations above average, which is quite excellent. His Agility Score isn't remarkable, but is acceptably average. While his statistical production was exceptional, the computer also suggests that his numbers might be a bit underrated here. When you consider how Idaho was generally playing from behind, and how little his teammates appeared to contribute to the pass rush, Buckley's results start to look even more impressive. There are actually some very interesting parallels that can be drawn between Buckley, and the statistical production of players like J.J. Watt and Ndamukong Suh though I am certainly not claiming that he will reach that level of success. Either way, there is an argument to be made for the possibility that Buckley might have been the most productive interior pass rusher in this entire draft class. In the few games of his that I was able to watch, I also thought he appeared to live up to what his numbers would suggest he was. Because of his somewhat smaller size (a hair under 6'2" and 296 pounds) as well as an arm length of just 32.75", he seems best suited to playing in a 4-3 defense. Though he has some issues that might concern us, it strikes us as a bit peculiar that Buckley is generally listed as a player who might not get drafted at all. It seems to us that spending a late round pick on someone like this is probably a small price to pay, for a player that might have significant upside.
Christian Ringo, DT, Louisiana Lafayette
Kangaroo Score: ? Agility Score: ? TFL: 11
Still waiting for data.
Kristjan Sokoli DT, Buffalo
Kangaroo Score: 1.548 Agility Score: 1.364 TFL: 4
I have to give credit to the president of the Taylor Swift fan club, Max Mulitz, for tipping me off to this guy. Based on the initial, and unofficial, reports from Buffalo's pro day, Sokoli does seem to possess a very particular set of skills that we might find appealing. There just doesn't appear to be a lot of evidence of statistical production to back it up. Still, he is only expected to be a late round or undrafted type of prospect, so it might be worth treating him as a lottery ticket. This peculiar Albanian prospect has only been playing football for a short time, and it is probably worth encouraging him to continue pursuing his NFL dreams. It's certainly a better career path than kidnapping Liam Nesson's daughter.
Brian Mihalik, DT, Boston College
Kangaroo Score: 1.995 Agility Score: 1.371 TFL: 5.75
Well, it looks like we've stumbled across another bizarre physical freak, with questionable statistical production. When it comes to athletic ability, Mihalik's results are simply outrageous. The only question is, why didn't he accomplish more during his time in college? One weird possibility is that being almost 6'9" tall isn't really an advantage for a defensive lineman. There are still bits and pieces of data we'd like to find to help explain who this guy is, and we haven't been able to find any Youtube clips that actually show him playing, so we just view Mihalik as an interesting oddity. We do kind of wonder if some team will try to turn him into an offensive tackle, since that seems to be a position where people seem to find a large physical frame like this to be rather appealing. In the end, we suspect he will only be an UDFA, but we suppose it's possible that he could get selected somewhere at the end of the draft.
Monday, March 9, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Kangaroo Court: The 2015 Offensive Linemen
When we did this last year, I really figured we would catch more grief over our admission that we rarely bother watching the offensive line prospects...ummm...actually play. While I realize that there are some people who enjoy watching fat men jostle each other around (whatever floats your boat, man), the cruel calculations of our Banana 6000 Data Thresher are all I really care about here. This may seem a bit unwise, but we just don't trust our lying eyes to make these sorts of judgments. In the end, I figure if purchasing courting our Russian mail order bride could be done through simple data analysis, then I why not apply it to something more whimsical, like offensive linemen?
Of course, this process was a bit trickier with our darling Ludmilla. All I really had to go on in that case were the numbers 38-44-38, and the many heartfelt poems she composed about peeling potatoes. While her prose was moving, I do think it's possible that I might have misunderstood the meaning of those numbers. I would have thought that at least one of them would have related to her vertical jump. Good, hearty breeding stock is quite important to me, if I ever want my offspring to have a shot at NFL riches. Maybe there was a mix up in converting the data from metric to standard. I'm really not sure. Still, she is a rather sturdily constructed babushka, so perhaps we can still spawn some future nose tackles. I swear though, if a single one of them turns out to be a long-snapper, I'm going to burn her green card.
While I've tried to encourage the company that brought Ludmilla and myself together to start some sort of combine-type program, to eliminate future misunderstandings, so far I have received little feedback. As a televised event, I think watching Russian women running 3-cone drills in spandex could be quite compelling television viewing. Maybe it's an idea that is just too far ahead of it's time. Either way, history does seem to suggest that this can be done rather effectively with prospective NFL players, so I guess we'll stick with that for the time being.
As always, we'll be judging the players based on a few very basic criteria. We will measure their Kangaroo Score (our measure of lower body power and explosiveness), and their Agility Score (based on their short shuttle and 3-Cone drills). These scores are given in the form of how many standard deviations that the prospect is away from the average result for an offensive linemen. If you are curious, you can take a look at Athleticism and the Offensive Line part I and part II, to get some sense as to how this relates to offensive tackles and guards. For centers, we place more importance on their short shuttle times, as you can read about here. We also played a little game with what we call the Lobotomy Line, to see what sort of results these limited bits of information could have theoretically produced in comparison to an actual NFL team. There are, of course, other factors such as injuries, inability to elude the law, playing time, comically unnecessary punctuation in a player's name, and positional versatility that also somewhat weigh into our views on a prospect, as well as a few other more minor measurable athletic traits.
Speculating about a player's potential, based on their athletic traits, can obviously be a bit controversial. People will often point to someone like Bruce Campbell as an individual with allegedly great athletic ability, who has amounted to very little, as a way of dismissing this approach. So, let's take a look at Bruce Campbell.
While there are numerous positive things we could say about Campbell, and we could pick apart his numbers more thoroughly to reveal some other interesting and positive bits of data, his overall results weren't nearly as freakish as many claimed them to be. He was a nice, moderately interesting prospect, and the computer would have given him some consideration as a mid-round pick, which is where he ended up being selected. Still, he really didn't compare too favorably to Trent Williams, who went in the the 1st round of the same draft, and was the true physical freak.
Now, we're not trying to say that the more physically gifted player will always wind up performing better. That would be ridiculous. Instead, we're just suggesting that particular measurable traits do make us feel more comfortable with selecting players, at certain points in the draft. The degree to which we place value on some of these traits can vary quite a bit, as we move along the different positions of the offensive line. In the end, however, we're not really trying to suggest that a player is doomed to failure because of these scores. Players who measured up poorly occasionally do rather well. It's just that the outcomes for the truly exceptional prospects tend to turn out positively much more often than people seem to realize.
So, rather than attempting to foolishly say "this guys will succeed" and "this guy will fail", we really want to just narrow our focus to a very small handful of players, who perhaps have the balance of risk and reward more strongly tilted in their favor. Inevitably, this will lead to passing over certain players who do quite well, but all we care about is identifying a very select few. Last year, the computer suggested that Joel Bitonio and Corey Linsley were probably the best/safest players to pick at their respective positions, and so far things seem to be going well for them. Hopefully, as things go on, a few other interesting nuggets will surface.
This list is still under construction, as we await the complete sets of data for individual draft prospects. The list will continue to grow, and be updated with additional players. Individual Agility Scores are unlikely to be changed, but based on the results from college pro-days, Kangaroo Scores may be adjusted. The order the players are listed in will also periodically be adjusted to roughly coincide with the CBS' rankings. Last Updated: 4/24/15
Brandon Scherff, OT/OG, Iowa
Arm Length: 33.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.134 Agility Score: 1.489
Ah, the results from Scherff's pro day are finally in, and they look rather promising. Based on his excellent Kangaroo Score and Agility Score, we would have to say that Scherff probably does have a significantly above average chance of meeting the expectations that people will have of a 1st round pick. The only area of concern might be his arm length, which might force him to move inside to the guard position. Still, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that he could do quite well as a tackle as well, since his overall athletic traits are still a rather good fit for that position as well. I have to give him some added respect for majoring in Leisure Studies, which sounds like something that would involve an X-Box and some Doritos. I'm just not sure how you tell your parents that you are devoting your college education to the study of 'flip cup', but it probably requires balls of steel. Maybe that courage carries over to the football field, I really can't say for sure. I anxiously await the results from his drug test.
Andrus Peat, OT, Stanford
Arm Length: 34.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.615* Agility Score: -0.102
There have been some wildly varying reports coming from Peat's pro day, but we still feel like have to radically boost his Kangaroo Score. We still have some minor concerns about his Agility Score, but overall we now actually have to take him somewhat seriously as a 1st round draft pick. Based on his results, we might still lean towards projecting him as more of a right tackle, because we still wonder if he has the sort of quickness that we prefer for the left side of the line. Then again, Andrew Whitworth has appeared to do fine on the left side despite some similar concerns. While our opinion of his athleticism has improved, we aren't sure whether we wouldn't feel more comfortable with Jake Fisher's more balanced athletic traits. In the end, it probably doesn't matter too much, since it appears that Peat will be selected before Team Kangaroo would ever really need to give this much real consideration.
La'El Collins, OG, LSU
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: -0.183 Agility Score: 0.421
I don't really see anything wrong with Collins results, but I also don't see anything that would make me feel comfortable with selecting him as highly as many people feel he is going to be taken. In many ways, he is in a similar situation to the one Zach Martin was in last year, with very similar measurables. I didn't have a problem with Martin either, but felt that Joel Bitonio's superior athleticism gave us more reasons to feel confident. Still, you have to like a guy whose name seems to be 'the the'. Maybe his parents were fans of the 1980's British rock group.
T.J. Clemmings, OT/OG, Pittsburgh
Arm Length: 35.125" Kangaroo Score: 1.015 Agility Score: 0.677
Now, here we have a prospect that I find fairly interesting. Athletically, he is quite impressive, and somebody I might have some interest in. Beyond just his above average lower body power, and moderately nimbly-toed agility, Clemmings also has advantages when it comes to his arm length, which is exceptional, especially for someone of his height. One of the big questions here is whether NFL teams will be able to see past his merely average height (a tad under 6'5"), or whether they will move him inside to the guard position. Personally, I think height is a rather overrated trait for tackles, but many teams seem to be incredibly stubborn about this subject. The bigger concern with Clemmings might be that he has only really played on the offensive line for 2 years, after switching over from the defense. Considering that he will be turning 24 in November, and he might still need some time to adjust to life on the offensive line, I could see some reasons to be slightly concerned about teaching a slightly older dog new tricks. So, I probably wouldn't take Clemmings in the 1st round, but if he is still there in the 2nd, I could be tempted to take a shot at him.
Ereck Flowers, OT, Miami
Arm Length: 34.5" Kangaroo Score: -0.021 Agility Score: ?
So far, we only have the data related to Flower's vertical jump and broad jump at his pro day, which is significantly less information than we would really like to have. Despite those limitations, we're still somewhat concerned with what this first piece of information might be telling us. No, his results don't mean he is doomed, it was simply a bit more pedestrian and unexceptional than we would like to see.
Cameron Erving, OT/OG/C, Florida State
Arm Length: 34.125" Kangaroo Score: 0.951 Agility Score: 0.811
The possibilities with Erving can be a bit ridiculous. He started off in college as a defensive tackle, before becoming the team's left tackle in 2012, where he largely seemed to remain. In 2014, he even spent 5 games at center. While his relative lack of experience on the offensive line is similar to what we see with T.J. Clemmings, I think that Erving being almost 2 years younger gives him a bit of an edge to continue to improve with time. Now, I have no real issue with him remaining at tackle, as his athletic ability appears to be perfectly suited to this, but there does appear to be a lot of flexibility to how he can be used. When it comes to playing center, I am somewhat torn when it comes to Erving. Since centers rarely exceed 6'5", and there are several sound possibilities as to why they rarely exceed this mark, Erving's height of just a hair under 6'5.5" might make him an unusual fit at this position. There is also nothing that excites me more than a freakishly quick short shuttle time, when considering a center prospect. In Erving's case, his time of 4.63 seconds is really nothing shocking, and merely 0.571 standard deviations above average for an offensive lineman. That's not a bad result at all, but compared to some of the league's best centers, it is rather pedestrian. In Erving's case, I might be willing to make a huge exception to this rule though. You see, normally, centers have the absolute worst Kangaroo Scores, often posting results that go into the negative range. Cameron's result of 0.951, is absolutely shocking for a center, and quite similar to another historical oddball, Nick Hardwick. What this says about Erving's lower body power, really excites me. At the same time, his overall Agility Score was still quite good, so he doesn't appear to simply be a powerful stiff. I suspect Erving could probably play any position along the offensive line, and probably do reasonably well, though I suspect his best chance of success will come somewhere along the interior of the offensive line, most likely at the guard position. Either way, I think his positional flexibility is a huge bonus. I am very interested in seeing what happens with him, and suspect he is probably worth a late 1st round pick.
Jake Fisher, Oregon, OT
Arm Length: 33.75" Kangaroo Score: 0.957* Agility Score: 1.953
Except for his slightly below average arm length, he really seems to be a nearly perfect physical specimen. Now, I normally try not to fuss too much about arm length, but I do have some minor concerns about it when it comes to taller players. So, in Fisher's case, his height of 6'6", might slightly decrease his already average reach. In the end though, I'm not sure I really care. So far, unless someone else emerges, he appears to be one of the most physically superior offensive linemen in the entire draft. That he is also one of the younger prospects, at just 21 years old, also weighs into our view of his significant upside. While it would be nice to have data related to how often Fisher gave up a sack, this doesn't seem to be available. Still, his QB Marcus Mariota, appeared to be kept relatively clean during the past 3 years. While you might credit this to Mariota's athleticism, I kind of doubt that is the case. Scrambling QBs, in general, actually tend to take a higher number of sacks than pocket passers, so Fisher's job was probably more challenging than you might expect. The one thing we can say, is that in the 13 games Fisher played this year, Mariota was only sacked on 4.19% of his pass attempts, a rather excellent result. In the 2 games that Fisher missed with a leg injury, Mariota was sacked on 17.3% of his pass attempts. Admittedly, this is a ridiculously small sample size, but that is all we have to work with, and you can make of it whatever you wish. Fisher's combined athletic traits put him on a tier where failure becomes relatively rare, probably occurring no more than 25-30% of the time (Winston Justice would be an example of where this didn't work out). With those sorts of odds, I'd say he is worth a first round pick, though some people seem to suggest that he could still be available into the 2nd round. I would be surprised if he lasted that long, since I expect at least one team will become as enamored of Fisher's measurables as I am.
A.J. Cann, OG, South Carolina
Arm Length: 32.625" Kangaroo Score: 0.911 Agility Score: ?
It's looking like we are never going to be able to say much about his agility, which is unfortunate. Still, he does appear to have some power to him. Without a full set of data, I really wouldn't want to speculate about what his chances of success are, but I have to admit that his 5.46 second forty time is a bit worrisome. You generally don't have a lot of amazing successes coming from people who put up that sort of result. Oh well, at least he has power.
Laken Tomlinson, OG, Duke
Arm Length: 33.675" Kangaroo Score: 0.837 Agility Score: -0.998
Based on his tubby physique (323#), and the above measurables, he would appear to be a basic road grader type, though not necessarily an exceptional one. He might do okay in that role, depending on which team selects him, but I have to admit that his rather poor agility largely negates the benefits of his somewhat above average power, at least in my eyes. Based on his pro day results (where he had dropped his weight down to 316 pounds), we could boost his Agility Score to a respectably average 0.002. If we decided to trust these newer results, we might start to consider him a fairly interesting prospect. Still, it often pays to be wary of these sorts of radical improvements.
D.J. Humphries, OT, Floida
Arm Length: 33.625" Kangaroo Score: 0.202 Agility Score: -0.393
To quote Jay Cutler,"Don't caaaaarrreeeee....". I seem to see projections for where Humphries will be taken that range from the 1st round to the 3rd round. If he does fall somewhere in that area, it would strike me as quite a daring gamble. While none of Humphries' results are necessarily bad, they also wouldn't do anything to ease my concerns with selecting him this high.
Reese Dismukes, C, Auburn
Arm Length: 32.4" Kangaroo Score: -0.527 Agility Score: -0.528
I'm only including Dismukes on this list because a number of people seem to think that he will be selected in the first few rounds of the draft, and generally rate him as one of the better center prospects. Honestly, I see nothing here that gets me the least bit excited. One interesting fact about Dismukes, is that the only area in which he tested slightly above average at the combine was in the short shuttle drill. As I've said before this is the one drill that centers really tend to dominate, though in Dismukes case, his time of 4.7 seconds was only 0.227 standard deviations above average for an offensive lineman, and nothing that would make me take him the least bit seriously. While his Kangaroo Score might appear rather poor, it's actually relatively close to an an average result for a center, where power tends to be in somewhat short supply.
Ty Sambrailo, OT, Colorado St.
Arm Length: 33" Kangaroo Score: -0.452 Agility Score: 0.827
While Sambrailo's results aren't terrible, they aren't what I want to see in a player who supposedly is going to cost a 2nd or 3rd round pick. In the 5th round? Hmmm...maybe. By the third day of the draft we'll probably be quite hungover, and willing to lower our standards a bit. While his Agility Score is respectable, I would really need to see more evidence of explosive lower body power to pick him this high in the draft. As things stand, he has traits that I associate more with guards, and not a tackle. Of course, I've probably just secured his hall of fame induction by expressing these doubts.
Tre Jackson, OG, Florida State
Arm Length: 32.625" Kangaroo Score:-0.472 Agility Score: -2.566*
Tre Jackson might be a lovely human being, but his mother should smack him in the head for producing these results. You could probably do a better job of protecting your quarterback by lining up a bunch of bean-bag chairs in front of him.
Daryl Williams, OT, Oklahoma
Arm Length: 35" Kangaroo Score: -0.340 Agility Score: -1.978
I still seem to see a number of people projecting that Williams could be taken somewhere around the 3rd round, and this really makes no sense to me. He doesn't seem to have the explosiveness or power to play tackle, and so far, he appears to have the agility of a rock...a very tired rock. I wouldn't select him at all, let alone in the first half of the draft.
Tyrus Thompson, OT, Oklahoma
Arm Length: 34.875" Kangaroo Score: 0.026 Agility Score: -0.850*
I wasn't going to include Thompson on this list, but someone mentioned that the Draft Advisory Board had given him a 2nd round grade. In other places, I see him being projected to go around the 4th round. Personally, I have no more interest in him than I did in his teammate Daryl Williams. While his Kangaroo Score falls in the tolerable/average sort of range, it isn't the sort of result I really want to see. We can't really fully weigh his Agility Score, since we only have his short shuttle time at this point, but the initial results are less than promising. The only thing we can really say for Thompson, is that he is a rather large guy (324#), with long arms. That doesn't really cut it in my book.
Hroniss Grasu, C, Oregon
Arm Length: 31.125" Kangaroo Score:? Agility Score: -0.113
The initial reports from Grasu's pro day were claiming that he had a 4.20 short shuttle time. I think by now we've clearly established that we have a deranged affection for centers with excellent short shuttle times. Now, the somewhat more official numbers are suggesting that he ran the short shuttle in 4.74 seconds, which is vastly less interesting to us, and more in line with what we would expect based on his 7.85 second 3-Cone drill. While it would be nice to have the data to calculate his Kangaroo Score, that doesn't seem like it will ever become available. So, what was once an interesting prospect, now becomes someone we won't be giving much thought to.
Ali Marpet, OG, Hobart
Arm Length: 33.375" Kangaroo Score: 0.416 Agility Score: 1.468
At some point, I suspect we're all going to get tired of the way that players from Hobart dominate the league. Athletically, Marpet is pretty much the ideal model for what I expect from a guard. While guards tend to have a bit less explosive power than tackles, Marpet's Kangaroo Score is actually surprisingly good, relative to his peers. Perhaps more importantly, his agility score is exceptional, and precisely the sort of result I'm used to seeing among the league's more successful guards. While his 40 time of 4.98 seconds was good, I was particularly pleased with his 10-yard split of 1.74 seconds. I suppose the main concern here is the level of competition he faced in college, but there's isn't much we can do about that. If he continues to be available as the 3rd round approaches, I could be quite tempted to take him, though I wouldn't be surprised if he goes a bit higher than many people expect. At this point, we see him as one of the most intriguing offensive linemen in the entire draft.
Arie Kuandijo, G, Alabama
Arm Length: 34.125" Kangaroo Score: -1.122 Agility Score: -2.655
I'm really not seeing anything to be optimistic about with this guy The only thing he appears to have going for him are some unusually long arms for a guard. Oh, the mystique of Alabama must be alive and well, if Kuandijo is being viewed as a serious prospect.
John Miller, OG, Louisville
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: -0.545 Agility Score: -0.757
Hey, I know that name from somewhere. Oh well, I must be thinking of someone else. I really do appreciate it when a player's obvious shortcomings give me a chance to be brief.. Hmm, maybe this is the John Miller I know? Based on his pro day results, he seems to have lifted his Kangaroo Score to 0.014, as well as improving his Agility Score to -0.049. These are still just very average results, and it generally pays to be cautious about pro days.
Cedric Ogbuehi, OT, Texas A&M
Arm Length: 35.875" Kangaroo Score:? Agility Score: ?
Still waiting for data. Considering that he tore his ACL in the West Virginia game on December 29th, it is unlikely that we'll ever get any data here, or that we could put much stock in it. It is really unfortunate that I can't find stats related to sacks allowed by college offensive linemen. Still, I did find numerous people making an interesting note about Ogbuehi, and the horrific 3 game stretch in which he allowed 6 sacks this past year. That is definitely way beyond just bad, and not something I ever expect to see from a supposed star player at the college level. Without something to counterbalance this, I'd probably avoid him altogether.
Donovan Smith, OT, Penn State
Arm Length: 34.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.988 Agility Score: -0.412
Am I concerned about a tackle with somewhat below average agility? Yes. Am I also incredibly curious what will happen when a player with this sort of Kangaroo Score is used as a run blocker? Definitely. Personally, I'd have a hard time selecting Smith in the vicinity of the 3rd round, which is where he seems to be projected to be taken, but I am still quite curious what he might become. I definitely wouldn't want him to play left tackle, but on the right side, eh, he might be interesting.
Mitch Morse, OG, Missouri
Arm Length: 32.25" Kangaroo Score: 0.696 Agility Score: 0.917
.. .----. .-.. .-.. / ... . -. -.. / .- -. / ... --- ... / - --- / - .... . / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. .-.-.- / .. / .... --- .--. . / - .... .- - / ... --- -- . --- -. . / --. . - ... / -- -.-- / -- . ... ... .- --. . / .. -. / .- / -... --- - - .-.. . .-.-.- If he continues to be seen as just a mid-round pick, I could see some potential value here. While he played tackle the past 2 seasons, we'd really like to see him used as a guard or center. When we factor in his somewhat short arms, along with his above average short shuttle time of 4.50 seconds, the center position is really calling his name, and a place we think he might do quite well. Fortunately, he seems to have already played this role, at least for a short time back in 2012. As a guard, we have slightly less interest, and as a tackle we might not want him at all. Without knowing what position teams will have him play, I 'd be hesitant to place any bets here, but I do think he is an interesting mid-round prospect. If I had confidence as to how he would be utilized, I might start to target him in the 4th or 5th round. I look forward to seeing -- --- .-. ... . written on the back of a jersey.
Terry Poole, OG, San Diego State
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: 0.851 Agility Score: -0.005
While he is generally listed as a tackle, I kind of doubt that teams will use him at that position. His somewhat shorter arm length, and merely average height (a whisker over 6'4.5"), just don't seem likely to get him an opportunity there. As a guard, I think he would be a more interesting prospect, and perhaps a reasonable gamble to take in the mid-to-late portion of the draft. Based on his measurable traits, I would expect him to be more at home as a run blocker than a pass protector. I wouldn't bet on him becoming a star, but he's got to be better than someone like the dreaded Oniell Cousins. I probably wouldn't pursue him, but I'd be interested in following his progress.
Mark "Glo Worm" Glowinski, OG, West Virginia
Arm Length: 33.125" Kangaroo Score: 0.851 Agility Score: 0.792
There is nothing terribly amazing about either of Glowinski's scores that are listed above. In combination, however, I do think they could make him a fairly interesting prospect. He generally seems to be projected to be a late round pick or undrafted free agent, but if given the opportunity, he does seem to possess some interesting upside potential. With a 4.58 short shuttle time, I wouldn't even rule out moving to the center position. Based on players who were similar to him, I'd say he has a slightly better than a 50/50 shot of turning out to at least be a respectable player, if he is given an opportunity, which is more than you can say for many of the players who are likely to be selected at a similar point in the draft. He's quickly becoming one of our favorite players to target in the middle of the draft. I'd probably aim to pick him up somewhere around the 4th round.
Jarvis Harrison, OG, Texas A&M
Arm Length: 33.5" Kangaroo Score: 0.715 Agility Score: 0.782
I would find it incredibly amusing if Harrison ended up being seen as a better player than his former teammate Cedric Ogbuehi, despite (probably) being drafted much later. He appears to have been a fairly successful 3 year starter at Texas A&M, though he missed some time in 2014 due to injuries. Either way, Harrison is athletically somewhat similar to the previously mentioned Mark Glowinski (actually, Glowinski measured up better, but had some inconsistencies in his combine results), and seems to be garnering a similar lack of attention. A fair bit of the criticism of Harrison seems to relate to his roly-poly physique (330#), which strikes me as a bit odd, since the NFL tends to be a group of chubby chasers. Just like we said with Glowinski, if he is still floating around in the 5th round, I think he'd make an interesting target.
Laurence Gibson, OT, Virginia Tech
Arm Length: 35.125" Kangaroo Score:1.139 Agility Score: 0.558
Overall, Gibson has the sort of athletic traits that I would find rather appealing for an offensive tackle. While his Agility Score isn't amazing, it is still good enough to not give me much concern, particularly if he is started out as a right tackle, where his physical abilities might be better suited. Of course, there is a reason why Gibson is typically ranked as a prospect who might not go until near the end of the draft. He only started 18 games in his college career, and will already be turning 24 this upcoming March. Is there something terribly wrong with him, that prevented him from getting significant playing time? Or, were his coaches just idiots? Who can really say? I suspect some team will gamble on his athletic ability a bit sooner than many might expect, but if he is still sitting around in the 6th or 7th round, I really see no reason not to give him a shot.
Austin Reiter, C, USF
Arm Length: ? Kangaroo Score: 0.617 Agility Score: 0.755
We're still looking for more information on Reiter, so take some of this with a grain of salt. Our main concerns are that we still don't know his arm length, and he might be a slightly older prospect, though we've had a hard time figuring out when he was born. Despite that, among the prospects who actually played the center position in college, Reiter might be one of the more interesting prospects. If we eliminated center prospects from consideration who were conversion projects, or who will be taken in the 3rd round or higher, Reiter might end up being our top choice for the position. While the results we have listed above might not seem exceptional, they actually line up very nicely with what we want to see in a center. We tend to have a much lower expectation of even just average lower body power with centers, so Reiter's results here are actually surprisingly good. While his Agility Score might look fairly uninteresting, his short shuttle results were 1.061 standard deviations above average. We view that as a rather key attribute for successful centers, so that interests us a great deal. Reiter was also a tree year starter at center for USF, and was twice listed on the Rimington Trophy watch list for the nation's best college centers. Despite all of that, he is generally projected to go undrafted. We would probably start to consider Reiter somewhere around the 5th round.
Of course, this process was a bit trickier with our darling Ludmilla. All I really had to go on in that case were the numbers 38-44-38, and the many heartfelt poems she composed about peeling potatoes. While her prose was moving, I do think it's possible that I might have misunderstood the meaning of those numbers. I would have thought that at least one of them would have related to her vertical jump. Good, hearty breeding stock is quite important to me, if I ever want my offspring to have a shot at NFL riches. Maybe there was a mix up in converting the data from metric to standard. I'm really not sure. Still, she is a rather sturdily constructed babushka, so perhaps we can still spawn some future nose tackles. I swear though, if a single one of them turns out to be a long-snapper, I'm going to burn her green card.
While I've tried to encourage the company that brought Ludmilla and myself together to start some sort of combine-type program, to eliminate future misunderstandings, so far I have received little feedback. As a televised event, I think watching Russian women running 3-cone drills in spandex could be quite compelling television viewing. Maybe it's an idea that is just too far ahead of it's time. Either way, history does seem to suggest that this can be done rather effectively with prospective NFL players, so I guess we'll stick with that for the time being.
As always, we'll be judging the players based on a few very basic criteria. We will measure their Kangaroo Score (our measure of lower body power and explosiveness), and their Agility Score (based on their short shuttle and 3-Cone drills). These scores are given in the form of how many standard deviations that the prospect is away from the average result for an offensive linemen. If you are curious, you can take a look at Athleticism and the Offensive Line part I and part II, to get some sense as to how this relates to offensive tackles and guards. For centers, we place more importance on their short shuttle times, as you can read about here. We also played a little game with what we call the Lobotomy Line, to see what sort of results these limited bits of information could have theoretically produced in comparison to an actual NFL team. There are, of course, other factors such as injuries, inability to elude the law, playing time, comically unnecessary punctuation in a player's name, and positional versatility that also somewhat weigh into our views on a prospect, as well as a few other more minor measurable athletic traits.
Speculating about a player's potential, based on their athletic traits, can obviously be a bit controversial. People will often point to someone like Bruce Campbell as an individual with allegedly great athletic ability, who has amounted to very little, as a way of dismissing this approach. So, let's take a look at Bruce Campbell.
| 40 yard | Kangaroo | Agility | |
| Bruce Campbell | 4.75 | 0.411 | 0.487 |
While there are numerous positive things we could say about Campbell, and we could pick apart his numbers more thoroughly to reveal some other interesting and positive bits of data, his overall results weren't nearly as freakish as many claimed them to be. He was a nice, moderately interesting prospect, and the computer would have given him some consideration as a mid-round pick, which is where he ended up being selected. Still, he really didn't compare too favorably to Trent Williams, who went in the the 1st round of the same draft, and was the true physical freak.
| 40 yard | Kangaroo | Agility | |
| Trent Williams | 4.81 | 1.644 | 0.528 |
Now, we're not trying to say that the more physically gifted player will always wind up performing better. That would be ridiculous. Instead, we're just suggesting that particular measurable traits do make us feel more comfortable with selecting players, at certain points in the draft. The degree to which we place value on some of these traits can vary quite a bit, as we move along the different positions of the offensive line. In the end, however, we're not really trying to suggest that a player is doomed to failure because of these scores. Players who measured up poorly occasionally do rather well. It's just that the outcomes for the truly exceptional prospects tend to turn out positively much more often than people seem to realize.
So, rather than attempting to foolishly say "this guys will succeed" and "this guy will fail", we really want to just narrow our focus to a very small handful of players, who perhaps have the balance of risk and reward more strongly tilted in their favor. Inevitably, this will lead to passing over certain players who do quite well, but all we care about is identifying a very select few. Last year, the computer suggested that Joel Bitonio and Corey Linsley were probably the best/safest players to pick at their respective positions, and so far things seem to be going well for them. Hopefully, as things go on, a few other interesting nuggets will surface.
This list is still under construction, as we await the complete sets of data for individual draft prospects. The list will continue to grow, and be updated with additional players. Individual Agility Scores are unlikely to be changed, but based on the results from college pro-days, Kangaroo Scores may be adjusted. The order the players are listed in will also periodically be adjusted to roughly coincide with the CBS' rankings. Last Updated: 4/24/15
Brandon Scherff, OT/OG, Iowa
Arm Length: 33.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.134 Agility Score: 1.489
Ah, the results from Scherff's pro day are finally in, and they look rather promising. Based on his excellent Kangaroo Score and Agility Score, we would have to say that Scherff probably does have a significantly above average chance of meeting the expectations that people will have of a 1st round pick. The only area of concern might be his arm length, which might force him to move inside to the guard position. Still, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that he could do quite well as a tackle as well, since his overall athletic traits are still a rather good fit for that position as well. I have to give him some added respect for majoring in Leisure Studies, which sounds like something that would involve an X-Box and some Doritos. I'm just not sure how you tell your parents that you are devoting your college education to the study of 'flip cup', but it probably requires balls of steel. Maybe that courage carries over to the football field, I really can't say for sure. I anxiously await the results from his drug test.
Andrus Peat, OT, Stanford
Arm Length: 34.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.615* Agility Score: -0.102
There have been some wildly varying reports coming from Peat's pro day, but we still feel like have to radically boost his Kangaroo Score. We still have some minor concerns about his Agility Score, but overall we now actually have to take him somewhat seriously as a 1st round draft pick. Based on his results, we might still lean towards projecting him as more of a right tackle, because we still wonder if he has the sort of quickness that we prefer for the left side of the line. Then again, Andrew Whitworth has appeared to do fine on the left side despite some similar concerns. While our opinion of his athleticism has improved, we aren't sure whether we wouldn't feel more comfortable with Jake Fisher's more balanced athletic traits. In the end, it probably doesn't matter too much, since it appears that Peat will be selected before Team Kangaroo would ever really need to give this much real consideration.
La'El Collins, OG, LSU
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: -0.183 Agility Score: 0.421
I don't really see anything wrong with Collins results, but I also don't see anything that would make me feel comfortable with selecting him as highly as many people feel he is going to be taken. In many ways, he is in a similar situation to the one Zach Martin was in last year, with very similar measurables. I didn't have a problem with Martin either, but felt that Joel Bitonio's superior athleticism gave us more reasons to feel confident. Still, you have to like a guy whose name seems to be 'the the'. Maybe his parents were fans of the 1980's British rock group.
T.J. Clemmings, OT/OG, Pittsburgh
Arm Length: 35.125" Kangaroo Score: 1.015 Agility Score: 0.677
Now, here we have a prospect that I find fairly interesting. Athletically, he is quite impressive, and somebody I might have some interest in. Beyond just his above average lower body power, and moderately nimbly-toed agility, Clemmings also has advantages when it comes to his arm length, which is exceptional, especially for someone of his height. One of the big questions here is whether NFL teams will be able to see past his merely average height (a tad under 6'5"), or whether they will move him inside to the guard position. Personally, I think height is a rather overrated trait for tackles, but many teams seem to be incredibly stubborn about this subject. The bigger concern with Clemmings might be that he has only really played on the offensive line for 2 years, after switching over from the defense. Considering that he will be turning 24 in November, and he might still need some time to adjust to life on the offensive line, I could see some reasons to be slightly concerned about teaching a slightly older dog new tricks. So, I probably wouldn't take Clemmings in the 1st round, but if he is still there in the 2nd, I could be tempted to take a shot at him.
Ereck Flowers, OT, Miami
Arm Length: 34.5" Kangaroo Score: -0.021 Agility Score: ?
So far, we only have the data related to Flower's vertical jump and broad jump at his pro day, which is significantly less information than we would really like to have. Despite those limitations, we're still somewhat concerned with what this first piece of information might be telling us. No, his results don't mean he is doomed, it was simply a bit more pedestrian and unexceptional than we would like to see.
Cameron Erving, OT/OG/C, Florida State
Arm Length: 34.125" Kangaroo Score: 0.951 Agility Score: 0.811
The possibilities with Erving can be a bit ridiculous. He started off in college as a defensive tackle, before becoming the team's left tackle in 2012, where he largely seemed to remain. In 2014, he even spent 5 games at center. While his relative lack of experience on the offensive line is similar to what we see with T.J. Clemmings, I think that Erving being almost 2 years younger gives him a bit of an edge to continue to improve with time. Now, I have no real issue with him remaining at tackle, as his athletic ability appears to be perfectly suited to this, but there does appear to be a lot of flexibility to how he can be used. When it comes to playing center, I am somewhat torn when it comes to Erving. Since centers rarely exceed 6'5", and there are several sound possibilities as to why they rarely exceed this mark, Erving's height of just a hair under 6'5.5" might make him an unusual fit at this position. There is also nothing that excites me more than a freakishly quick short shuttle time, when considering a center prospect. In Erving's case, his time of 4.63 seconds is really nothing shocking, and merely 0.571 standard deviations above average for an offensive lineman. That's not a bad result at all, but compared to some of the league's best centers, it is rather pedestrian. In Erving's case, I might be willing to make a huge exception to this rule though. You see, normally, centers have the absolute worst Kangaroo Scores, often posting results that go into the negative range. Cameron's result of 0.951, is absolutely shocking for a center, and quite similar to another historical oddball, Nick Hardwick. What this says about Erving's lower body power, really excites me. At the same time, his overall Agility Score was still quite good, so he doesn't appear to simply be a powerful stiff. I suspect Erving could probably play any position along the offensive line, and probably do reasonably well, though I suspect his best chance of success will come somewhere along the interior of the offensive line, most likely at the guard position. Either way, I think his positional flexibility is a huge bonus. I am very interested in seeing what happens with him, and suspect he is probably worth a late 1st round pick.
Jake Fisher, Oregon, OT
Arm Length: 33.75" Kangaroo Score: 0.957* Agility Score: 1.953
Except for his slightly below average arm length, he really seems to be a nearly perfect physical specimen. Now, I normally try not to fuss too much about arm length, but I do have some minor concerns about it when it comes to taller players. So, in Fisher's case, his height of 6'6", might slightly decrease his already average reach. In the end though, I'm not sure I really care. So far, unless someone else emerges, he appears to be one of the most physically superior offensive linemen in the entire draft. That he is also one of the younger prospects, at just 21 years old, also weighs into our view of his significant upside. While it would be nice to have data related to how often Fisher gave up a sack, this doesn't seem to be available. Still, his QB Marcus Mariota, appeared to be kept relatively clean during the past 3 years. While you might credit this to Mariota's athleticism, I kind of doubt that is the case. Scrambling QBs, in general, actually tend to take a higher number of sacks than pocket passers, so Fisher's job was probably more challenging than you might expect. The one thing we can say, is that in the 13 games Fisher played this year, Mariota was only sacked on 4.19% of his pass attempts, a rather excellent result. In the 2 games that Fisher missed with a leg injury, Mariota was sacked on 17.3% of his pass attempts. Admittedly, this is a ridiculously small sample size, but that is all we have to work with, and you can make of it whatever you wish. Fisher's combined athletic traits put him on a tier where failure becomes relatively rare, probably occurring no more than 25-30% of the time (Winston Justice would be an example of where this didn't work out). With those sorts of odds, I'd say he is worth a first round pick, though some people seem to suggest that he could still be available into the 2nd round. I would be surprised if he lasted that long, since I expect at least one team will become as enamored of Fisher's measurables as I am.
A.J. Cann, OG, South Carolina
Arm Length: 32.625" Kangaroo Score: 0.911 Agility Score: ?
It's looking like we are never going to be able to say much about his agility, which is unfortunate. Still, he does appear to have some power to him. Without a full set of data, I really wouldn't want to speculate about what his chances of success are, but I have to admit that his 5.46 second forty time is a bit worrisome. You generally don't have a lot of amazing successes coming from people who put up that sort of result. Oh well, at least he has power.
Laken Tomlinson, OG, Duke
Arm Length: 33.675" Kangaroo Score: 0.837 Agility Score: -0.998
Based on his tubby physique (323#), and the above measurables, he would appear to be a basic road grader type, though not necessarily an exceptional one. He might do okay in that role, depending on which team selects him, but I have to admit that his rather poor agility largely negates the benefits of his somewhat above average power, at least in my eyes. Based on his pro day results (where he had dropped his weight down to 316 pounds), we could boost his Agility Score to a respectably average 0.002. If we decided to trust these newer results, we might start to consider him a fairly interesting prospect. Still, it often pays to be wary of these sorts of radical improvements.
D.J. Humphries, OT, Floida
Arm Length: 33.625" Kangaroo Score: 0.202 Agility Score: -0.393
To quote Jay Cutler,"Don't caaaaarrreeeee....". I seem to see projections for where Humphries will be taken that range from the 1st round to the 3rd round. If he does fall somewhere in that area, it would strike me as quite a daring gamble. While none of Humphries' results are necessarily bad, they also wouldn't do anything to ease my concerns with selecting him this high.
Reese Dismukes, C, Auburn
Arm Length: 32.4" Kangaroo Score: -0.527 Agility Score: -0.528
I'm only including Dismukes on this list because a number of people seem to think that he will be selected in the first few rounds of the draft, and generally rate him as one of the better center prospects. Honestly, I see nothing here that gets me the least bit excited. One interesting fact about Dismukes, is that the only area in which he tested slightly above average at the combine was in the short shuttle drill. As I've said before this is the one drill that centers really tend to dominate, though in Dismukes case, his time of 4.7 seconds was only 0.227 standard deviations above average for an offensive lineman, and nothing that would make me take him the least bit seriously. While his Kangaroo Score might appear rather poor, it's actually relatively close to an an average result for a center, where power tends to be in somewhat short supply.
Ty Sambrailo, OT, Colorado St.
Arm Length: 33" Kangaroo Score: -0.452 Agility Score: 0.827
While Sambrailo's results aren't terrible, they aren't what I want to see in a player who supposedly is going to cost a 2nd or 3rd round pick. In the 5th round? Hmmm...maybe. By the third day of the draft we'll probably be quite hungover, and willing to lower our standards a bit. While his Agility Score is respectable, I would really need to see more evidence of explosive lower body power to pick him this high in the draft. As things stand, he has traits that I associate more with guards, and not a tackle. Of course, I've probably just secured his hall of fame induction by expressing these doubts.
Tre Jackson, OG, Florida State
Arm Length: 32.625" Kangaroo Score:-0.472 Agility Score: -2.566*
Tre Jackson might be a lovely human being, but his mother should smack him in the head for producing these results. You could probably do a better job of protecting your quarterback by lining up a bunch of bean-bag chairs in front of him.
Daryl Williams, OT, Oklahoma
Arm Length: 35" Kangaroo Score: -0.340 Agility Score: -1.978
I still seem to see a number of people projecting that Williams could be taken somewhere around the 3rd round, and this really makes no sense to me. He doesn't seem to have the explosiveness or power to play tackle, and so far, he appears to have the agility of a rock...a very tired rock. I wouldn't select him at all, let alone in the first half of the draft.
Tyrus Thompson, OT, Oklahoma
Arm Length: 34.875" Kangaroo Score: 0.026 Agility Score: -0.850*
I wasn't going to include Thompson on this list, but someone mentioned that the Draft Advisory Board had given him a 2nd round grade. In other places, I see him being projected to go around the 4th round. Personally, I have no more interest in him than I did in his teammate Daryl Williams. While his Kangaroo Score falls in the tolerable/average sort of range, it isn't the sort of result I really want to see. We can't really fully weigh his Agility Score, since we only have his short shuttle time at this point, but the initial results are less than promising. The only thing we can really say for Thompson, is that he is a rather large guy (324#), with long arms. That doesn't really cut it in my book.
Hroniss Grasu, C, Oregon
Arm Length: 31.125" Kangaroo Score:? Agility Score: -0.113
The initial reports from Grasu's pro day were claiming that he had a 4.20 short shuttle time. I think by now we've clearly established that we have a deranged affection for centers with excellent short shuttle times. Now, the somewhat more official numbers are suggesting that he ran the short shuttle in 4.74 seconds, which is vastly less interesting to us, and more in line with what we would expect based on his 7.85 second 3-Cone drill. While it would be nice to have the data to calculate his Kangaroo Score, that doesn't seem like it will ever become available. So, what was once an interesting prospect, now becomes someone we won't be giving much thought to.
Ali Marpet, OG, Hobart
Arm Length: 33.375" Kangaroo Score: 0.416 Agility Score: 1.468
At some point, I suspect we're all going to get tired of the way that players from Hobart dominate the league. Athletically, Marpet is pretty much the ideal model for what I expect from a guard. While guards tend to have a bit less explosive power than tackles, Marpet's Kangaroo Score is actually surprisingly good, relative to his peers. Perhaps more importantly, his agility score is exceptional, and precisely the sort of result I'm used to seeing among the league's more successful guards. While his 40 time of 4.98 seconds was good, I was particularly pleased with his 10-yard split of 1.74 seconds. I suppose the main concern here is the level of competition he faced in college, but there's isn't much we can do about that. If he continues to be available as the 3rd round approaches, I could be quite tempted to take him, though I wouldn't be surprised if he goes a bit higher than many people expect. At this point, we see him as one of the most intriguing offensive linemen in the entire draft.
Arie Kuandijo, G, Alabama
Arm Length: 34.125" Kangaroo Score: -1.122 Agility Score: -2.655
I'm really not seeing anything to be optimistic about with this guy The only thing he appears to have going for him are some unusually long arms for a guard. Oh, the mystique of Alabama must be alive and well, if Kuandijo is being viewed as a serious prospect.
John Miller, OG, Louisville
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: -0.545 Agility Score: -0.757
Hey, I know that name from somewhere. Oh well, I must be thinking of someone else. I really do appreciate it when a player's obvious shortcomings give me a chance to be brief.. Hmm, maybe this is the John Miller I know? Based on his pro day results, he seems to have lifted his Kangaroo Score to 0.014, as well as improving his Agility Score to -0.049. These are still just very average results, and it generally pays to be cautious about pro days.
Cedric Ogbuehi, OT, Texas A&M
Arm Length: 35.875" Kangaroo Score:? Agility Score: ?
Still waiting for data. Considering that he tore his ACL in the West Virginia game on December 29th, it is unlikely that we'll ever get any data here, or that we could put much stock in it. It is really unfortunate that I can't find stats related to sacks allowed by college offensive linemen. Still, I did find numerous people making an interesting note about Ogbuehi, and the horrific 3 game stretch in which he allowed 6 sacks this past year. That is definitely way beyond just bad, and not something I ever expect to see from a supposed star player at the college level. Without something to counterbalance this, I'd probably avoid him altogether.
Donovan Smith, OT, Penn State
Arm Length: 34.375" Kangaroo Score: 1.988 Agility Score: -0.412
Am I concerned about a tackle with somewhat below average agility? Yes. Am I also incredibly curious what will happen when a player with this sort of Kangaroo Score is used as a run blocker? Definitely. Personally, I'd have a hard time selecting Smith in the vicinity of the 3rd round, which is where he seems to be projected to be taken, but I am still quite curious what he might become. I definitely wouldn't want him to play left tackle, but on the right side, eh, he might be interesting.
Mitch Morse, OG, Missouri
Arm Length: 32.25" Kangaroo Score: 0.696 Agility Score: 0.917
.. .----. .-.. .-.. / ... . -. -.. / .- -. / ... --- ... / - --- / - .... . / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. .-.-.- / .. / .... --- .--. . / - .... .- - / ... --- -- . --- -. . / --. . - ... / -- -.-- / -- . ... ... .- --. . / .. -. / .- / -... --- - - .-.. . .-.-.- If he continues to be seen as just a mid-round pick, I could see some potential value here. While he played tackle the past 2 seasons, we'd really like to see him used as a guard or center. When we factor in his somewhat short arms, along with his above average short shuttle time of 4.50 seconds, the center position is really calling his name, and a place we think he might do quite well. Fortunately, he seems to have already played this role, at least for a short time back in 2012. As a guard, we have slightly less interest, and as a tackle we might not want him at all. Without knowing what position teams will have him play, I 'd be hesitant to place any bets here, but I do think he is an interesting mid-round prospect. If I had confidence as to how he would be utilized, I might start to target him in the 4th or 5th round. I look forward to seeing -- --- .-. ... . written on the back of a jersey.
Terry Poole, OG, San Diego State
Arm Length: 33.25" Kangaroo Score: 0.851 Agility Score: -0.005
While he is generally listed as a tackle, I kind of doubt that teams will use him at that position. His somewhat shorter arm length, and merely average height (a whisker over 6'4.5"), just don't seem likely to get him an opportunity there. As a guard, I think he would be a more interesting prospect, and perhaps a reasonable gamble to take in the mid-to-late portion of the draft. Based on his measurable traits, I would expect him to be more at home as a run blocker than a pass protector. I wouldn't bet on him becoming a star, but he's got to be better than someone like the dreaded Oniell Cousins. I probably wouldn't pursue him, but I'd be interested in following his progress.
Mark "Glo Worm" Glowinski, OG, West Virginia
Arm Length: 33.125" Kangaroo Score: 0.851 Agility Score: 0.792
There is nothing terribly amazing about either of Glowinski's scores that are listed above. In combination, however, I do think they could make him a fairly interesting prospect. He generally seems to be projected to be a late round pick or undrafted free agent, but if given the opportunity, he does seem to possess some interesting upside potential. With a 4.58 short shuttle time, I wouldn't even rule out moving to the center position. Based on players who were similar to him, I'd say he has a slightly better than a 50/50 shot of turning out to at least be a respectable player, if he is given an opportunity, which is more than you can say for many of the players who are likely to be selected at a similar point in the draft. He's quickly becoming one of our favorite players to target in the middle of the draft. I'd probably aim to pick him up somewhere around the 4th round.
Jarvis Harrison, OG, Texas A&M
Arm Length: 33.5" Kangaroo Score: 0.715 Agility Score: 0.782
I would find it incredibly amusing if Harrison ended up being seen as a better player than his former teammate Cedric Ogbuehi, despite (probably) being drafted much later. He appears to have been a fairly successful 3 year starter at Texas A&M, though he missed some time in 2014 due to injuries. Either way, Harrison is athletically somewhat similar to the previously mentioned Mark Glowinski (actually, Glowinski measured up better, but had some inconsistencies in his combine results), and seems to be garnering a similar lack of attention. A fair bit of the criticism of Harrison seems to relate to his roly-poly physique (330#), which strikes me as a bit odd, since the NFL tends to be a group of chubby chasers. Just like we said with Glowinski, if he is still floating around in the 5th round, I think he'd make an interesting target.
Laurence Gibson, OT, Virginia Tech
Arm Length: 35.125" Kangaroo Score:1.139 Agility Score: 0.558
Overall, Gibson has the sort of athletic traits that I would find rather appealing for an offensive tackle. While his Agility Score isn't amazing, it is still good enough to not give me much concern, particularly if he is started out as a right tackle, where his physical abilities might be better suited. Of course, there is a reason why Gibson is typically ranked as a prospect who might not go until near the end of the draft. He only started 18 games in his college career, and will already be turning 24 this upcoming March. Is there something terribly wrong with him, that prevented him from getting significant playing time? Or, were his coaches just idiots? Who can really say? I suspect some team will gamble on his athletic ability a bit sooner than many might expect, but if he is still sitting around in the 6th or 7th round, I really see no reason not to give him a shot.
Austin Reiter, C, USF
Arm Length: ? Kangaroo Score: 0.617 Agility Score: 0.755
We're still looking for more information on Reiter, so take some of this with a grain of salt. Our main concerns are that we still don't know his arm length, and he might be a slightly older prospect, though we've had a hard time figuring out when he was born. Despite that, among the prospects who actually played the center position in college, Reiter might be one of the more interesting prospects. If we eliminated center prospects from consideration who were conversion projects, or who will be taken in the 3rd round or higher, Reiter might end up being our top choice for the position. While the results we have listed above might not seem exceptional, they actually line up very nicely with what we want to see in a center. We tend to have a much lower expectation of even just average lower body power with centers, so Reiter's results here are actually surprisingly good. While his Agility Score might look fairly uninteresting, his short shuttle results were 1.061 standard deviations above average. We view that as a rather key attribute for successful centers, so that interests us a great deal. Reiter was also a tree year starter at center for USF, and was twice listed on the Rimington Trophy watch list for the nation's best college centers. Despite all of that, he is generally projected to go undrafted. We would probably start to consider Reiter somewhere around the 5th round.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
2015 Free Agent Dumpster Diving
Unless someone unexpected gets released by their team, I'm not finding this year's group of free agents terribly exciting. At least when we discussed free agency last year, we had Jared Veldheer to salivate over. Sadly, the Ravens offered a somewhat more costly contract than Veldheer ended up receiving, to the typically mediocre Eugene Monroe, though that is water under the bridge at this point.
Regardless, Reilly and I decided to once again throw together a short and possibly idiotic list of the free agents that interest us for this year. For the most part, we exclude players who will be seeking highly expensive contracts, because we don't see much upside in paying a player what he is probably worth. We also tend to ignore players that are over 27 years old, since you are more likely to be paying for someone's gradual decline at that point. That leaves us giving most of our attention to cheap bums, and individuals with possible untapped potential. If the NFL Draft is like locking eyes with your one true love, from across a crowded room, then free agency must be picking up a prostitute on the side of the road. I suppose that large signing bonuses, that you quickly regret, are sort of the equivalent of getting the clap, if we were to continue with this metaphor. So, we would encourage teams to pursue the cheapest strumpets that they possibly can.
As always, we'll frequently make reference to a player's Kangaroo Score and Agility Score, which come from the combine results. These scores are given in the form of how many standard deviations that a player is away from the average results for a players at their position.
While his modest statistical production probably doesn't draw much attention, we still like Jaguars' wide receiver Cecil Shorts. We even had him listed as one of the computer's top 5 wide receiver prospects from the 2011 NFL Draft. With that being said, we still wouldn't claim that Shorts is a Julio Jones type of monster. His 40-yard dash time of just 4.50 seconds is nothing exceptional. At a whisker under six feet tall, and with a Kangaroo Score of just -0.447, he also isn't likely to be physically overpowering. He is, however, extremely nimble, with an Agility Score of 1.560. In his time at Mount Union, he performed at a very high level, even if it was against a fairly low level of competition. Considering that he wasn't selected until the 4th round, has dealt with a number of injuries, and been receiving passes from the likes of Blake Bortles and Blaine Gabbert, we still think he has done reasonably well. When catching passes from the more acceptably mediocre Chad Henne in 2012, he actually did a pretty good job. If there's one thing that troubles us about him, it is probably the rate at which he has been dropping passes, which has consistently been slightly below average over the past few seasons. Still, we remain hopeful that some of that might have to do with the poor circumstances he was forced to play in. While I wouldn't want him to be a team's primary receiver, which he has often been forced to be with the Jaguars, I do like him as a 2nd or 3rd option for the QB to throw to. Of course, this all depends on how cheaply he can be acquired. I'd probably draw the line at $3-4 million/year, with the sort of signing bonus that allows a team to part ways if things don't work out.
I'm not going to say too much about this, but I still think someone should sign Mike "Not the fat one" Williams. Yes, he is probably a bit of a moron. Yes, I have periodically gotten in trouble for my affection for asshole wide receivers. Still, I'm not really sure what this guy could have possibly done that would make him less deserving of a roster spot than Tavon Austin or Dexter McCluster. Does anyone really believe that Williams (still only 27 years old) wouldn't be an improvement over most teams' 3rd or 4th wideout? Considering that the Bills released him in December, and he went unclaimed, it's hard to see how he could possibly demand much more than the veteran minimum salary. At that price, a free pass on whatever upcoming DWIs or domestic violence charges he might have planned for his future, would just be an expected part of his compensation.
We had Rams' wide receiver Kenny Britt on our free agent shopping list last year, and it seems that we can consider him once again. Like the situation we find with Mike Williams, Britt's reputation for being an idiot has greatly affected his ability to get on the field in the past few years. Despite that, when the Rams were eventually forced to give him more opportunities this past season, he seemed to perform quite well. He was a prospect that the computer liked when he was drafted in 2009, and we still think he's a guy that's worth giving a shot to...especially now that the price he can demand is greatly diminished.
Among all the possible free agent offensive linemen that will be available, we're probably most interested in Byron Stingily, the Titans' right tackle. Our minor infatuation with him is probably a bit unreasonable. We liked him in 2011, when he was drafted in the 6th round, and we're still interested. He's probably not going to get much attention, or cost very much, since his major accomplishment thus far was simply being less incompetent than Michael Oher. Regardless, we think he has a reasonable amount of potential, based on his 0.347 Kangaroo Score, and 0.966 Agility Score. While he could keep playing right tackle, we think the best move would be to turn him into a guard, a position which might better suits his physical abilities, and one where he might thrive. If he ends up costing little more than $2 million/year, with a minimal signing bonus, I wouldn't really see any risk or downside to giving him a shot, though I think there could be some significant upside potential.
It seems highly likely that 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver is another person to add to our list of discount morons. The more he is allowed to speak, the cheaper he may be to acquire. His Agility Score of 0.373 isn't really ideal for a cornerback (though it's not bad), but when you factor in his 0.589 Kangaroo Score he does become a very interesting player to switch to the free safety position, which is what he played prior to his senior season at South Carolina. While he seems to have generally done a fine job as a corner, we still think the safety position is where he would fit best. If teams are scared away by his personal issues, I'd happily sign him to a cheap contract. I wouldn't be surprised if he is given a reasonably significant contract, but as long as the signing bonus is kept rather low, the risks of being stuck with him shouldn't be too bad.
Cardinals' tight end Rob Housler is someone that probably should be much better than he has so far appeared to be, at least based the computer's data. He's fast, he's agile, he's explosive...at least on paper. He also displayed excellent statistical production in his time at Florida Atlantic. So far, it just hasn't really amounted to much at the NFL level. While he seems to regularly haul in around 69% of the passes thrown his way, with very few drops, he simply has never become as big a part of the Cardinals' offense as we would expect him to be. Is it because of injuries? Does the Cardinals poor pass blocking require him to help out there, rather than running more pass routes? I really have no idea. Still, quality tight ends are fairly rare commodities, and we think there is a reasonable chance he could still have his best years ahead of him. Maybe it would seem more sensible to pursue someone like Dolphins' tight end Charles Clay, who might also be allowed to enter free agency. Unfortunately, in Clay's case, his production has already probably inflated his value to the point where he won't be a bargain anymore. So, we might be willing to slightly overspend here, and take a gamble on the less established Housler. We'd probably offer something in the $3 million/year range, purely based on his upside.
In general, we're sort of opposed to selecting nose tackles with high draft picks. They rarely contribute much to the pass rush, and merely exist to tie up offensive linemen to slow down the running game. Instead of drafting a fat man for the middle of the line, why not just pick one up on the cheap? Our top target would probably be Kenrick Ellis. His 1.776 Kangaroo Score is precisely the sort of lower body power we want to see in a nose tackle. He was a productive player in college, and in his somewhat limited snaps in the NFL seems to be a perfectly adequate fat guy. Our other, even cheaper alternative might be Ishmaa'ily Kitchen. With a 1.177 Kangaroo Score, he's probably a bit less physically gifted than Ellis, and generally been less productive, though I still suspect he could be perfectly adequate. I'd just offer a fairly small contract of maybe $2 million/year to each of them, along with all the donuts they can eat, and take whomever signs first, and for the least amount of money.
Prior to the 2014 season, Ravens' safety Jeromy Miles really didn't do much outside of playing on special teams. In 6 seasons in the NFL, he has only been listed as a starter for 3 games. Still, his 0.363 Agility Score and 1.245 Kangaroo Score do suggest significant physical potential that is ideal for a safety, and he was a rather productive player in his time at Massachusetts. His 4.45 second 40-yard dash, with a 10-yard split of 1.53 seconds, is also highly encouraging for a player who is 6'2" and 211 pounds. Despite his potential, it seems very possible that teams underestimate him because of the stigma of being an undrafted player from a lower level of competition. I suspect he'll cost next to nothing to sign, so there's no real risk in seeing if he might have some upside. I'm guessing that he will be signed for barely more than the veteran minimum, and almost no signing bonus at all. At the very worst, he would provide depth, though he could prove to be more valuable than many might suspect. I view him as a high priority, extremely low risk target.
I can't really make up my mind about Bills' safety Da'Norris Searcy. His college resume was rather mediocre, but his 0.364 Agility Score and 1.339 Kangaroo Score suggests extremely good physical potential for his position. In many ways, he is athletically similar to the previously mentioned Jeromy Miles (though Searcy is probably a tad less quick), with the benefit of having received more actual playing time. This difference in playing time could entirely be a product Searcy being drafted in the 4th round, though it is difficult to say for sure. During the past two seasons, he seems to have performed reasonably well, though it's possible he benefited a lot from the Bills' pass rush. If he was available cheaply, for maybe about $2-3 million/year, with a very modest signing bonus, I could see picking him up, though I suspect he'll end up costing more than I would like to pay.
Titans' linebacker Colin McCarthy is a bit of an odd duck, who might get overlooked due to missing the 2014 season with a shoulder injury. When he was drafted in the 4th round in 2011, Reilly and I had very mixed feelings about him. The computer liked his athletic potential, with his -0.309 Kangaroo Score (which is better than it might sound), and 1.015 Agility Score. He also had an impressive 4.59 second 40-yard time, with a 1.60 10-yard split. Overall, his athletic ability was very similar to many of the players at his position who have gone on to become Pro Bowlers. His statistical production at Miami was also quite solid, though it suggested his strengths probably leaned towards being more of a run defender, than someone who excelled in coverage. Despite all of these positive signs, we just never felt too excited about him during the 2011 draft. He just didn't blow our minds when we watched him play. As a free agent who can probably be acquired cheaply, we might feel a bit differently. He's still only 26 years old. In his limited playing time, he has had his ups and downs, and probably been at least a passably average player. I suspect he can be signed for under $1.5 million/year, with an insignificant signing bonus, and at the very least provide some depth to a team.
Chiefs' safety Kurt Coleman sort of falls into the "what do you have to lose?" category. I can't imagine that he'll cost significantly more than the veteran minimum, so there shouldn't be much risk, but he still has some potential upside. With a 0.309 Agility Score, and a 0.478 Kangaroo Score, he has reasonably good physical potential for a safety, though nothing amazing. So far, he seems to have gotten minimal playing time, and produced extremely erratic results from year to year. I'd probably offer him a ham sandwich and a bus ticket to Baltimore.
I get the feeling that there aren't many James Carpenter fans out there. That's fair. To some extent I think the biggest issue here might be the ridiculous expectations that people have of 1st round draft picks, which he clearly fell short of meeting. Carpenter's 0.515 Kangaroo Score, and 0.375 Agility Score, while relatively good, are not the sorts of results that should have merited being selected as highly as he was taken. While he performed rather poorly in his first 3 seasons in the NFL, I do think he improved significantly in 2014. While he doesn't appear to be much of a run blocker, I do have to wonder about the extent to which his pass blocking struggles might relate to other issues in the Seahawks offense. The team's receivers have largely been garbage, which probably requires him to hold a block for a longer period of time. Russell Wilson is also obviously a bit of a scrambler, which also tends to result in many more sacks being credited to a team's offensive linemen. Now, I'm not saying that Carpenter is actually good. I'm just saying that he might be closer to average than some might suspect, and that his current deflated value might be more in line with that level of expected performance. While I wouldn't strongly pursue Carpenter, I could see giving him a shot at redemption, if the price is right. Let's say that a largely non-guaranteed contract that paid no more than $1.5 million/year might interest me.
Regardless, Reilly and I decided to once again throw together a short and possibly idiotic list of the free agents that interest us for this year. For the most part, we exclude players who will be seeking highly expensive contracts, because we don't see much upside in paying a player what he is probably worth. We also tend to ignore players that are over 27 years old, since you are more likely to be paying for someone's gradual decline at that point. That leaves us giving most of our attention to cheap bums, and individuals with possible untapped potential. If the NFL Draft is like locking eyes with your one true love, from across a crowded room, then free agency must be picking up a prostitute on the side of the road. I suppose that large signing bonuses, that you quickly regret, are sort of the equivalent of getting the clap, if we were to continue with this metaphor. So, we would encourage teams to pursue the cheapest strumpets that they possibly can.
As always, we'll frequently make reference to a player's Kangaroo Score and Agility Score, which come from the combine results. These scores are given in the form of how many standard deviations that a player is away from the average results for a players at their position.
While his modest statistical production probably doesn't draw much attention, we still like Jaguars' wide receiver Cecil Shorts. We even had him listed as one of the computer's top 5 wide receiver prospects from the 2011 NFL Draft. With that being said, we still wouldn't claim that Shorts is a Julio Jones type of monster. His 40-yard dash time of just 4.50 seconds is nothing exceptional. At a whisker under six feet tall, and with a Kangaroo Score of just -0.447, he also isn't likely to be physically overpowering. He is, however, extremely nimble, with an Agility Score of 1.560. In his time at Mount Union, he performed at a very high level, even if it was against a fairly low level of competition. Considering that he wasn't selected until the 4th round, has dealt with a number of injuries, and been receiving passes from the likes of Blake Bortles and Blaine Gabbert, we still think he has done reasonably well. When catching passes from the more acceptably mediocre Chad Henne in 2012, he actually did a pretty good job. If there's one thing that troubles us about him, it is probably the rate at which he has been dropping passes, which has consistently been slightly below average over the past few seasons. Still, we remain hopeful that some of that might have to do with the poor circumstances he was forced to play in. While I wouldn't want him to be a team's primary receiver, which he has often been forced to be with the Jaguars, I do like him as a 2nd or 3rd option for the QB to throw to. Of course, this all depends on how cheaply he can be acquired. I'd probably draw the line at $3-4 million/year, with the sort of signing bonus that allows a team to part ways if things don't work out.
I'm not going to say too much about this, but I still think someone should sign Mike "Not the fat one" Williams. Yes, he is probably a bit of a moron. Yes, I have periodically gotten in trouble for my affection for asshole wide receivers. Still, I'm not really sure what this guy could have possibly done that would make him less deserving of a roster spot than Tavon Austin or Dexter McCluster. Does anyone really believe that Williams (still only 27 years old) wouldn't be an improvement over most teams' 3rd or 4th wideout? Considering that the Bills released him in December, and he went unclaimed, it's hard to see how he could possibly demand much more than the veteran minimum salary. At that price, a free pass on whatever upcoming DWIs or domestic violence charges he might have planned for his future, would just be an expected part of his compensation.
We had Rams' wide receiver Kenny Britt on our free agent shopping list last year, and it seems that we can consider him once again. Like the situation we find with Mike Williams, Britt's reputation for being an idiot has greatly affected his ability to get on the field in the past few years. Despite that, when the Rams were eventually forced to give him more opportunities this past season, he seemed to perform quite well. He was a prospect that the computer liked when he was drafted in 2009, and we still think he's a guy that's worth giving a shot to...especially now that the price he can demand is greatly diminished.
Among all the possible free agent offensive linemen that will be available, we're probably most interested in Byron Stingily, the Titans' right tackle. Our minor infatuation with him is probably a bit unreasonable. We liked him in 2011, when he was drafted in the 6th round, and we're still interested. He's probably not going to get much attention, or cost very much, since his major accomplishment thus far was simply being less incompetent than Michael Oher. Regardless, we think he has a reasonable amount of potential, based on his 0.347 Kangaroo Score, and 0.966 Agility Score. While he could keep playing right tackle, we think the best move would be to turn him into a guard, a position which might better suits his physical abilities, and one where he might thrive. If he ends up costing little more than $2 million/year, with a minimal signing bonus, I wouldn't really see any risk or downside to giving him a shot, though I think there could be some significant upside potential.
It seems highly likely that 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver is another person to add to our list of discount morons. The more he is allowed to speak, the cheaper he may be to acquire. His Agility Score of 0.373 isn't really ideal for a cornerback (though it's not bad), but when you factor in his 0.589 Kangaroo Score he does become a very interesting player to switch to the free safety position, which is what he played prior to his senior season at South Carolina. While he seems to have generally done a fine job as a corner, we still think the safety position is where he would fit best. If teams are scared away by his personal issues, I'd happily sign him to a cheap contract. I wouldn't be surprised if he is given a reasonably significant contract, but as long as the signing bonus is kept rather low, the risks of being stuck with him shouldn't be too bad.
Cardinals' tight end Rob Housler is someone that probably should be much better than he has so far appeared to be, at least based the computer's data. He's fast, he's agile, he's explosive...at least on paper. He also displayed excellent statistical production in his time at Florida Atlantic. So far, it just hasn't really amounted to much at the NFL level. While he seems to regularly haul in around 69% of the passes thrown his way, with very few drops, he simply has never become as big a part of the Cardinals' offense as we would expect him to be. Is it because of injuries? Does the Cardinals poor pass blocking require him to help out there, rather than running more pass routes? I really have no idea. Still, quality tight ends are fairly rare commodities, and we think there is a reasonable chance he could still have his best years ahead of him. Maybe it would seem more sensible to pursue someone like Dolphins' tight end Charles Clay, who might also be allowed to enter free agency. Unfortunately, in Clay's case, his production has already probably inflated his value to the point where he won't be a bargain anymore. So, we might be willing to slightly overspend here, and take a gamble on the less established Housler. We'd probably offer something in the $3 million/year range, purely based on his upside.
In general, we're sort of opposed to selecting nose tackles with high draft picks. They rarely contribute much to the pass rush, and merely exist to tie up offensive linemen to slow down the running game. Instead of drafting a fat man for the middle of the line, why not just pick one up on the cheap? Our top target would probably be Kenrick Ellis. His 1.776 Kangaroo Score is precisely the sort of lower body power we want to see in a nose tackle. He was a productive player in college, and in his somewhat limited snaps in the NFL seems to be a perfectly adequate fat guy. Our other, even cheaper alternative might be Ishmaa'ily Kitchen. With a 1.177 Kangaroo Score, he's probably a bit less physically gifted than Ellis, and generally been less productive, though I still suspect he could be perfectly adequate. I'd just offer a fairly small contract of maybe $2 million/year to each of them, along with all the donuts they can eat, and take whomever signs first, and for the least amount of money.
Prior to the 2014 season, Ravens' safety Jeromy Miles really didn't do much outside of playing on special teams. In 6 seasons in the NFL, he has only been listed as a starter for 3 games. Still, his 0.363 Agility Score and 1.245 Kangaroo Score do suggest significant physical potential that is ideal for a safety, and he was a rather productive player in his time at Massachusetts. His 4.45 second 40-yard dash, with a 10-yard split of 1.53 seconds, is also highly encouraging for a player who is 6'2" and 211 pounds. Despite his potential, it seems very possible that teams underestimate him because of the stigma of being an undrafted player from a lower level of competition. I suspect he'll cost next to nothing to sign, so there's no real risk in seeing if he might have some upside. I'm guessing that he will be signed for barely more than the veteran minimum, and almost no signing bonus at all. At the very worst, he would provide depth, though he could prove to be more valuable than many might suspect. I view him as a high priority, extremely low risk target.
I can't really make up my mind about Bills' safety Da'Norris Searcy. His college resume was rather mediocre, but his 0.364 Agility Score and 1.339 Kangaroo Score suggests extremely good physical potential for his position. In many ways, he is athletically similar to the previously mentioned Jeromy Miles (though Searcy is probably a tad less quick), with the benefit of having received more actual playing time. This difference in playing time could entirely be a product Searcy being drafted in the 4th round, though it is difficult to say for sure. During the past two seasons, he seems to have performed reasonably well, though it's possible he benefited a lot from the Bills' pass rush. If he was available cheaply, for maybe about $2-3 million/year, with a very modest signing bonus, I could see picking him up, though I suspect he'll end up costing more than I would like to pay.
Titans' linebacker Colin McCarthy is a bit of an odd duck, who might get overlooked due to missing the 2014 season with a shoulder injury. When he was drafted in the 4th round in 2011, Reilly and I had very mixed feelings about him. The computer liked his athletic potential, with his -0.309 Kangaroo Score (which is better than it might sound), and 1.015 Agility Score. He also had an impressive 4.59 second 40-yard time, with a 1.60 10-yard split. Overall, his athletic ability was very similar to many of the players at his position who have gone on to become Pro Bowlers. His statistical production at Miami was also quite solid, though it suggested his strengths probably leaned towards being more of a run defender, than someone who excelled in coverage. Despite all of these positive signs, we just never felt too excited about him during the 2011 draft. He just didn't blow our minds when we watched him play. As a free agent who can probably be acquired cheaply, we might feel a bit differently. He's still only 26 years old. In his limited playing time, he has had his ups and downs, and probably been at least a passably average player. I suspect he can be signed for under $1.5 million/year, with an insignificant signing bonus, and at the very least provide some depth to a team.
Chiefs' safety Kurt Coleman sort of falls into the "what do you have to lose?" category. I can't imagine that he'll cost significantly more than the veteran minimum, so there shouldn't be much risk, but he still has some potential upside. With a 0.309 Agility Score, and a 0.478 Kangaroo Score, he has reasonably good physical potential for a safety, though nothing amazing. So far, he seems to have gotten minimal playing time, and produced extremely erratic results from year to year. I'd probably offer him a ham sandwich and a bus ticket to Baltimore.
I get the feeling that there aren't many James Carpenter fans out there. That's fair. To some extent I think the biggest issue here might be the ridiculous expectations that people have of 1st round draft picks, which he clearly fell short of meeting. Carpenter's 0.515 Kangaroo Score, and 0.375 Agility Score, while relatively good, are not the sorts of results that should have merited being selected as highly as he was taken. While he performed rather poorly in his first 3 seasons in the NFL, I do think he improved significantly in 2014. While he doesn't appear to be much of a run blocker, I do have to wonder about the extent to which his pass blocking struggles might relate to other issues in the Seahawks offense. The team's receivers have largely been garbage, which probably requires him to hold a block for a longer period of time. Russell Wilson is also obviously a bit of a scrambler, which also tends to result in many more sacks being credited to a team's offensive linemen. Now, I'm not saying that Carpenter is actually good. I'm just saying that he might be closer to average than some might suspect, and that his current deflated value might be more in line with that level of expected performance. While I wouldn't strongly pursue Carpenter, I could see giving him a shot at redemption, if the price is right. Let's say that a largely non-guaranteed contract that paid no more than $1.5 million/year might interest me.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Heads Will Roll
Team Kangaroo is
sort of the ultimate small market team. Our attendance is extremely
poor, leading to blackouts for all of our team's home games.
Sponsorship arrangements to endorse Viagra and Ford F-150s have been
non-existent. We can't even afford uniforms for our cheerleaders, and we're shamefully forced to send them onto the field naked. It's also safe to say that our continued efforts to get
tax payers to fund our $1.5 billion stadium plan have fallen on deaf
ears. This has forced us to make some radical adjustments, namely the
selling of the team to an individual who better conforms to blueprint of the league's
standard owner. Hopefully, having the right figurehead can be our first step towards legitimacy.
All hail our fearless leader! May he live forever!
By acquiring a 51% stake in our fictional franchise (for the low, low price of $3.50), Boss Hogg has become our new leader, and representative at league meetings. He promises to bring the swagger back to our humble organization, and should prove to be the equal of other cartoonish individuals such as Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. He has also made a pledge not to move the team to Los Angeles, though he keeps bringing up some place called Hazzard County, wherever the hell that is. While I'm sure there might be some criticism about having the team run by a deranged and fictional character, portrayed by a now deceased actor, I do think Al Davis might have set a precedent here.
In death, members of Team Kangaroo have a name...
Normally, our primary focus is on trying to find interesting young prospects in the NFL Draft, but there is another side to this coin that is perhaps almost as vital. Sometimes you need to know when to let go, and cut your losses. Far too often, teams hold onto players for far too long, hoping that the light will eventually come on, and a previously incompetent player will begin to shine. The longer that teams wait to cut ties with these disappointments, the fewer opportunities they have to discover if someone better might be out there. We prefer to use maggot therapy, to eat away the dead flesh as soon as possible, so that the healthy areas remain uninfected.
We will now cast off those poor bastards who failed to set our world on fire, so that we can make room for new and future disappointment who will take their place. While I've been meaning to do this for a while, I kept forgetting to make these decisions official. Managing a non-existent team, and keeping up with the endless paper work, can be quite a burden. Still, most of these cuts should have been rather obvious from the beginning. We'll start things off with some of the selections from the 2013 Ozzie Newsome Challenge.
It's pretty clear that there is no longer any reason to hold out hope for our 7th round pick of offensive tackle Wade Jacobson, so onto the trash heap he goes. Admittedly, we picked him despite never having seen him play. That's just the sort of responsible scouting we do around here. Nonetheless, his physical attributes are so shockingly unusual that the odds of him being completely incapable of landing a roster spot struck me as incredibly unlikely. With a 1.788 Kangaroo Score and a 1.407 Agility Score, he was an absolute freak. The failure rate for people with this sort of athleticism is really remarkably low. Despite that, nobody seemed interested in giving him much of an opportunity, and yet the incomparably incompetent Oneil Cousins continues to be employed. It's really quite confusing. Oh well.
Likewise, we will also be discarding our 4th round pick of wide receiver Ryan Swope. In this case, I have to admit that we had a bit of a brain-fart. I knew that Swope had a serious history of concussions, but I must have been blocking this out when we chose him. Regardless, he retired before his first season even began, so as to preserve the integrity of his precious brain. Personally, I think he could have just rubbed some dirt on it, but that's not really my decision.
We also probably have to do something about Da'Rick Rogers. The sensible part of me says it is time to move on. On the other hand, I see that he has now been picked up by the Chiefs, a team that is clearly in need of some receiving talent. Honestly, I think he could end up being the most talented receiver on their team, not that this will probably have much effect on his ability to get playing time. It's really an odd situation. His most likely less gifted former Tennessee teammates Justin Hunter and Cordarelle Patterson are still sort of limping along, producing relatively little. Da'Rick, in his limited opportunities, has arguably provided more reasons for optimism than either of them, but without the draft status these other two carry, nobody seems too invested in seeing how far he can go, or how many DUIs he can acquire.
I've always thought Da'Rick had a lot in common with Mike "Not the fat one" Williams, who seems to be going through a similar spell of struggles related to his...umm...issues. Of course, neither one of them appears to have entered the Josh Gordon Zone of truly exceptional stupidity. I'm not sure when the NFL's concern with character became such a priority, but I find this new trend highly disturbing. The league was built on highly athletic and productive players, who frequently tended to be morons! It's almost as if nobody has any respect for tradition anymore. For now, I think we'll let Da'Rick hang around a tiny bit longer, though we might revisit this question after the upcoming draft, if we need to make room for someone else.
Now, we're gradually going to transition from our 2013 draft class to our group from 2014. There is a bit of overlap here when it comes to bad luck. From the 2013 class, we have offensive guard Dave Quessenberry, who appeared to be doing quite well, before being diagnosed with cancer. For the time being, we're going to hold onto him, and cross our fingers. Our fictional team now has a fictional injured reserve, just for him. Then in 2014, we selected offensive tackle Garrett Scott, who was promptly diagnosed with a previously unknown heart ailment, which forced his immediate retirement. I almost have to wonder if we are causing these things to happen to people, merely by selecting them. The odds of having two such extreme medical issues come up seems rather slim. Either way, we clearly have to call it quits with Garrett Scott.
I suspect our problems with identifying health/injury risks are Reilly's fault. When your expected lifespan is only 12 years (and you're already 12 years old!), your attitude towards long term risks can become quite warped. The way things are going, we'll be the first team to draft a player with polio in over fifty years.
Plans for the future...
We're working on some new ideas that we want to explore for the upcoming draft. We're kicking around some ideas about minimizing risks when selecting quarterbacks. We're also giving some serious thought to how we view the statistical production of defensive linemen and linebackers. Unfortunately, the results of some of these thoughts might not be entirely ready in time for this year's upcoming draft.
For the most part, the bulk of these new efforts will really focus on defensive players who line up in the front seven. We're leaving defensive backs out, for the moment, because we still think their output is too heavily influenced by the individuals who are in front of them. So far, it seems to be providing some interesting possible explanations for why some players who had exceptional athletic ability, and superficially good statistical production, have failed to succeed to the level that the computer might have expected.
While we're excited about some of these possibilities, it involves rebuilding some of our database of players from past drafts, and this will take some time. We probably won't have this finished before the upcoming draft, though we'll test it out on a limited basis with some of the more interesting prospects. Honestly, I have very mixed feelings about some of the ways that we are trying to reevaluate college statistics. On the one hand, some of these efforts will probably push us in a more intelligent direction, and help to eliminate some potential errors. On the other hand, I've rather enjoyed approaching the draft with no real intelligent thoughts in my head. It's sort of been our raison d'etre, to see how far we can go, while making almost no effort. It really would be a shame to give that up.
 |
| Long may he reign! |
All hail our fearless leader! May he live forever!
By acquiring a 51% stake in our fictional franchise (for the low, low price of $3.50), Boss Hogg has become our new leader, and representative at league meetings. He promises to bring the swagger back to our humble organization, and should prove to be the equal of other cartoonish individuals such as Dan Snyder and Jerry Jones. He has also made a pledge not to move the team to Los Angeles, though he keeps bringing up some place called Hazzard County, wherever the hell that is. While I'm sure there might be some criticism about having the team run by a deranged and fictional character, portrayed by a now deceased actor, I do think Al Davis might have set a precedent here.
In death, members of Team Kangaroo have a name...
Normally, our primary focus is on trying to find interesting young prospects in the NFL Draft, but there is another side to this coin that is perhaps almost as vital. Sometimes you need to know when to let go, and cut your losses. Far too often, teams hold onto players for far too long, hoping that the light will eventually come on, and a previously incompetent player will begin to shine. The longer that teams wait to cut ties with these disappointments, the fewer opportunities they have to discover if someone better might be out there. We prefer to use maggot therapy, to eat away the dead flesh as soon as possible, so that the healthy areas remain uninfected.
We will now cast off those poor bastards who failed to set our world on fire, so that we can make room for new and future disappointment who will take their place. While I've been meaning to do this for a while, I kept forgetting to make these decisions official. Managing a non-existent team, and keeping up with the endless paper work, can be quite a burden. Still, most of these cuts should have been rather obvious from the beginning. We'll start things off with some of the selections from the 2013 Ozzie Newsome Challenge.
It's pretty clear that there is no longer any reason to hold out hope for our 7th round pick of offensive tackle Wade Jacobson, so onto the trash heap he goes. Admittedly, we picked him despite never having seen him play. That's just the sort of responsible scouting we do around here. Nonetheless, his physical attributes are so shockingly unusual that the odds of him being completely incapable of landing a roster spot struck me as incredibly unlikely. With a 1.788 Kangaroo Score and a 1.407 Agility Score, he was an absolute freak. The failure rate for people with this sort of athleticism is really remarkably low. Despite that, nobody seemed interested in giving him much of an opportunity, and yet the incomparably incompetent Oneil Cousins continues to be employed. It's really quite confusing. Oh well.
Likewise, we will also be discarding our 4th round pick of wide receiver Ryan Swope. In this case, I have to admit that we had a bit of a brain-fart. I knew that Swope had a serious history of concussions, but I must have been blocking this out when we chose him. Regardless, he retired before his first season even began, so as to preserve the integrity of his precious brain. Personally, I think he could have just rubbed some dirt on it, but that's not really my decision.
We also probably have to do something about Da'Rick Rogers. The sensible part of me says it is time to move on. On the other hand, I see that he has now been picked up by the Chiefs, a team that is clearly in need of some receiving talent. Honestly, I think he could end up being the most talented receiver on their team, not that this will probably have much effect on his ability to get playing time. It's really an odd situation. His most likely less gifted former Tennessee teammates Justin Hunter and Cordarelle Patterson are still sort of limping along, producing relatively little. Da'Rick, in his limited opportunities, has arguably provided more reasons for optimism than either of them, but without the draft status these other two carry, nobody seems too invested in seeing how far he can go, or how many DUIs he can acquire.
I've always thought Da'Rick had a lot in common with Mike "Not the fat one" Williams, who seems to be going through a similar spell of struggles related to his...umm...issues. Of course, neither one of them appears to have entered the Josh Gordon Zone of truly exceptional stupidity. I'm not sure when the NFL's concern with character became such a priority, but I find this new trend highly disturbing. The league was built on highly athletic and productive players, who frequently tended to be morons! It's almost as if nobody has any respect for tradition anymore. For now, I think we'll let Da'Rick hang around a tiny bit longer, though we might revisit this question after the upcoming draft, if we need to make room for someone else.
Now, we're gradually going to transition from our 2013 draft class to our group from 2014. There is a bit of overlap here when it comes to bad luck. From the 2013 class, we have offensive guard Dave Quessenberry, who appeared to be doing quite well, before being diagnosed with cancer. For the time being, we're going to hold onto him, and cross our fingers. Our fictional team now has a fictional injured reserve, just for him. Then in 2014, we selected offensive tackle Garrett Scott, who was promptly diagnosed with a previously unknown heart ailment, which forced his immediate retirement. I almost have to wonder if we are causing these things to happen to people, merely by selecting them. The odds of having two such extreme medical issues come up seems rather slim. Either way, we clearly have to call it quits with Garrett Scott.
I suspect our problems with identifying health/injury risks are Reilly's fault. When your expected lifespan is only 12 years (and you're already 12 years old!), your attitude towards long term risks can become quite warped. The way things are going, we'll be the first team to draft a player with polio in over fifty years.
Plans for the future...
We're working on some new ideas that we want to explore for the upcoming draft. We're kicking around some ideas about minimizing risks when selecting quarterbacks. We're also giving some serious thought to how we view the statistical production of defensive linemen and linebackers. Unfortunately, the results of some of these thoughts might not be entirely ready in time for this year's upcoming draft.
For the most part, the bulk of these new efforts will really focus on defensive players who line up in the front seven. We're leaving defensive backs out, for the moment, because we still think their output is too heavily influenced by the individuals who are in front of them. So far, it seems to be providing some interesting possible explanations for why some players who had exceptional athletic ability, and superficially good statistical production, have failed to succeed to the level that the computer might have expected.
While we're excited about some of these possibilities, it involves rebuilding some of our database of players from past drafts, and this will take some time. We probably won't have this finished before the upcoming draft, though we'll test it out on a limited basis with some of the more interesting prospects. Honestly, I have very mixed feelings about some of the ways that we are trying to reevaluate college statistics. On the one hand, some of these efforts will probably push us in a more intelligent direction, and help to eliminate some potential errors. On the other hand, I've rather enjoyed approaching the draft with no real intelligent thoughts in my head. It's sort of been our raison d'etre, to see how far we can go, while making almost no effort. It really would be a shame to give that up.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
The People's Champions
Our main focus around here has been speculation about the criteria by which team's make their picks in the NFL Draft. The goal is simply to find ways of identifying prospects that have a better chance of meeting a team's hopes and expectations, rather than ending up a disappointment. It's a tricky business, and inevitably we will be wrong sometimes (at which point, I will place the blame squarely on Reilly's shoulders).
Oddly, if there is one aspect of doing this blog (the bloooog) that makes me nervous, it is the possibility of shouting "Hey, we were right about this guy!". Yes, we want our idiotic hunches to turn out well, but chest thumping bravado gives me the heebie jeebies. The data is there. We attempt to sort it, and extract some meaning from it. We think it is the sensible thing to do. Despite that, I really cringe when I see some of the gurus of the internet, and the self-congratulatory wanking they engage in. Some enthusiasm is understandable, but preferably in moderation. I generally think we should behave more like monks, or maybe the Amish. So, with that in mind, we've decided to try to make it a policy to avoid reflecting on the times when things go according to plan. We want to avoid doing unnecessary and tacky victory laps.
At the same time, there are going to be some prospects whom we strongly disapproved of, who go on to do quite well for themselves. Whether they are genuine outliers, or there was insufficient data to project them correctly, or maybe we were just plain wrong; it all works out the same. Sometimes we're just going to be way off the mark. It may not change our feelings about whether such prospects were sensible gambles for a team to make, but we do think these slip-ups should be given some consideration. Maybe there is something to be learned from such embarrassing accidents.
Based on these feelings, we decided to start doing an annual list of our potentially most egregious errors. Rather than include all of our mistakes, we'll mainly focus on the players that we had the most damning criticisms of, who still managed to exceed our expectations. As time goes on, these lists will undoubtedly grow. Since these players are possible victories for the traditional scouting crowd, we'll just refer to them as The People's Champions. Our cilice has been tightened, let the flagellation begin...
Kelvin Benjamin
I believe our exact words were something like, any team that drafts him "should probably check their GM for symptoms of dementia". That might have been a bit harsh. Of course, Benjamin went on to accumulate 1,008 yards, and 9 touchdowns in his rookie season. It wasn't our finest moment. The worst part is, I still don't have a great theory as to how this happened.
One issue that makes Kelvin Benjamin particularly difficult to reexamine, relates to his claims that he intentionally bombed the combine in order to drop in the draft, so that Carolina would be able to select him. If this is true, then we clearly didn't have much of a chance to evaluate him correctly, since we base a fair bit of our hunches on a player's measurable attributes. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that Benjamin is serious about any of this, since you would have to be a moron to intentionally make yourself look bad at the combine. On the other hand, this is an individual who scored a 7 on the Wonderlic test, so he probably needs his coaches to help him tie his shoes.
Will Benjamin flame out like Michael Clayton, who was a 2004 rookie phenom that similarly defied explanation? I have no idea. While I'd love to have order restored to my universe, I will try to refrain from constructing any voodoo dolls shaped like a Panthers' player to do so. I wish him luck, and sincerely hope that someone in Carolina has child-proofed his house.
In the end, if we have to be wrong at some point, I'd always prefer that it be about someone as comically peculiar as Kelvin Benjamin.
C.J. Mosley
It's particularly painful for me to acknowledge that we might have been wrong about C.J. Mosley, since the Ravens are not only my home team, but one of my favorite organizations to torment. Still, despite my apprehensions regarding Mosley, I have to say that I do think he probably is performing quite a bit better than our numbers suggested he would.
While we never really outright claimed that Mosley would be a bust, we certainly leaned towards the possibility that he would be a mediocrity. Whether it was his measured athletic ability, or his statistical production in college, there wasn't much that grabbed our attention, or made him appear to be in the same class as some of the 1st round MLBs that preceded him. Still, off the top of my head, I can say that there were a handful of similar players such as Navorro Bowman, Curtis Lofton, and maybe Jon Beason that were also a bit unlikely to become successful NFL middle linebackers. So, these things do happen from time to time..
Has Mosley performed better than I believed he would? Yes, almost certianly. Now, do I really believe that Mosley deserved to be selected for the Pro Bowl this year? Ehh...hmm...maybe not. The degree to which his draft status may have enhanced the likelihood of receiving this honor is a strong possibility. At the same time, we should also probably take a look at the players who have surrounded Mosley in his rookie season.
While the Ravens' 2014 secondary play was clearly horrendous, that shouldn't really have too much impact on an inside linebacker. The front seven of their defense, however, was actually rather good. The outside pass rushing tandem of Suggs and Dumervil, accumulated 29 combined sacks, more than holding up their part of the equation. The team's three primary down linemen, of Ngata, Williams and Canty, are a massive 992 pound wall (possibly the largest trio in the league, though I still have to check on that), and generally conform (to varying degrees) to the athletic and statistical profiles we hope to see in these types of players. They probably kept Mosley relatively untouched. Finally, there is the team's other inside linebacker, the veteran Daryl Smith, who despite his age, is still performing at a high enough level to take a lot of the pressure off of Mosley. All things considered, Mosley wound up in a pretty good environment.
Will Mosley be able to maintain this head of steam, as the surrounding talent retires or moves to other teams? I don't know, but I think it is an interesting question. Haloti Ngata is easily the most physically gifted linemen on the team, but his current contract makes him a ripe target to cut. With the exception of Brandon Williams, everyone else in the front seven is at least 30 years old, so the clock is ticking. How this will impact Mosley is hard to say.
The most interesting question, at least to me, is whether Mosley's apparent success may actually end up hurting the team in a more roundabout way. If Mosley continues to do well, despite being a prospect that on paper appeared to present some risks, doesn't this just encourage the team to continue pursuing their questionable approach to the draft? Let's consider the team's top draft picks in the past few years.
In 2013, the team's top pick was Matt Elam, who so far has been a fairly well recognized failure at the safety position. Due to an inability to calculate his Agility Score, we weren't able to give him much of an assessment last year. With defensive backs, the Agility Score is obviously a bit more of a factor than it might be at other positions. While his 40 time was fairly good (4.43 seconds), his statistical production and Kangaroo Score (0.284) were little more than just average. Still, while we couldn't fully appraise Elam, we certainly wouldn't have been able to endorse selecting someone about whom there wasn't enough data, or where the available data was relatively weak, so the computer would have viewed this pick as an unnecessary and unwise risk.
In 2012, the team's top pick was Courtney Upshaw, who is someone we have criticized numerous times already. Due to the fact that he has been listed as a starter in 36 out of a possible 48 games during his young career, many people still choose to defend this pick. Of course, Reilly and I tend to think that the whopping 3 sacks he has produced in this time are a bit more meaningful. The data was there to suggest he would likely struggle as a pass rusher, which we still feel is the primary role for a 3-4 OLB, particularly when one is selected with a relatively high pick. So, again, caution was thrown to the wind, and the team went with their gut instinct, rather than with the statistical data.
In 2011, the team selected cornerback Jimmy Smith, and...we really don't have a huge issue with this pick. While there were other prospects that the computer might have preferred, Smith was still fairly intriguing. While his Agility Score (0.316) was only slightly above average, he was a much larger sort of corner, and his Kangaroo Score (0.963), suggested he did have some potential. While people seem to feel he has done well so far, injuries appear to be his main obstacle. This seems to be shaping up to have been a reasonably effective draft pick.
In 2010, the team's top pick was Sergio Kindle. While we could skip past this selection, since he never really played due to injury, the data still suggests that the team was ignoring the glaring warning signs here, as they frequently appear to do. It's a shame that Kindle couldn't get on the field and confirm whether or not the data was accurate, but we still have to accept that this was a bust.
In 2009, the Ravens' first pick was the infamous Michael Oher. What would the computer make of an offensive tackle prospect with a 0.134 Agility Score, and a 0.194 Kangaroo Score? Well, you could certainly do worse, but those are pretty much the definition of average and forgettable results. They certainly aren't the kinds of results that would make us feel comfortable with selecting someone in the first round. Nonetheless, that is precisely what the team did, and Oher has gone on to surrender a sack in about 53% of his games started, which is clearly a rather poor result. Oddly, none of this appears to have greatly impacted his starting status, because high draft picks probably get more second chances than they sometimes deserve. We tried to delve into why this foolishness happens before,, and I think that brings us back around to why we should be equally suspicious of why Courtney Upshaw continues to get starts.
In the area that these players were selected, you can generally figure on making a successful pick about 60-70% of the time. It seems reasonable to me that you could say that the only arguable success in this group may have been Jimmy Smith (though it may still be a bit early to declare that). Most likely, it isn't a complete coincidence that Smith was a rather decent fit for the athletic/statistical profile of an NFL cornerback. On the other hand, what can we say about these other picks that the Ravens made? Pretty much without exception, they all seem to have been enormous gambles, even if the conventional wisdom at the time suggested they were reasonable picks.
Now, it may sound as if I am still being a bit reticent about giving C.J. Mosley the level of praise he perhaps deserves, but that isn't my goal. While I wish Mosley continued good fortune, I still have some concerns about the thought process that went into his selection, regardless of how things actually turned out. To some extent, the process used to select Mosley appears to be the same one used to make all of these other regrettable picks. It feels as if the Ravens are playing a strange form of Russian roulette. While the computer would have expected the Ravens to shoot themselves in the foot 5 times out of 6, it only actually happened on 4 of these occasions. That the team's most recent pull of the trigger turned out to be significantly less painful than it was in past years, might lead them to believe that their process is worth pursuing in the future. People tend to sweep the past under the rug, in light of more positive recent outcomes. This would make me very nervous.
Okay. Maybe I'm feeling just a tiny bit bitter about C.J. Mosley.
Oddly, if there is one aspect of doing this blog (the bloooog) that makes me nervous, it is the possibility of shouting "Hey, we were right about this guy!". Yes, we want our idiotic hunches to turn out well, but chest thumping bravado gives me the heebie jeebies. The data is there. We attempt to sort it, and extract some meaning from it. We think it is the sensible thing to do. Despite that, I really cringe when I see some of the gurus of the internet, and the self-congratulatory wanking they engage in. Some enthusiasm is understandable, but preferably in moderation. I generally think we should behave more like monks, or maybe the Amish. So, with that in mind, we've decided to try to make it a policy to avoid reflecting on the times when things go according to plan. We want to avoid doing unnecessary and tacky victory laps.
At the same time, there are going to be some prospects whom we strongly disapproved of, who go on to do quite well for themselves. Whether they are genuine outliers, or there was insufficient data to project them correctly, or maybe we were just plain wrong; it all works out the same. Sometimes we're just going to be way off the mark. It may not change our feelings about whether such prospects were sensible gambles for a team to make, but we do think these slip-ups should be given some consideration. Maybe there is something to be learned from such embarrassing accidents.
Based on these feelings, we decided to start doing an annual list of our potentially most egregious errors. Rather than include all of our mistakes, we'll mainly focus on the players that we had the most damning criticisms of, who still managed to exceed our expectations. As time goes on, these lists will undoubtedly grow. Since these players are possible victories for the traditional scouting crowd, we'll just refer to them as The People's Champions. Our cilice has been tightened, let the flagellation begin...
Kelvin Benjamin
I believe our exact words were something like, any team that drafts him "should probably check their GM for symptoms of dementia". That might have been a bit harsh. Of course, Benjamin went on to accumulate 1,008 yards, and 9 touchdowns in his rookie season. It wasn't our finest moment. The worst part is, I still don't have a great theory as to how this happened.
One issue that makes Kelvin Benjamin particularly difficult to reexamine, relates to his claims that he intentionally bombed the combine in order to drop in the draft, so that Carolina would be able to select him. If this is true, then we clearly didn't have much of a chance to evaluate him correctly, since we base a fair bit of our hunches on a player's measurable attributes. On the one hand, it is hard to believe that Benjamin is serious about any of this, since you would have to be a moron to intentionally make yourself look bad at the combine. On the other hand, this is an individual who scored a 7 on the Wonderlic test, so he probably needs his coaches to help him tie his shoes.
Will Benjamin flame out like Michael Clayton, who was a 2004 rookie phenom that similarly defied explanation? I have no idea. While I'd love to have order restored to my universe, I will try to refrain from constructing any voodoo dolls shaped like a Panthers' player to do so. I wish him luck, and sincerely hope that someone in Carolina has child-proofed his house.
In the end, if we have to be wrong at some point, I'd always prefer that it be about someone as comically peculiar as Kelvin Benjamin.
C.J. Mosley
It's particularly painful for me to acknowledge that we might have been wrong about C.J. Mosley, since the Ravens are not only my home team, but one of my favorite organizations to torment. Still, despite my apprehensions regarding Mosley, I have to say that I do think he probably is performing quite a bit better than our numbers suggested he would.
While we never really outright claimed that Mosley would be a bust, we certainly leaned towards the possibility that he would be a mediocrity. Whether it was his measured athletic ability, or his statistical production in college, there wasn't much that grabbed our attention, or made him appear to be in the same class as some of the 1st round MLBs that preceded him. Still, off the top of my head, I can say that there were a handful of similar players such as Navorro Bowman, Curtis Lofton, and maybe Jon Beason that were also a bit unlikely to become successful NFL middle linebackers. So, these things do happen from time to time..
Has Mosley performed better than I believed he would? Yes, almost certianly. Now, do I really believe that Mosley deserved to be selected for the Pro Bowl this year? Ehh...hmm...maybe not. The degree to which his draft status may have enhanced the likelihood of receiving this honor is a strong possibility. At the same time, we should also probably take a look at the players who have surrounded Mosley in his rookie season.
While the Ravens' 2014 secondary play was clearly horrendous, that shouldn't really have too much impact on an inside linebacker. The front seven of their defense, however, was actually rather good. The outside pass rushing tandem of Suggs and Dumervil, accumulated 29 combined sacks, more than holding up their part of the equation. The team's three primary down linemen, of Ngata, Williams and Canty, are a massive 992 pound wall (possibly the largest trio in the league, though I still have to check on that), and generally conform (to varying degrees) to the athletic and statistical profiles we hope to see in these types of players. They probably kept Mosley relatively untouched. Finally, there is the team's other inside linebacker, the veteran Daryl Smith, who despite his age, is still performing at a high enough level to take a lot of the pressure off of Mosley. All things considered, Mosley wound up in a pretty good environment.
Will Mosley be able to maintain this head of steam, as the surrounding talent retires or moves to other teams? I don't know, but I think it is an interesting question. Haloti Ngata is easily the most physically gifted linemen on the team, but his current contract makes him a ripe target to cut. With the exception of Brandon Williams, everyone else in the front seven is at least 30 years old, so the clock is ticking. How this will impact Mosley is hard to say.
The most interesting question, at least to me, is whether Mosley's apparent success may actually end up hurting the team in a more roundabout way. If Mosley continues to do well, despite being a prospect that on paper appeared to present some risks, doesn't this just encourage the team to continue pursuing their questionable approach to the draft? Let's consider the team's top draft picks in the past few years.
In 2013, the team's top pick was Matt Elam, who so far has been a fairly well recognized failure at the safety position. Due to an inability to calculate his Agility Score, we weren't able to give him much of an assessment last year. With defensive backs, the Agility Score is obviously a bit more of a factor than it might be at other positions. While his 40 time was fairly good (4.43 seconds), his statistical production and Kangaroo Score (0.284) were little more than just average. Still, while we couldn't fully appraise Elam, we certainly wouldn't have been able to endorse selecting someone about whom there wasn't enough data, or where the available data was relatively weak, so the computer would have viewed this pick as an unnecessary and unwise risk.
In 2012, the team's top pick was Courtney Upshaw, who is someone we have criticized numerous times already. Due to the fact that he has been listed as a starter in 36 out of a possible 48 games during his young career, many people still choose to defend this pick. Of course, Reilly and I tend to think that the whopping 3 sacks he has produced in this time are a bit more meaningful. The data was there to suggest he would likely struggle as a pass rusher, which we still feel is the primary role for a 3-4 OLB, particularly when one is selected with a relatively high pick. So, again, caution was thrown to the wind, and the team went with their gut instinct, rather than with the statistical data.
In 2011, the team selected cornerback Jimmy Smith, and...we really don't have a huge issue with this pick. While there were other prospects that the computer might have preferred, Smith was still fairly intriguing. While his Agility Score (0.316) was only slightly above average, he was a much larger sort of corner, and his Kangaroo Score (0.963), suggested he did have some potential. While people seem to feel he has done well so far, injuries appear to be his main obstacle. This seems to be shaping up to have been a reasonably effective draft pick.
In 2010, the team's top pick was Sergio Kindle. While we could skip past this selection, since he never really played due to injury, the data still suggests that the team was ignoring the glaring warning signs here, as they frequently appear to do. It's a shame that Kindle couldn't get on the field and confirm whether or not the data was accurate, but we still have to accept that this was a bust.
In 2009, the Ravens' first pick was the infamous Michael Oher. What would the computer make of an offensive tackle prospect with a 0.134 Agility Score, and a 0.194 Kangaroo Score? Well, you could certainly do worse, but those are pretty much the definition of average and forgettable results. They certainly aren't the kinds of results that would make us feel comfortable with selecting someone in the first round. Nonetheless, that is precisely what the team did, and Oher has gone on to surrender a sack in about 53% of his games started, which is clearly a rather poor result. Oddly, none of this appears to have greatly impacted his starting status, because high draft picks probably get more second chances than they sometimes deserve. We tried to delve into why this foolishness happens before,, and I think that brings us back around to why we should be equally suspicious of why Courtney Upshaw continues to get starts.
In the area that these players were selected, you can generally figure on making a successful pick about 60-70% of the time. It seems reasonable to me that you could say that the only arguable success in this group may have been Jimmy Smith (though it may still be a bit early to declare that). Most likely, it isn't a complete coincidence that Smith was a rather decent fit for the athletic/statistical profile of an NFL cornerback. On the other hand, what can we say about these other picks that the Ravens made? Pretty much without exception, they all seem to have been enormous gambles, even if the conventional wisdom at the time suggested they were reasonable picks.
Now, it may sound as if I am still being a bit reticent about giving C.J. Mosley the level of praise he perhaps deserves, but that isn't my goal. While I wish Mosley continued good fortune, I still have some concerns about the thought process that went into his selection, regardless of how things actually turned out. To some extent, the process used to select Mosley appears to be the same one used to make all of these other regrettable picks. It feels as if the Ravens are playing a strange form of Russian roulette. While the computer would have expected the Ravens to shoot themselves in the foot 5 times out of 6, it only actually happened on 4 of these occasions. That the team's most recent pull of the trigger turned out to be significantly less painful than it was in past years, might lead them to believe that their process is worth pursuing in the future. People tend to sweep the past under the rug, in light of more positive recent outcomes. This would make me very nervous.
Okay. Maybe I'm feeling just a tiny bit bitter about C.J. Mosley.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)