v1rotv2":1p4awknk said:
When a thread asks for a grade on a draft that has just happened your not grading the players after they have had a chance to experience NFL coaching. So in reality your grading JS/PC's ability to draft the players you want them to. With all the evidence we have seen in this coaching staffs ability to elevate players from college level to NFL championship caliber why do we even attempt to think we know more than they do?
Just sit back and let it unfold.
I agree with all of this and made virtually the same commentary in the OP. Draft Grades right now are just a snapshot, a statement of preference. Nothing to be taken overly seriously.
That said, even among our home run draft selections, a lot of them would have been after thoughts if Jim Mora were still running this team. I think JS works very hard and is a very good GM, but I don't think he's a drafting genius. I do think Pete is a coaching genius though, and for as long as we have him we will be the best team in the league.
At the very top of the draft, everyone's draft board is virtually identical, but as the draft goes along differences in the draft boards begin to appear, and by the time you get to round four it's very hard to predict the draft order because each teams board varies so much at that point.
I think the reason PC/JS have been so good late in the draft is because they can usually get the guys they want for their system in that range without worrying too much if someone is going to grab that player first, plus draft boards actually widen with every round so they usually have plenty of fallback options.
But in the early rounds they tend to ignore consensus view and draft their own guys there, leading to some poor value pick selections, usually to fit needs. Because our coaching is so awesome, their early round track record is still decent, but it is nowhere near as masterful as their late round productivity has been.
The 2011 draft was a lot like this one for me, underwhelming and full of picks I disagreed with. They saved that draft in a very big way with all those day three choices that worked out, but the fact remains that they got jack squat out of the first three rounds.
These guys are such optimizers and such hard workers, I am not surprised that they kind of re-tuned their early round philosophy slightly this year (they valued intangibles more than usual with high picks). They know their system kind of sucks for early picks, but they haven't quite yet figured it out IMO. I think ideally, they should listen to the rest of the league a bit more with early picks, then march to their own beat once the draft boards start to widen out.
I don't hate the Britt or Richardson selections, in some ways I understand why they felt the way they did. But to me, they feel like 4th round selections that cost us 2nd rounders to acquire. Just a gut feeling, I hope they prove me wrong. But it's been five drafts now and we've seen some trends, one of them being that those "reachy" early picks usually look like reaches in retrospect too.