Your 2025 Draft Grade: The Poll

[Whatever]

(6 hours ago)CJD Wrote: Are you estimating that they probably miss a lot? Or do you have examples? I've followed them for about 4 years now and every time they didn't like a pick, it didn't work out. And a lot of times, they offered who they'd rather have picked, and that player often comes out great. 

The biggest miss they've had for a bengals player is probably John Ross. Their metrics really liked him. He didn't work out. But year over year, I've found them to be pretty accurate.

They were not fans of Myles Murphy, for example. They formed that opinion based on their own watching of him paired with statistics, which I don't consider to be other people's work, personally.

They also track historical data such as, "players that don't test during the combine and pro days often don't work out." 

I remember in 2022, we all wanted Andrew Booth the CB out of Clemson. Their system predicted he would not be a great NFL player and one of the major red flags was his lack of testing and injury history. Lo and behold, that was his issue in the NFL.

I don't think there's anything wrong with recording what has worked in the past and what hasn't and measuring a current year's players based on that evidence.

Another example, players that don't produce in college typically do not produce in the NFL. There are exceptions, obviously, but the trend data does not look favorably on those types of prospects. They have charts that relate pass rush win rate to true pass rush win rate, with the upper right quadrant being guys with guys that had high rates of both. In that quadrant you have some of the stars in the NFL. Myles Garrett, Nick Bosa, Jared Verse, Joey Bosa, Aiden Hutchenson etc. The bottom left quadrant has players with low rates of both. In that quadrant you have some of the biggest busts like Clelin Ferrell, K'Lavon Chaisson, Solomon Thomas, Payton Turner, Joe Tryon-Shoyinka, Marcus Davenport, Tyree Wilson, Takk McKinley, Lukas Van Ness etc.

And Shemar Stewart, unfortunately, is in that bottom left quadrant. It isn't all busts, of course. The two biggest outliers are Travon Walker and Greg Rousseau. And that is probably what Stewart looks like if he hits. But there are more failures than successes in that quadrant.

I'm not saying the system is perfect, but calling it lazy ass bullshit seems unnecessarily harsh. They put a lot of effort into this, as far as I can tell.

I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but at the same time, it seems strange that the team can be 18th in average value of the players they drafted, but be given a D for their draft class.  If they are doing their own player rankings based on recorded metrics and their own film study,the Consensus Big Board rankings shouldn't play into it at all.  

Every source has its hits and misses, so tossing out examples is pretty meaningless.  I've got plenty of guys I can point to and say I was right on, but it doesn't mean I know better than an NFL personnel department.  Unless we're going to sit here and quantify it by setting objective criteria for what a "hit" and "miss" is and compare to various big boards and other methodologies, it's not necessarily more or less valuable than any other.