Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeRedskin
No, you fool, we are judging the process. If the process is perfect - drafting talent in its expected place; finding "bargains" and making trades that appear to get more value than they give up - then you have had a successful draft. It doesn't matter who the players are.
<sigh>
Grading a draft is so subjective, even when to grade is subjective. There are extremes like (obviously bad) NO trading it's entire draft to us in order to get Ricky Williams to say, Baltimore's (great) 1997 draft in which it turned it's two first round picks into two HOF'ers (Lewis and Ogden). In each case, it was pretty clear from the get go that the draft was good or bad.
Most, however, have to wait. A few years ago (2007) everyone raved about Cleveland's ability to trade into the first round to get Brady Quinn and how they were so astute to do so. Three years later, doesn't look too smart to trade up for BQ. Ultimately, in my opinion, barring obvious "fails", like not getting your card up in time or obvious FO dysfunction in the pick, it is just silly to judge a draft on anything other than player production.
Regardless how they got picked - good value, bad value, blah blah blah ... what did the rookies picked produce? Everybody starts every draft with the same base number of picks. Some are traded away, some are gained ... at the end of the day, who got the most productive (qualitatively and quantitatively) rookies out of a draft. That's who had the best draft.
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As someone who would have given Cleveland a passing grade on draft day 2007, they still had Quinn hold out and not play at all as a rookie. And two years in, their return on that draft class looked...a lot like it does right now. Our eyes weren't lying to us there.
There's nothing wrong with waiting 5 years to come up with an opinion on someone's draft. It's nothing if not careful judgment. But by the time you've arrived at your opinion, everyone else has already beat you there. By two years in, you pretty much know what you're going to know about a draft, and the questions you still have will be minor and very specific.
Two years in, it's totally non-controversial to think Robert Griffin is a really good player, who is a electric runner, a nice-but-developing pocket passer, and has some warts on his game particularly once he breaks the pocket, and a fumble problem he needs to clean up.
Do I know if the rest of the Redskins team is going to grow with him and support a great career? I do not. But I'm also not exactly judging the 2012 draft when I ask if the Redskins can get enough talent around him to win consistently. What I'm doing is judging the 2014-15 drafts and then pretending to bring it back to 2012 under the principle of prudence.
-EDIT-
Something occurred to me after my post...why did the Ricky Williams trade strike you as such an obviously flawed trade if you aren't going to say the same about the RG3 trade? Hindsight tells me Williams had a pretty darn accomplished NFL career. You're at least suggesting that New Orleans' process was so horribly flawed that Williams was going to be helpless to justify it.
Washington more or less pulled the same thing here. Maybe not exactly the same, but my original point was pretty self evident: you can't make bad decisions and expect good results. You can get good results from bad decisions, but if that happens, you don't double down on bad decisions, right? Right?
My other point is also pretty self-evident: if two years after a decision you can't justify the decision as good...then the alternative has to be true.