Great post. I agree with you completely. The messed up thing is that the Hill pick wasn't out of thin air, a lot of teams had him rated above Jeffrey. Who knows maybe Chicago would've taken him instead of Jeffrey even if the Jets hadn't forced their hand. Teams in general need to stop overthinking the draft process and/or value production more. Especially at certain positions more than others -reciever is one of the top in that regard.
We missed on Ruben Randle too who while isn't as productive as Jeffrey, is still better than Steven Hill.
I will take your word on Saunders. I wanted Bruce Ellington instead badly there but you seem to think along the right lines and so I will take you for your word here.
Scouting ain't rocket science but I think a lot of times low level scouts that ain't paid shit lean a bit too much on stats (and lean a bit too much on the arm of their sofas). Too many times scouts hone in on a single player, go watch him play maybe one game, write their little report (so they get paid), and it's a wrap. There needs to be MORE scouts and they need to GO WATCH more games. Sometimes a freshman WR who can't get on the field much makes 2 spectacular catches, but won't show up on the stat line compared to the starting WR who's wide open for his 12 receptions that anyone could make. There's so much subtlety to the game that can't be seen or felt from the sofa. It's in that subtlety that future stars lurk, especially in the later rounds of the draft where players we've never heard of are selected.
I vaguely remember Hill being drafted because the Jets wanted to go back to a strictly ground and pound offense. With Hill playing in a predominantly run oriented offense in college they thought he'd be a good fit.
Here's my thing. I liked Ellington a lot, and there's a good chance that he's going to be an impact guy with the 9ers. Thing is, once the picks were made, I stopped focusing on him and focused on Saunders because I want to focus on my team, and if players I wanted do well elsewhere in real life then I'll go back and revisit that. I've seen guys on this forum trash our draft picks before they even take a snap, mainly because the players they wanted in the draft weren't taken. I understand that kind of frustration, but I've seen some of these toolbags predict players the Jets have drafted as busts before the player even takes a regular season snap. Is that a Jets fan or is that someone that wants to be right about the draft? One fucknut even compared Amaro to Becht. It's one thing to scout the draft to see if your team is picking correctly. Yet another to trash all of your supposed team's pick because you think you are a scout. I'm not talking about you, BTW.
I disagree big time. I don't think the problem is a lack of access, a lack of scouts or leg work. I think it's all in poor evaluation, over thinking and the scout's mindsets (ie. putting too much stock in workouts and measurables) 20 years ago maybe you would have a point but these days with the tremendous amount of access out there, even the average joe with an ESPN subscription can pretty much watch every college football game, watch the scouting combine, team's spring games', etc... What I am saying is that I don't think players are getting overlooked in the draft because they flew under the radar and weren't discovered. I think the players that are now wrongly overlooked in the draft were overlooked because of terrible decision making across the board, poor evaluation, etc. We are on the edge of a major changing of the guard I think. Analytics has changed scouts mindsets in baseball completely. It is starting to take hold of other sports like basketball and hockey, but it has largely not been adopted at all in football. This will change and people will start evaluating players differently in the coming years.. scouts are going to care less about pro days and interviews and more about things like "adjusted yards per attempt"..
You are right there is a lot of grudges being held because of wanting to be right about a player on this board and the internet in general. I know you weren't talking about me but sometimes I can be guilty of that too. When it comes to sunday's though I am hoping that "our guys" turn out to be awesome whether I wanted them or not. I sure as hell hope others are like that.
I seem to remember that the big knock on Jeffery was that he was overweight and people questioned his work ethic. Some scouts were saying the same type of things about Clowney heading into the draft about his work ethic, which was ridiculous. He took it easy his last year at South Carolina because he knew we was a top 2 pick, and didn't want to risk his future. That's not laziness that's just securing your families financial well-being for the rest of all of their lives.
Saunders - 202 catches, 3085 yards, 26 TD's in 4 years with 2 different teams. Ellington - 106 catches, 1586 yards, 16 TD's in 3 years. If Ellington had his senior year which is most guys best season he would have been looking at another 900 - 100 yards, and 8 TD's, and that would have put him in the same ballpark as Saunders, so at that point I think it's fair to just take the guy you like most. The Jets went with the one that was a little faster and had a year extra of experience. Either pick though would have been solid in that spot, and I don't think the Jets would have really screwed up with either. Either way just compare their numbers to Stephen Hill and it's pretty clear that Stephen Hill was a 5th to 6th round receiver that we burned a 2nd round pick with. In the modern NFL, you can't take a project in rounds 1 or 2, you need to pick up 2 year one starters, and if you plan to succeed atleast one needs to become a borderline pr0-bowler at minimum. In round 3 you find someone who is going to atleast be a quality backup right away with potential to start in year 2. Rounds 4-7 are where you take shots at the dartboard and hope you come away with something special. Saunders to me is a quality shot. Hill would have been a quality shot in round 5. In round 2 though it was outrageous.
Nope. Between NCAA 1,2 &3 each scout probably has 30 teams to scout, which equates to about 1500 players. Which means only a few glamor guys get watched and written up while the diamonds in the rough don't even get noticed. Guys like Brady, Chrebet, Snacks are out there but it's not surprising all 320 scouts from all 32 teams rarely seem to find them. But ya, hiring more scouts to spend more time in the stands and with the teams is stupid. I'll shut up now.
This is all true particularly for players taken in the first few rounds. These players are well known, and there's tons of film on them. Some even have isolation cameras on them during the games. Idzik said they narrow it down to 100 players and go from there with interviews, combine, pro days, invitations to come to Jets East for a visit, etc. The entire scouting system was designed to address poetntial superstars in the first few rounds. But rounds 4,5,6,7 + UDFA don't get invited to the combine. Or the draft. They don't have isolation cameras on them during the game. They don't have pro days. They never get invited to come here to see what they have. Decisions on the bottom half of the draft are made with very little data. I'm sure the Jets check out a handful of tier 2/3 players they've heard good things about, and if they like them they draft them. But what about the other 2000 tier 2/3 players? There aren't enough man hours for a small scouting dept to scout every player in the country. They scout maybe 5% of the total players. 90% of a scouting teams efforts go into evaluating potential 1st, 2nd, and maybe 3rd round pics. Teams simply CANT BE WRONG when picking that high. That leaves about 10% of a scouting team's efforts to scout the other 95% of players and 'hope' to get the next Tom Brady in the 6th round. It's no wonder it's almost impossible for a team to hit reliably from the 4th round on down. But I know...there's nothing wrong.
If it were that easy, it probably would've been done. I'm sure an owner like Jerry Jones would employ something ridiculous like 100 more scouts than every other franchise and it'd be reported on. Lack of scouts isn't the problem. Perhaps lack of quality scouts if you really want to bark up that tree, but you're simply assuming that NFL franchises aren't doing their own research on how much scouting needs to occur for each given region and colleges. Until you have the background knowledge to back up your claims that there isn't enough scouts, then your argument is really silly.
I don't think it's that simple though. Each team has about 8 scouts. This is just hypothetical but I don't think it's crazy or anything. - 1 for the SEC / Sun Belt - 1 for the Pac-12 / Mountain West - 1 for the Big 10 / AAC - 1 for the Big 12 / C-USA - 1 for the ACC / MAC - 1 for D-II - 1 for D-III - 1 where extra help is needed. I don't think that's too crazy, especially considering during conference time during every game you watch, you cover 2 teams at once. They also don't really analyze 50 guys for every team. I am pretty sure the way it works is they go watch a game with a list of players that they are planning on evaluating, and then if anyone else catches their eye they will take note of it. Just look at your example though. - Brady - He wasn't hidden at all. He played at Michigan in 1998 and 1999 when they ended up ranked 11th and 5th. No one thought he would be any good, but the Patriots took a chance on him late in the draft and it worked out. - Chrebet - We was broke a bunch of receiving records for D-II football and was right in the Jets backyard. You see NFL teams all the time bring in guys from the local colleges to see how they can do. It's cheap, easy and low risk. - Harrison - Just beyond lucky. William Penn plays community college level football basically. The odds of that guy shaping up to be a great NFL player is 1 in a 1000.
I really don't know if it's a lack of warm bodies to go scout games/players, or a lack of guys who actually know what to look for. And overall I'm only talking about players taken in round 4 on down to UDFA. Players taken in rounds 1-3 get a TON of scrutiny and attention. But there's only a few of them up for consideration. How many times have we read right here on TGG how important it will be for Idzik to hit real talent in the later rounds too? I really don't think a small scouting dept can watch and evaluate 2000 players every Saturday from every college in America. But that may be what needs to be done to identify and draft the next Marques Colston.
But you're implying that a team would be successfully hitting on these picks if they had more scouts evaluating the lower tier players. It's not as if they aren't scouting players for the lower rounds in the draft, it's the fact that it's that much harder to hit on these players because many of them are not destined for anything more than being NFL special team players for 3-4 years before they're out of the league. If it were that easy to hit on players in rounds 4-7 there would be loads of starters coming from these rounds which simply doesn't happen, regardless of the team. It's not like every team is drafting 6th round starters and grabbing undrafted free agents to plug in, and the Jets are one of even say 10 teams that are missing drastically on these guys. NFL franchises as a whole draft a boatload of low round players that are out of the league very quickly. It's how the draft works, not poor scouting by the Jets. Of course some franchises hit on more then others. It's partly luck, and partly scouting, but it's not as if the Jets aren't doing everything in their power to put scouts out there to watch these guys.
You either understand talent at the college level and how it translates at the pro level or you don't. When you have a lot of over-drafted busts early in the draft it's an indicator that you just don't understand how talent works in the transition between college and the NFL. The Jets used a third round pick on Derrick Strait out of Oklahoma in 2004. The guy was 5'11" and 189 lbs and he ran a 4.52 40 at the combine. He had a great college career at Oklahoma but he didn't have any outstanding traits that suggested he was going to be a good CB in the NFL. He wasn't big enough to cover the slower taller receivers and he wasn't fast enough to cover the little guys his size. He was dominant at the NCAA level for two reasons, one was that NCAA receivers are not as good as NFL receivers. The other was that he was very experienced by his junior year and had a big experiential advantage over the typical receivers in his junior and senior seasons. Predictably once he got to the NFL all of those advantages went away and he became a small to mid-sized player without enough speed to make up the difference. The Jets drafted Shonn Greene out of Iowa in the third round in 2009. Now two things were true about Shonn Greene and the Iowa Hawkeyes: one was that the Hawkeyes, as they have done for decades, prioritized the run heavily. The other was that they also prioritized the offensive line heavily, as they have done for decades. Since 2000 the Hawkeyes have had 13 offensive lineman drafted in the NFL draft. They have had 6 of them taken in the top 3 rounds. They have had 3 RB's taken in the NFL draft over that span and none since Greene in 2009. The story of the Iowa running game is a tale of hogs with whoever running wild behind them. So Greene was a very good back in college because he had a very good offensive line in front of him opening up huge holes for him to run through. We all know he has pretty good straight line speed when he gets a head of steam up and he used that to great effect at Iowa behind that line. When he got to the Jets he had that good line for one season before it began to decline. By his third season he was barely replacement level behind what was still an ok line. He needed the great line he had at Iowa and in his first season with the Jets to be a positive factor at the NFL level. He didn't really have NFL level talent at above the replacement level. You put almost anybody behind a great line and they will make yards. It's picks like these that clue us into what the default thinking in the Jets scouting department was. They over-valued the wrong things in a college player and they seemed to discount the factors that would ultimately make the player less valuable at the NFL level.
Wow, I'm not high at all on Stephen Hill and I think he should probably be cut, but this article by Mehta is one of the most unprofessional and douchey things I've read by him (especially the fist portion). http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/f...tephen-hill-final-drop-team-article-1.1918195
