Bad move for the Titans. Jones is over the hill and was always prone to missing games when he was good.
Eh, they didn’t give up very much , they are as in their window as they are ever going to be with Henry as the focus. I don’t blame them for shooting their shot now. Healthy they are the closet threat to the chiefs.
Liked for being the first to break the news on the board. Well-done, @FJF. I just saw it. @Br4d, I agree but apparently the Titans are convinced that they are close to a Super Bowl and are hoping that Jones will push them over the top. I don't think so, but they are taking their shot under Vrabel.
Given the various probabilities of drafted players reaching their potential vs the potential added-value over 3 years from Julio, this seems like a fair trade to me or even a win for Tenn.
The Titans hope it will be a relatively late second round pick, and obviously believe that Henry and Tannehill still have another year or two at their best in them. This is going to come down to Henry being effective in the playoffs (they've lost their last two playoff games, and in both he was quite ineffective), and having Jones as an option is designed to prevent playoff opponents from stacking the box against them. If Jones only plays 10 or 11 regular season games, but is healthy for the playoffs, the Titans will consider it well worth the pick.
Actually that’s not bad trade value if Jones can stay healthy. Tanny would have handed over this and next years first rounders.
Interesting....the Falcons traded Jones to Tennesse for a 2nd and a 4th (I believe the 4th is a 2023 pick?) and had to give back a 6th Pretty consistent with what we got from Carolina for Darnold...get that Jones is 32 and has a huge contract, but he’s been a multiple time all pro and pro bowl guy, and he still looks strong...
Draft picks are very under-valued in general by NFL teams because so few talent evaluation teams are much more than random in how they use them in the draft itself. If you have confidence in your system and have produced good results you tend to value the picks at face value. If you don't have confidence in your system and/or have not produced good results you tend to under-value them and treat them like easily disposable assets. How teams value draft picks tends to be highly predictive of how those teams perform over the long run. This has been true in all eras of the NFL since the merger and was likely true before that, although the draft was so many rounds at one point that it was hard not to pick some decent players every year just by throwing darts at random targets.
We got more for Sam Darnold than they did for Julio. They reupped Matt Ryan to fix the cap. They drafted TE at 4 to try and make one more run at it. They then traded Jones for a 2nd. How do they not take Fields at 4? I don't like this move for them at all. On the other side of it -- HUGE upgrade for the Titans. They lost Jonnu + Corey Davis in FA. Jones, Brown, & Henry is a scary group of weapons on that team. The TE Fischker (spelling?) is decent as well. Saw him in limited action when Jonnu was out last year. Henry isn't going to face an 8 man box all year.
I think that's fair. We threw around draft picks 10-15 years ago when it wasn't uncommon for us to have a 3 or 4 pick Draft. Tanny obviously didn't rate the scouting department - and he may have had a point.
Adding a threat to keep the safety out of the box was a good move for them..... if Julio has any legs left there will be opportunity for some big plays..... by Derrick Henry
If you get the chance watch the movie Moneyball. What Billy Beane was dealing with in the scouting room is similar to what many NFL teams are dealing with at this point. Frequently the truth lies hidden behind a facade that no stopwatch or weightroom performance is going to penetrate. Most professional scouts are not much better than the average fan at figuring out who is going to be good or bad at the next level. Some are worse. However you have to look at their results over a fairly long period of time to figure out who is actually good at the job of projecting next level performance. I remember watching film of Travis Kelce from U Cincinnati the year he came out. His measurables were ok. He had a 4.65-ish 40 and good size, although not huge by any means. However the guy got from a standing start to full speed in like 3 steps. He had insane immediate acceleration after catching the ball. He had unusual control of his body for a big guy with RB moves in the first few steps. And on top of all that he was 6'4+, 250 lbs. Like a twitch warrior. But the NFL scouts were like, ok, he's 4.65, 6'4+, 250 lbs, that's a decent TE prospect, so he went top of the 3rd instead of bottom of the 1st/top of the 2nd where he belonged. He was the 5th TE off the board. That's a total indictment of the NFL scouting establishment as it stood in 2013. The next year, BTW, we took a TE in the 2nd who was slower than a three-toed sloth and had the twitch reactions of a Galapagos tortoise. That's how bad our scouting room was.
This is where analytics come to play. Figuring out characteristics of players that the eye test doesn't pick up. I don't think there's a single MLB team without a department dedicated to analytics to find undervalued players both amateur and pro. I hope the Jets catch up pretty quickly to NFL teams who are using analytics to make decisions.
The NFL is starting to get there on some of this stuff but there is still a whole lot of "5 tool player" crap that hasn't washed out of the system yet. If I took over a failing franchise the first thing I would do is hand *everybody* responsible for putting talent on the field their walking papers and start fresh. I might rehire a few of the people based on how I perceived their knowledge base and methods of applying it but for the most part a failing franchise is being failed by everybody in the talent evaluation department. It's normal to clean out the coaching staff when a new regime comes in but really in most cases the talent evaluation and acquisition people are more responsible for the current failures and they should go before the coaching staff. Now, a commonly held position is that you can't fire the talent people between the end of the season and the draft because you are wasting a year's work by them and you'll never catch up in time for the draft. However you're going to be using a very unproductive scouting season in the next draft if you let the work of the guys who just contributed heavily to everybody else getting fired be your first step into the next regime. I'd fire everybody and make it a major project to get new people in and up to speed before the draft. I'd largely forgo free agency in the first year with the exception of potentially retaining proven players already in the organization because the pro personnel people are all getting the boot also. I'd accept the fact that the first year was going to be a rebuilding year both for the personnel and scouting departments as well as on the field and I'd start rebuilding the front office infrastructure immediately upon being hired. The idea would be to have a new successful organization in place and raring to go on the second year of the new regime.
I've seen Moneyball, and agree we should be dispassionately using statistics to guide our scouting (if we aren't already). I've never seen any value in the Combine and the other artificial evaluations of talent that potential rookies get put through. As a counterpoint to your Kelce story, and to give more credence to the use of statistics and not personal judgement, I've been blown away by a number of prospects over the years who have amounted to nothing. I think I convinced myself that Montario Hardesty was the second coming of Walter Payton back in 2010. Confirmation bias is real. The Jets Scouting department should be replaced by a Radioshack TRS-80.
The value of the Combine is to meet face-to-face with the prospects in a pressurized setting and see how they react. The medical checks are valuable also. Secondarily it is of value in terms of cutting through the college athletics department hype and getting real numbers on players. The Combine is for moving players down the ladder not up. Where people rise after the Combine it should primarily be due to other people falling and the risers moving up due to that. 2+ years of college tape should tell any professional scouting department 99% of what they need to know about a player's capabilities.
