Re: Michael Holley believes Patriots will draft Ellis or Dorsey
I follow this team fine, thank you. You obviously don't.
Maroney WAS a need.
Well of course if they couldn't use a player, they wouldn't pick him.
A team needs to have the best player possible at every position.
When people talk about picking for need vs picking for value, they are are talking about the philosophy of selecting. Two ways to do it:
1. Pck for need. Figure out which position is the weakest and pick the best player available at that position. This is rather simple to do. You simply list all the draft picks by position, from top to bottom, best to worst, then when it is your turn to pick go to the column with the position you have predecided has the greatest need and take the best player that is left. Next selection, take the top player from whatever column is next on you list of needed positions. This makes for an easy draft day because your board never changes. You know what position you are selecting (your position of greatest need) and all you do is take the best player at that position.
2. Pick for value. Compare all players for maximum long-term value to the team and rank them, regardless of position. This makes for a very complicated board because you are judging the impact of this particular linebacker vs that particular TE, and your draft board is always changing.
If you pick for need, it will work for a year of two, then you will have a subpar team. When you take the best player at a certain position, you may be passing over several better players at other positions. Then, next year or the next, you need a player at one of those positions you passed over to grab you position of need. You pick the best player at this year's position of need, passing over players of other positions because you don't need them. Now you have players in both positions for the next few years taht aren't as good as the ones you could have had because you passed over a better player to grab your position of need. Over the long haul, this leaves you with a lesser team.
Grabbing players based on long-term value will often result in some positions being stronger than others, and you may draft a DL/DE when your DLine is already dominant, but this is not as bad a thing as many make it out to be. When you can totally dominate one phase of the game, all other teams will need to address this dominance in their game plan and you know what each opponent will more or less do.
