Oh, my ...
You concluded that the Patriots had a slightly worse than average success rate in the second round. The careful reader understands that your conclusion is contingent on certain assumptions, namely -
- the study cited by Casserly and, in particular, the 50% second round hit rate, provide accurate and valid benchmarks;
- the unspecified criteria used to sort hits from misses in the study are the same criteria you used to evaluate the hits/misses (e.g., how would Casserly have treated Hill?);
- your own subjective evaluation of hits/misses is valid and accurate. (On this latter point, I would say that your judgments are certainly reasonable but that other judgments may be reasonable as well.)
It's a list. Based upon a study. The list has the Patriots just under average hit rate in the second round, but clearly above average in the first round. The study parameters for defining a "hit" were in the link. C'mon, Zeus, if you're going to go down this road you've got to at least read the article.
There are of course other things to consider -
- the sample size (15 observations since 2000) is way too small arrive at any meaningful conclusion regarding drafting effectivness;
- injuries are largely unpredictable and account for a significant share of the misses. (By the way, the health aspect of drafting success is largely random and offers little insight into the efficacy of the drafting stategy)
- the Patriots hit rate may have an inherent downward bias due to their average drafting position, their on-average higher number of picks and the relative strength of their roster compared to others going into any draft
There really isn't more to consider. It's a simple, straightforward study, which is what makes it so easy to use as a starting point. We can opine that player X might have been the greatest player in history if he hadn't gotten injured, but that doesn't make him a hit instead of a miss.
Further, my impression is that the Patriots rely more on observed performance and less on where a player was drafted in making roster and playing time decisions. To the extent that other teams are less willing to recognize mistakes than NE, this creates another downward bias.
This is one of the Patriots myths that probably needs to be publicly and thoroughly debunked, but I don't really want to waste the time it would take to go down the list of all 32 NFL teams for enough years back to make people happy. Suffice it to say that teams dump bad players. Guys like Cody Brown, Ryan Leaf and Limas Sweed can vouch for that.
Overall, I don't think you can reach a meaningful conclusion regarding any team's draft performance for any single round.
Come on.... :bricks:
1. Money most certainly does matter at every at every level of the draft. The model used in the paper cited by the OP looked at performance value versus compensation in finding the late first/early second round "sweet spot." I would expect that NE and most other teams have built models that have looked at recent draft history to assess the expected performance value of each pick (this is after all the genesis of the draft pick point value chart) and have overlaid compensation to arrive at some overall utility for any given pick. In the end, all draft decisions are necessarily subjective, but the discipline of building and constantly refining such quantitative models has been proven time and time again to enhance decision-making processes in virtually all aspects of business.
No, sorry, but it doesn't. The money differences after round 2 are so small as to be essentially irrelevant when you're dealing with high caps such as now, when they are over $100 million dollars. Furthermore, the flattening of the money at the top of the draft minimizing the financial difference at the top of the draft is, in fact, part of why there's the theory of the "new" sweet spot.
2. Felger's "cap is crap" argument is that any team can manipulate the cap and a small number to player contracts to add players. I do not disagree at all, yet I think it misses a bigger picture. Signing a high profile free agent (or drafting Suh or Bradford) affects the rest of the roster. A big contract inevitably means: 1) you will have to cut players you would like to keep; and 2) you will not be able to sign players that you would like. It's a calculated risk but the cost of a mistake is terribly high and the effects are felt over a number of years. This has been true since the advent of the salary cap. The new CBA did lessen the cost of rookies (especially earlier in the draft) and that has clearly affected the value proposition posited by the author of the paper cited by the OP.
No, Zeus, this has not been true since the advent of the cap. In fact, it became laughably untrue during the last CBA extension, which is precisely the point of why the cap has been little more than an accounting gimmick in recent years.
3. The hits are more important than the misses. Wheatley and Gronk were drafted using the same rationale (talented player with injury problems). Gronk's performance value relative to compensation is among the highest in the league. The fact that Wheatley didn't pan out doesn't necessarily make it a bad decision to take him. It's all about risk versus reward. Good decisions can have bad outcomes - that's life.
You're arguing a personal opinion that's completely outside the scope, which is fine, but doesn't really apply here. In context, the fact that Wheatley didn't pan out does, necessarily, make it a bad decision to take him, because the context is hit or miss and Wheatley's a miss.
4. I'm not intending to be an apologist. The Patriots of the past decade are among the most successful franchises in all of sports. Other teams (and indeed other businesses) study the Patriots to see what they can learn about how to be successful. There are lessons here for all of us. And I have no doubt that Bill Belichick and the Patriots are far more critical of their own draft perfromance than anyone here ever dreamed of being. No doubt they study both successes and failures to see what they can learn and how they can improve.
Deus - Sorry for the length of the reply. I agree it's an interesting discussion (and all in good fun).
The Patriots study other teams, as well. It's not as if the world is all focused on the Patriots. Teams and businesses study the Giants. Teams and businesses study the Steelers.
This is, as you noted, all in good fun, but it's completely undermined if we can't be honest about guys who were misses being misses, and if we have to attack a study because we're worried it might possibly make the Patriots look less than perfect, even though the study was a general study of the entire league and not an anti-Patriots study.
As an aside, since you're looking to discredit the study for some reason, the most obvious potential weakness in the study isn't injured players, IMO. It's good players who don't become starters because of a particular team having excellent players in front of them, like Green Bay with Rodgers behind Favre, although even there Rodgers became the starter in year 4.
But I have to think that having no extra picks to play with cramps BB's style. As you said earlier, more picks = more flexibility to make moves of all kinds.
