When there is a "reach", it means the media draftniks failed to forecast correctly. If they had known what they were doing, they should have said something like "we believe most teams had [3rd round] grades on [player], but some teams might have him as high as a [1st round] grade on him because [reasons]". When they are surprised (like with Strange) it means they failed in their forecast, and cover it up by blaming the team that made the surprisingly early pick.
Doubters would feel different about the Strange pick if the media draftniks had forecast it correctly.
It's even worse when there is a "steal", because in that case a draftnik touted player is publicly passed over by every team, completely invalidating the draftniks consensual hallucination. To cover their failure, they claim that the team that eventually picks the player as having made a "steal" when it was instead a massive forecasting failure by draftniks. The correct analysis would have been something like "we believe the highest any team will take [player] is round [n] but we also believe the player should actually be picked in round [n + m] for [reasons].
"Reaches" and "steals" are just indicators of failures to forecast draft day. True "value" of players picked and the true opportunity cost can only be determined years later based on actual performance, and even then there is uncertainty because of semi-random factors like injury and the difficulty to even retroactively assess team specific fit.
This is not to say the draftnik efforts are useless; they are hugely entertaining to us the public and provide us very interesting detailed introductions to players (even more so if they are team specific like BGC's) And the draft scoring game is fun just like fantasy football is fun.
But draftnik efforts are not particularly relevant to teams. I believe the only teams that factor in media pre-draft consensus about "value" are teams that have ownership, management or coaching running scared about fan opinion because of a record of poor actual team performance.
99% of the time there's no such thing as a "riser" or "faller". It just doesn't work like that. Almost all the time it's bc of injury or character grade and might change if new info becomes available like anyone else but guys don't drop multiple rounds or "shoot" up the board. It's just that the media doesn't find about it until later. I've tried preaching this forever but it's the same thing more or less with "reaches" & "steals".
"Draftniks" are relevant, actually important, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. Obviously not everyone, it's an oversaturated market but some are very useful.
They're the first look, a baseline on prospects long before the NFL puts a value on them. And if you play that out to it's conclusion the consensus board hit almost 85% of the top 150 drafted this past draft and has been very close in the past. That's pretty excellent considering.
Without that exposure though fans wouldn't know Jordan Richards was a terrible pick, for example. They'd be in the dark and basically just have to take the teams word for it as to why the drafted someone that high or drafted them at all.
There would be no draft weekend for sure. No one would know those day 2/3 picks. Everyone drafted gets a little piece on then, some highlights. Draft geeks will have done that 100 times over by draft day so the audience watching knows names from online. Kiper, McShay and those guys only have like two three months of draft talk whereas I already have a good grasp on the next two classes and do it year round.
I don't pay attention to most of the people out there. The ones i do is for background info. I barely go on Twitter anymore and don't care about the people on there except a handful of people. Not my thing but draft geeks are very useful if you think about.
To illustrate the level of BS involved, consider Mike Mayock's fate: he was highly respected by the public as a media draftnik and hired because of that -- but was a joke as an actual general manager. Now he can't show his face in public.
Mayock was well liked but never good at evaluating talent tbh. Great entertainment, again everyone loved hearing him talk but if you looked back on who he was pounding the table for you'd see some gods awful picks. He was really good at keeping things interesting and would speak his mind but I don't ever remember hearing people talk about how good he was as an evalautor tbh. What's funny is Gruden might be worse. He was terrible too. Ill never forget him screaming for Johnny Football as a top 5 pick. Both were terrible.
Yeah, if Kiper and the rest of his type ever had to be accountable for their analysis and prognostications, they'd be assistant managers at Denny's. Those guys would have their lunch money taken repeatedly by the dozen or so really competent NFL personnel offices.
I think the best of the best on the "outside" or "amateurs" would do just as well if not better given the chance tbh. Obviously a small, select few.
You could use the AV score from pro football reference to gage how you've done if you're smart.
@TB_Helmet looked into it a few years back.
"Still trying to figure out the best way to do it. I still like if we take the average AV per game played for a player, rank all players from first to last, then take the first 320 players and say they should have been first rounders, the second 320 players as second rounders, etc. Then we could do the same for your numbers, and see how far off on average you were.
For example, Aaron Donald is a first rounder by AV (he's one of the top 320 guys for sure), and he's at the top of your list, so you get a 0. But let's say Sam Darnold is in the second round according to AV, and you had him in the first round, you get a -1. So you want to be as close to 0 as possible, and we could say "on average you predicted guys to within n rounds of where they should have been taken". That's nice because you can compare against other people who make grades, and you can compare against where they were actually taken. Darnold was taken in the first round, so the NFL gets a -1 for that too.
"I'm not sure that's the best way but it's a start."
"You and the NFL are about equal at evaluating players, with a very slight edge to the NFL."
"The last table on the right is a sum of number of times each value in the "bgcDiff" column appears compared to the "nflDiff". So you picked 236 players exactly (round difference of 0) compared to 261 for the NFL. The average round miss is 1.41 for you and 1.33 for the NFL -- these are essentially the same."
