Same old, same old crap about the gamble that is the draft the '21 draft for example:
Zach Wilson #2
Justin Fields #3
Trey Lance #10
Mac Jones #14
The NFL, team braintrusts & Draft prognosticators really do not know how anything they see in college will translate into the NFL.. the list is long of highly thought of draft picks who suck in the NFL.
I would argue that the problem isn’t the people running the teams, it’s the way the league is structured. Unlike most sports the NFL doesn’t have a minor league system to grow players in, rather they have a sink or r swim system where every player has to make a massive jump from playing against players they are usually much better than, to playing against the best of the best, with no opportunity to learn and grow against equal talent. As a result the players either make it or bust. And the teams only have seven shots a year to pick the players that are supposed to be the key pieces for their franchises going forward. And when they miss, which all of them do, their fans are ripe and ready with their draft magazines and websites to proclaim well after the fact how much better they would have done.
It’s either this; or no one in the NFL knows what they are doing. And while I could see an argument that ineptitude was the case if some franchises were great at drafting, and others suck, the truth is that no franchise in the NFL has high success rates with their drafting. And a few years back( around 2020) there were only a couple of studies that had analyzed drafting over a long period of time (20 years) and they concluded that the Ravens and Patriots had demonstrated the most success overall, the latter coming as an absolute shock to the Patriots draftniks, who swear that they suck at it.
Right now the team that is doing the best job of drafting is the Eagles, yet just a few short years ago their fans were screaming for Howie Roseman’s head because he had mortgaged their future for Carson Wentz, and that was despite the fact that he had won a Super Biwl with Nick Foles at QB. Then again as we all know in New England it’s not how many Super Bowls you win, it’s what did you do for me last week?