England Fan

What makes the team better? How do we know drafting Myles Jack makes the team better? He may be a great player, he may be a terrible player, or he may practically never play at all. That is not the case with Myles Jack at all. He is first round talent. The problem is Jack saying he may only be able potentially play three years. He would start no doubt in my mind, but do you take an outsanding player in the 2nd round that may only be around for three years??? Jack makes the team better in a lot of ways. If a team ran no huddle Jack can play in coverage almost as an additional CB. He will help out against the screen and keep those plays to short yardage. He would be great against Gronkowski when we play NE. Hem also would help out against QB's that want to scramble which hurts the Ravens front seven greatly due to the lack of speed. You have to take into Cam, Russell Wilson, RG3, Aaron Rodgers, and all the other scramblers I predict would run by Suggs or Dumervil. His presence alone would force them to be pocket passers. He has a lot of upside specifically for our team in particular. I picked him over all the player we wanted to draft at no. 6 because he added the most to our team. I agree. It seems like year after year the Ravens draft a development type player, develop him up to become a very good player after a couple of years, then see him move on after just two years of real contribution, to follow a huge contract. What is the real risk getting Jack, a high first round talent who is likely to make an immediate contribution, but is potentially only able to play 4 years as well? It seems to make sense to be satisfied with an immediate contribution for those initial years, because you never know anyway if you can retain a player for longer than that. Then at the end of that time you have 4 years of additional data on his knee, and who knows, maybe he ends up being able to contribute for much longer.

Here are my questions, which come to mind as an auditor: 1. What have they learned from the past 3 drafts, to improve the process this year? Have they made any tweaks, or are they just continuing as they have in the past? (If you aren’t improving, you’re probably going backwards) 2. Have they done any analysis on players they skipped on in past drafts, which turned out to be much better than the player they had ranked above them at the time of the draft? Why did they not have the better player ranked higher? Was it because there just wasn’t enough information out there on the player, or that they didn’t have the right information, or did the group decision making process cause them to rank a lower player higher? Have they changed anything in their scouting/draft process to get better at this? 3. Which of their scouts consistently recommends players that ended up being very good players, but didn’t end up ranked as highly on the final draft board for whatever reason? Do they have this information? If not, why not? There appear to be a couple of skills at play: a) being able to spot talent, and then b) being able to persuade other people with strong personalities that a player is better than the current group think. Do they know the scouts good at a) but not at b)? Are they consistently (more than 3 or 4 times) disregarding the scouts good at a)? 4. Related to 3 above, the concern I have with a group consensus approach is that strong personalities usually win, but they may not be the best talent evaluators. How do they protect against that in their decision making?