Nate Silver rates Michael Sam’s chances of being picked at 50-50. Daniel D. Snyder examines the downplaying of Michael Sam’s skills:
It’s not uncommon for players to lose draft stock over non-football issues. Every year, terms like “character concerns,” “low motor,” and “locker room diva” get flung around during the draft process, and they have the power to drive players, deserving or not, into the later rounds and even right off the board. … Michael Sam doesn’t have these issues. He has no arrest record. He has a high motor. He has the love of his teammates, who have called him a “great guy” and a “great leader.” He is, by all accounts, the kind of high-character prospect coaches gush over at press conferences. So in the absence of a negative, his detractors have taken to attacking his football acumen instead.
The trouble is that these criticisms don’t hold up to actual analysis. In one of the many incorrect assessments of Sam’s game, one NFC scout in [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Bob] McGinn’s piece said, “He has trouble in space and struggles changing directions.” As it turns out, this may be what Sam does best. Retired NFL lineman Stephen White, in his extensive breakdown on SB Nation, called Sam “the best corner rusher I have broken down thus far.” Better even than his teammate and projected first-round pick Kony Ealy, who, it should be noted, Sam outproduced while playing in the same system against the same competition.
Robert Silverman’s take on the Sam evaluations:
The difficulty is that both Michael Sam the football player and Michael Sam the gay football player are being evaluated as a prospect by a multibillion-dollar business, specifically one that treats both its potential and current workers like hunks of very large, profit-generating meat that can and will be discarded or shunned at the drop of a hat if they in any way imperil the bottom line. …
You might call it cowardly or a convenient way to dodge the fact that they’re indirectly validating any bigotry on the part of both players and fans alike, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But corporations are not and have never been moral actors, or entities in service of the greater good. They exist to make a profit. Period.
But Joseph Stromberg NFL finds that, “despite years of data, most NFL teams still have no idea how to work the draft most effectively”:
It’s not their imperfect player evaluation, but something more basic — their refusal to follow the principle of risk diversification. That’s the conclusion economists Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came to after analyzingfifteen years of draft data in a series of papers — and it’s still true, despite recent changes to the wages rookies are paid.
Draft picks can be traded, and the success of any one player picked is highly uncertain. Because of that, their data says that in the current trade market, teams arealways better off trading down — that is, trading one high pick for multiple lower ones — but many teams become overconfident in their evaluation of one particular player and do the exact opposite: package several low picks for the right to take one player very early.
Aaron Gordon cites the same research:
To make the overconfidence effect even more pronounced, as Thaler and Massey wrote, the more information experts have to base their decisions on, the more confident they become. This wrinkle is particularly relevant this year, with the NFL draft being held two weeks later than normal. Teddy Bridgewater, a quarterback out of Louisville, provides a good case study: Over the past month or so, Bridgewater has fallen from being viewed as the top quarterback, and possibly the top player, in the draft to someone who’s not even worth a first-round pick. The number of games he’s played during that time: zero. Teams have been able to study Bridgewater for months, so what gives? With all this extra downtime to prepare for the draft, teams have time to second-guess themselves.
(Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
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