Forming Draft Priors and Letting Them Go

I have a friend that shoots me small texts about NFL players every so often, it is in the key of Remembering Some Guys, but it is more like Remembering How Some Guys I Liked Didn’t Make It

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Why isn’t Devin White good? Why didn’t someone sign Hunter Renfrow? And so on.

And the undercurrent of these messages is that there are 50 Zack Bauns waiting to appear every offseason, that we should remain ever-optimistic about these guys, when even the OG Baun became who he was in Philadelphia almost by mistake. The Baun who had to learn in-season how to deal with cut blocks. Baun had played 660 defensive snaps in four seasons in New Orleans before this happened.

Let me dial back to when I was doing Football Outsiders’ Top 25 Prospect list every offseason. I wrote this about Baun in 2021:

One thing I had learned early about doing these lists is that players like Baun may or may not ever get that chance to be “the guy.” And while I liked what Baun put down when I watched him at Wisconsin, and liked his athletic talent, it was pretty clear that the Saints didn’t have a real plan for him and kept stacking players ahead of him. Spots 1-10 on the Top Prospects list? I eventually figured out you were only placing prospects there that were guaranteed playing time. And Baun dealt with sign and sign again that he wasn’t going to really get to be “the guy” for the Saints.

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The world of the NFL Draft for me, after doing several of these lists for several seasons, became a place where I understood quickly that my priors were doing more harm than good. I’ve ridden several of these coasters, both good and bad. I got to be “person who advocated that the Texans take Russell Wilson in the third round in 2012” and I got to be “person who believed C.J. Stroud was better than Bryce Young in 2023.” I also got to be “person who liked Cordarrelle Patterson more than DeAndre Hopkins because of athletic talent” and “person who believed Josh Allen would be a washout because he couldn’t complete enough passes.” There was one guy who e-stalked me for years because I thought Andre Dillard was the only NFL-caliber left tackle the Texans could take in 2019 and didn’t love the Tytus Howard pick for that reason. It didn’t matter that my critique was functionally correct and that the Texans bent over backwards to trade for Laremy Tunsil. What mattered is that I was wrong about Mr. Dillard.

I can understand why people feel the way that they do about these prospects because the draft is supposed to be the mecca of hope for NFL teams. Everybody has to crap all over the free agency pool because those guys might cost money and all surplus value is supposed to be developed and retained by teams, who are presumably smart. NFL Draft coverage starts in earnest, in the shadows, while everyone else is working on the season. It emerges in Week 17 and Week 18 fully formed, ready to give hope to teams that definitely need to lose to ensure they get the best pick possible. Or at least that is how it hits fans most of the time.

A lot of these prospects are never going to be good NFL players. A majority of them are going to get hurt and lose enough athletic ability that they won’t be able to compensate. Some of them are going to be felled by off-field misanthropy. Some of them won’t love the sport enough to become a star player. (That’s not to shame any of them, by the way, but it isn’t all about athletic talent at many positions.) Even the flags you plant correctly can come tumbling down quickly, in the case of a Deshaun Watson scenario.

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None of that means that it isn’t fun to dream on what a player could be and say you were one of the first to recognize that. But over the years my ego has been appropriately crushed about what that means. It’s a world where you need to be smart and lucky, a world where you’d rather have more bites of the apple than not. A place where I think overconfidence is one of the biggest sins you can have.

I will develop my priors over the process. And I’ll tell you what I think. But I know that from the outside I have a pretty good chance of being wrong.

And nothing is a bigger reminder than these texts. Devin White and Zack Baun were on the Eagles last offseason at the same time. White ended up with the Texans after drawing a release because — my outside perspective talking here — he has an ego. And that ego doesn’t align with what the NFL thinks about him. Baun became one of the best players in the league at a position he’d barely played at before, literally learning on the job in some cases.

Nobody would have thought we’d wind up here when White went fifth overall in 2019 and Baun was a high third-round pick in 2020. If you ended the accounting of the draft in 2022, when White was on the last non-fifth-year option year of his rookie deal, there’s no way anyone would have taken Baun over White.

The thing about eating all the hope that the draft provides is that it can deflate your stomach pretty quickly if you don’t admit that we don’t really know how it’s going to go. To me, the best drafting teams understand that there is a science to scouting (we know who we want) and a science to understanding how that actually plays out. Just because they really like a guy doesn’t mean trading up for him always makes sense — and just because you can point to several examples of a player like this succeeding doesn’t mean this one will either. It is an approach that blends holistic thinking with the intense belief that you are right, and it has to drive the people who are paid only to be right all the time insane.

The willingness to believe that those thoughts might change on a dime has been my biggest takeaway of doing this as long as I can. I was here writing about how Bryce Young was probably done in Week 3 last year, and by Week 14 he was outdueling soon-to-be Super Bowl champion Jalen Hurts in a game. (Yes, the Panthers lost.)

This really isn’t a sport that lends well to sweeping beliefs that you hold on to forever. It is one where the coast is always changing.

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