Welcome to the 2024 NFL Draft – one of the great equalizers in sports fandom. Like the NCAA tournament bracket, when a 10-year-old kid has about as solid a shot at picking a game as any expert, fans today will wildly speculate and irrationally judge their team’s process with what might prove the same success rate as the folks who actually receive a paycheck to do so. It’s madness…and it’s fantastic!
I want to make clear that I am not one of those who believes himself equally as smart as (or smarter) than the experts. I’m not. It’s only in my ability to guess and occasionally hit that puts me on their level, for not only does none of us, experts included, have a clue as to how the draft board will unfold tonight, none of us knows the value assigned by a respective GM to a given position or player. And to believe that any GM is really giving the insiders and media coverage teams anything with legitimate teeth is laughable. In addition, none of us knows how well any of these men will transition to the next level.
Tonight, enjoy the fact that everybody’s guess is as good as anybody’s guess. And don’t get sucked into grades! People like grades and definitive conclusions. It’s comforting. That’s why you not only see team grades, but individual grades for the incoming rookie class. It makes us feel good to know that some dude who watches a lot of film and hangs out on some sidelines and wears a suit on TV and has a couple GM numbers in his cell gave our team an A-.
“Dude, did you guys see what Bill gave us on the draft? A-! Super Bowl, baby!”
But the formula for determining a team (or individual) grade before the dude ever plays a down in the NFL is entirely speculative, based entirely on past performance achieved against inferior competition.
It’s not that I dislike this type of hypothetical banter and projection. I actually love it. I crave it. I can’t get enough of it! Possibilities and predictions and rumors and player potential are precisely what makes this stuff a blast to watch unfold. And I certainly respect the men and women who bring it to me, because they put in the work! It often appears as though what they do is easy, and though it is wildly insulting to their craft to express that, it’s actually high praise, for it takes a tremendous amount of work to make it appear as though they don’t. That’s true for any craft. They consolidate their endless hours of research into a really nice, tight package for us to watch, so that we can pretend to know a lot about some left guard from Tulane in our text messages to our buddies.
But here’s the truth…
You want to know how your team did with its first pick (or any pick) this year? Check back in 2027, for until the guy gets some PT under his cleats, no one knows…not the expert, and certainly not the Twitter, scratch that…X, fanatic. Let’s all just agree to agree on this hard truth: we know virtually nothing, and what we do know is fed to us by folks who are often purposely misled by the content provider.
So tonight and this weekend, just have fun with the Strat-O-Matic analysis, and don’t take it too seriously.
