Originally posted by Steve
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The goal of the draft is to get the best players possible and a team that reaches does not do that--period.
While being nowhere near infallible, of course the presence of a consensus regarding a player means something. It is foolish of a GM to think that he and only he has a monopoly on the correct analysis of a player when that analysis is at odds with the gigantic consensus rating of a player.
And even when the GM strongly believes in a player, he should consider what the consensus means in terms of where the player he thinks highly of is likely to be drafted.
Further, to the extent that a player is a fit only in certain systems, something you specifically referenced regarding Woods, that reduces both the overall value of the player and the likelihood that the player will be drafted earlier by teams for which he is not a fit.
Frankly, the suggestion that there is nothing wrong with taking players early is absurd.
A GM should not be so wed to a particular player that he sacrifices more than a round of draft value to take the player early, especially when the GM has a chance to get extra value when there is a BPA value gap that can be easily exploited with even just a tiny amount of aggressiveness when what actually happened proved that the small trade up was available to be made. We do not have to speculate about it. The very pick in question that we could have acquired got traded and traded for less than what we would have offered with a similar package of draft picks.
The whole problem is that we did not "swing for the fences" when we had the chance to do so. When we had the chance to get the #44 overall ranked player (Travis Jones) at a PON in the middle of the third round by making a simple trade when everyone and their dog knew that BAL, a team that actually knows how to draft players outside of the first round, would take the player at #76, trading up to #75, should have been an easy, easy choice.
What a team should not do is to fail to get the pick that was proven to be available and then compound that error by selecting the #137 overall ranked player with the #79 draft pick, missing both the golden opportunity of getting great value and getting terrible value all at the same time. And then, of course, we reinforced the fact that we had the DL positional need by taking a much lesser caliber DL player in Ogbonnia.
We did not maximize our player talent with our draft picks. Our draft strategy in the third round was simply and quite obviously poor.
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