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Originally posted by Critty
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I'll try to check out as much as I can anyways.
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Nice to know something else is out there asside from PFF even if there is a fee. If it's good though, not a big deal.
I'll try to check out as much as I can anyways. -
You can look at their ebook rookie handbook for 2021 and view some pages for free on google ebooks app to get a sample of it. I think it gives enough to see if it worth your money. PFF subscription..meh. never spent a penny on their stuff. This SIS rookie handbook for 19.95 is good value if you are a draft fanatic. And if you never used the free app, you get a 3 dollar credit on the ebook.Originally posted by Boltjolt View Post
I also like how they don't act like their analytics are some flawless way to draft. Just a solid base for making decisions on what you think you see on film when you watch these players yourself. PFF elite monthly subscription is twice what this ebook cost. You could get one this year and then another in 2022 for what a single month of PFF gives you. And IMO, I'm trust Sports info Solutions and Bill James team and staff because there is a proven track record of useful applied analytics that help teams win more games.Who has it better than us?Comment
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Thank you sir! I use mostly PFF for deep dive analytics of NFL players which I find useful in a limited way, but it will be really nice to utilize another analytics tool from a very diifferent source.Originally posted by Critty View Post
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So far SIS seems to be pretty good and i cant even see player rankings with the free trial. Lots of reading, ...which im not a big fan of but some other good stuff about QBs. I still have about 170 pages to go on the trial.Originally posted by BoltUp InLA View Post
I wouldnt spend a dime on PFF.Comment
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Daniel Jeremiah on Peter King's FMIA talks about how difficult this draft is to analyze and forecast. Patience is the key. Also a quote from Telesco. I still think that there's a small chance that he'll get fired after the draft. The only reason he's still here is because of this uncertain offseason. But I can see the Spanos pulling a Pegula.
This is the kind of pre-draft season it’s been: There’s a first-round pass-rush prospect from the University of Miami named Gregory Rousseau. High school wideout/safety. College history, checkered. Year one: Played a few snaps as a freshman, got hurt, redshirted. Year two: ACC Defensive Rookie of the Year with 15.5 sacks. Year three: Opted out because of COVID concerns. Basically, four months of college game experience. No NFL Scouting Combine to probe him physically and mentally. No in-person visits with teams; Zoom meetings only. Rousseau is 20 years old.
Information sources? Shut off, pretty much, for so many of the prospects. In the fall, NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah wanted to know how much Rousseau weighed; he played his one season at 248, but it was a year later, and Rousseau, after opting out, was totally off the grid. “I DM’d him on Twitter, just trying to get info any way I could,” Jeremiah said. “And he wrote back: 262.”
“More than any year I’ve been doing this,” Jeremiah told me Saturday evening, “this draft’s a mystery. Say you’re watching a kid who played a season against great competition in the SEC this year, and you’re comparing him to a kid who opted out, maybe played nine or 10 games in 2019, and you haven’t seen him play football in over 400 days. It’s crazy.
“It kind of feels like the MLB draft, with the uncertainty. All kinds of kids in it. The college kids are safer, because you’ve seen them against good competition. They’ve got maybe a lower ceiling but a higher floor. The high school kids, the upside’s enormous but there’s a major risk. It’s usually not that way in the NFL Draft, but it feels like it this year.”
I looked at five mock drafts over the weekend, and Gregory Rousseau ranged from 11 to 21 on each one. Let’s just say he’s the 16th pick. Some team is going to guarantee him $15 million in a rookie contract, perhaps not even meet him in person till late July (no one knows the COVID rules for off-season work), and pray this man who hasn’t played a football game in 520 days will be ready to rush the passer in an NFL game after seven weeks of professional training.
Yikes.
Plenty of time to shuffle up team’s draft boards, but with increasingly important Pro Days beginning in earnest this week (vital this year because of no combine and no in-person meetings with prospects), and the draft 52 days away, I wanted to do a draft primer this week. With help from Jeremiah—you can watch him dissect a complicated year for quarterbacks in the video atop this column—I’ll try to give you the elementary look at what matters this year.
One other point about the importance of the 2021 draft: A look at the cap space on Over The Cap for the current season shows that exactly half the teams, 16 of 32, are either over the projected salary cap or have less than $10 million to spend. An average team will spend $8 million to $10 million to sign its rookies—so that shows you exactly how important the rookies are this year. Several teams will be forced to all but steer clear of significant free agents to build their rosters in 2021. Talk about combustible: There’s more of a need for rookies to contribute this year, and the knowledge base of those rookies will likely be lower than any year in memory.
I had one GM tell me Sunday his team is having trouble in three major draft areas:
• More players than ever—in this GM’s memory—have one season of successful college football only (such as Rousseau). The error rate on those players, because they’ve had less experience than normal prospects, is higher.
• With no on-campus scouting this year other than the Pro Day, the exposure to information sources is reduced. The GM said draft meetings so far have shown less information than ever in things like, How does he take coaching? What kind of teammate is he? What’s his work ethic?
• Limited medical information. Combine physical exams are notoriously thorough, sometimes discovering previously undiagnosed ailments. This GM told me his team won’t have trust in the exams till their own doctors can examine them—after the draft.
With all that, the show will go on. Final draft boards will be constructed over the next seven weeks, and Roger Goodell will step to a podium—in his New York-area basement or in Cleveland, site of the draft—and call out the picks. What you need to know about the landscape of the 2020 draft:
The quarterbacks are plentiful, as is the uncertainty. Five are likely to go in the first round, with Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence the likely number one pick to Jacksonville and BYU’s late-rising Zach Wilson likely number two to the Jets or some team trading up for him. After that, it’s a jumble. Ohio State’s Justin Fields is likely to go in the top 10, and the other two could go that high as well. North Dakota State’s Trey Lance was a terrific size-speed prospect against FCS competition in 2019, but played just one game in 2020, so some teams don’t know what make of him. And Mac Jones, great last fall in leading Alabama to the national title, could go as high as eight to Carolina. But he’s not an athlete and doesn’t fit the mold of a new-wave NFL passer.
“Jones is the most challenging evaluation for me,” Jeremiah said. “Ten years ago, lots of prospects were like him—accurate, great decision-making, poise in the pocket. He’s outstanding in those three. But the league is going in a different direction. You need guys who can create plays. If you can’t create and buy some time, or take off and run for a first down on third-and-five, it’s hard. You have a narrow path to winning consistently.”
Not a great defensive draft, at all. Jeremiah has 24 players with first-round grades, only 10 on defense. (For the record, four quarterbacks, four wideouts, three offensive linemen, two running backs, one tight end, three edge players, three linebackers, three corners, and one safety. No defensive tackles.) Jeremiah has Rousseau, Jaelan Phillips of Miami and Kwity Paye of Michigan atop his Edge rankings, but it doesn’t seem like any of them are locks.
What’s weird about this draft: It’s conceivable that the first eight players could be offensive players, and one of the unheralded corners—opt-out Virginia Tech athlete Caleb Farley or Alabama’s Patrick Surtain II—could be the first defender taken. “If you want a corner,” Jeremiah said, “you better get one in the first couple of rounds. It falls off after that.” Another son of an ex-NFLer, South Carolina cornerback Jaycee Horn (son of former wideout Joe Horn), should go by the end of round one.
Best position in the draft: Wide receiver (again). In the last two drafts, teams have picked a total of 30 wideouts in the first three rounds. This year, Jeremiah has 19 receivers with grades in the top three rounds. When you see the recent draft depth of the position—third-round wideouts from the last three years: Terry McLaurin, Michael Gallup, Tre’Quan Smith, Diontae Johnson—I begin to think NFL teams should start treating the receiver position like running backs. Don’t waste a high pick on one; you can get a good one in the seventies, eighties, nineties overall.
“It’s almost the same every year now, Jeremiah said. “Last year, I had a record number of guys with top-three-round grades [27]. Not as much this year, but so many good options in the second, third, fourth rounds.” Most draft boards will have LSU’s Ja’Marr Chase and Alabama’s DeVonta Smith and Jaylen Waddle among the top 12 picks. Kadarius Toney of Florida is Jeremiah’s fourth first-round wideout, but his favorite wideout at a bargain price (mid-round two) is Mississippi’s Elijah Moore: “There were games that nobody could cover him.”
Surest position at the top? Might be offensive line. It’s not deep, but either Rashawn Slater of Northwestern or Penei Sewell of Oregon (both were 2020 opt-outs) could be opening-day left tackles in September. They should both go in the top six or eight. Slater played well against Ohio State and ace edge-rusher Chase Young in their 2019 meeting. Alijah Vera-Tucker (USC) could play guard or tackle comfortably, and Christian Darrisaw (Virginia Tech) and Jalen Mayfield (Michigan) could crack the end of the first round.
The Unicorn. Florida tight end Kyle Pitts is the first player at his position in 43 years of Mel Kiper’s draft-grading to crack the top five overall prospects. Whether he goes that high is a matter of taste, but a smart team could use him as an in-line tight end, running routes out of the slot, split wide, and as an athletic motion man. (Remember Rob Gronkowski’s Jet Motion Super Bowl TD, when he was untouched by any defenders?) So Pitts may be drafted as a tight end but could end up playing all over the map. “If he had ‘WR’ next to his name,” Jeremiah said, “he’d be a top 15 pick.”
Run-and-chase linebackers are in style. Jeremiah loves Jeremiah Owusu-Koramoah of Notre Dame, and sees Micah Parsons (Penn State) and Zaven Collins (Tulsa) as first-round ‘backers. “He’s such an exciting player,” Jeremiah said of Owusu-Koramoah. “He’s one of the guys in this draft I can’t wait to see—both how he’ll be used and how many plays he makes all over the field.”
Running backs high in the draft are out of style, but not to Jeremiah. He loves Clemson’s Travis Etienne and Alabama’s Najee Harris, and the prospect who might be his favorite player in the draft (encompassing value as well as talent) is a likely second-rounder, North Carolina’s Javonte Williams. Jeremiah thinks Williams could end up being the best back in the draft. “Not often a running back is the leader of your football team,” Jeremiah said, “but Javonte Williams was at North Carolina.”
“I know one thing,” Jeremiah said near the end of our conversation. “If you’re a team or if you’re a fan, you’d better exercise patience after the draft this year. There’s just too much we’re not going to know about too many players.”
With the draft dominating news cycles increasingly from November to April, that’s not something draft-crazy fans are going to want to hear. But it sure sounds like the truth in 2021.10. PRO DAYS. With no combine this year, pro days are more important than ever. This week, the on-campus workouts begin in earnest, with three very big ones: Tuesday in Chicago, tackle Rashawn Slater, a 2020 opt-out, will be on display at Northwestern, and some scouts think he could be the first tackle picked. Thursday in South Carolina, Travis Etienne will try to show he should be RB1 at Clemson’s Pro Day. And Friday’s a big day at North Dakota State. Because of level of competition and the fact he’s played only one game in the last 14 months, Trey Lance will be under the microscope in Fargo.Last year, we had the combine, so that was normal. This year, no combine at all, so that is going to be a lot different. Essentially, those pro days are going to serve as a combine for us, as far as how we’re going to collect data on the players.”
—Chargers GM Tom Telesco, on the oddities of the 2021 pre-draft scouting process.Comment
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Interesting take on Telesco...I think it unlikely, but I will admit that something seems a bit off with Telesco in his interviews. A bit somber at times, and sometimes downright testy and defensive...and Where was he when Staley showed up at the facility...? The whole Spanos family was there, and a few players...no Telesco. Last year, TT was energetic, peppy even...he was all but glowing after the draft...and no doubt he really liked Anthony Lynn, maybe feels some guilt at his dismissal...but was Staley not his preferred hire? Does he see eye to eye with Staley? Does he think what you do, that his job may be in jeopardy? Or maybe he is starting to feel the weight and guilt of failing so far...Originally posted by Xenos View PostDaniel Jeremiah on Peter King's FMIA talks about how difficult this draft is to analyze and forecast. Patience is the key. Also a quote from Telesco. I still think that there's a small chance that he'll get fired after the draft. The only reason he's still here is because of this uncertain offseason. But I can see the Spanos pulling a Pegula.
I like the guy, and am rooting for him to get this team over the hump, personnel wise...but he has some work to do, and it's time to string together more hits than misses with regards to that oline.
Adopted Bolt: Kimani Vidal RB
Final prediction: Latham OT, Colson LB, Sainristil CB,Rice WR, Zinter OG, Nourzad OC, MacLachlan TE, Vidal RB, Lovett DT
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I mean I wouldn’t look into TT’s behavior so far. These things work best if the GM doesn’t know he’s getting fired. But I digress since it’s all heresy at this point. An out of the blue guess that’s probably wrong.Originally posted by Lone Bolt View PostComment
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OK. Let's start with the TT quote about needing to improve the Oline, as well as the rest of the team.Originally posted by Lone Bolt View PostWe do not play modern football.Comment
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We do not play modern football.Comment
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"hearsay" he meant!Originally posted by wu-dai clan View PostChiefs won the Superbowl with 10 Rookies....
"Locked, Cocked, and ready to Rock!" Jim Harbaugh
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Ninja = hereticOriginally posted by wu-dai clan View PostMy 2021 Adopt-A-Bolt List
MikeDub
K9
Nasir
Tillery
Parham
ReedComment
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