Or I could have called it ‘do we have this whole draft thing wrong!’
With dick all going on a couple of nights ago I pulled out some of the old game tapes of this year’s top OL prospects. In particular, I wanted to re-watch Alabama’s Jedrick Wills, who upon further review is indeed a really nice player. Smooth, solid technique, good body control, better quickness than his split time would suggest, excellent awareness, powerful punch. Pretty much the whole package. However, as I watched the Tide tapes, what kept jumping out at was that while the Alabama OL was very good, what made that offense dynamic, and it is very dynamic, was their track team at WR. They just put two guys out on each flank with one going deep and the other running a slant and wherever the safety on that side of the field went they threw to the other guy. The other teams never could match up and you started seeing 6-7 yard slants turned into 60-70 yard TDs on a regular basis as even in the games they lost, the Tide was putting up 40-plus points and likely would have at least made the CFP playoffs if Tua Tagovailoa hadn’t been injured.
Then there’s national champion LSU which was regularly putting 500-plus yards and 50 or more points on the board all season long with a team that featured a great QB throwing to another track team of WRs. LSU, of course, went on to win the national championship this past January defeating Clemson, the other real current power in college football, with a team led by a terrific QB throwing to – wait for it – a track team of WRs. Not to mention, the KC Chiefs who just won this year’s Super Bowl with the NFL’s best QB throwing to arguably the league’s deepest – and fastest – receiver corps. And it occurred to me as I was thinking of this stuff that maybe everyone should be thinking about drafting a track team of receivers.
Which is NOT the point of the piece. What also occurred to me is that while the Chiefs are Super Bowl champs, it is not because they have the fewest holes in their roster, but because they have the arguably NFL’s most dynamic individual unit. And when thinking about the really good teams around the league what one tends to see is that they all have a great QB and almost all have at least one really good unit that they essentially win games with. Obviously, with the Chiefs it is their receiver corps, while it was the defensive line for the 49ers. For others, like Seattle and the Seahawks old ‘legion of boom’ it was the defensive backfield. And so on. As such, it occurred to me that one could make a pretty good case that at the draft rather than attempting to fill holes one should really be thinking in terms of building and maintaining the unit or units that the team want to win with. Of course, teams are still going to want to address areas of weakness, especially any that literally do make winning difficult if not impossible.
The other part of the equation here is that the notion of ‘building through the draft’ really is an antiquated concept. It certainly had relevance before the advent of free agency when you had a player for the duration of his career. In that era you could talk about the proverbial 10-year starter and look elsewhere. With free agency, though, even if you draft well, it is going to cost you an arm and a leg to resign your guys after 4-5 years when their rookie contracts expire. The reality in today’s NFL is that teams are constantly turning their rosters every pretty much every 5 years or so whether they are technically rebuilding or not. In that sense, it is –hopefully – easier to maintain one elite unit, rather than trying to fill holes right across the roster. Of course, you aren’t going to draft just WRs or DEs. You are going to take good players at other positions when they are available; you probably will also want to over-draft ‘other’ positions in later rounds.
