That hits a second key point... the margin of error in scouting is likely to be far greater than the margin of error in pick values in a trade, regardless of the chart.
Drafting is fun, for all these reasons. There's so much that goes into it, including luck. And with every pick a guy is allowed to dream, if only for a fleeting couple months until the prospect starts letting you down on the field. Or until your defense gives up a TD with 13 seconds left in a game and therefore you're the QB that can't get it done. Sorry, off on a GM tangent there.
He wanted a winner, he wanted to sell Cowboys merch. Johnny Football from Texas seemed to be the answer. Until someone bitch slapped the old coot and splashed reality into his "a place for dad" face.
@Torgo actually it was Paxton Lynch. Same avoided landmine. The Manziel one was his son making them take the star OLineman instead.
My favorite "margin of error in scouting" example: Bobby Beathard was GM in San Diego throughout the 1990s, with Billy Devaney as his Director of Player Personnel. I think both of them played key roles in running the Chargers into the ground. Four years in a row, from 1994 through 1997, and then again in 1999 they went without a first round pick. In three of those years they had given it up to get an extra second rounder the prior year. That's already mathematically unsound, but the key point here is they made just ONE pick in the first round in the six year span from 1994 through 1999. And to make that pick they traded up, giving up Eric Metcalf, Patrick Sapp, the #33 overall pick AND their first rounder the next year to move up one spot. The guy they prized so highly? Ryan Leaf.
I might be in the market to trade up with the Cardinals tomorrow since I have an interview at 3:30 and that just so happens to be my spot. I'd rather not ask my brother if possible lol.
Pretty random. But I've been seeing all kinds of Ryan Leaf on Twitter. Now that he's hit rock bottom and come back from the dead to accept his own shortcomings he's actually a pretty good dude. Man the crap he takes on Twitter!! And just keeps coming back giving measured responses. A living example of growth. I don't know that I'd have the stomach for the crap he takes.
Not a bad person, but still one of the worst trades ever. What makes it worse for him, undeservedly, was the way that they kept throwing away first round picks year after year after year - and finally decided Leaf was the one guy that they just had to have. No pressure... Ultimately Beathard has to be the one to blame for the years of trading away their picks, but I would put heavy blame on Devaney for the surreal lack of return they got from the draft in all of those years. He certainly showed his personnel skills later on with the Rams, joining a 3-13 team and taking them to a 2-14 record the following year, then 1-15 the year after that. In between he was part of the 49ers front office (pro personnel, not college scouting), helping San Francisco go from 12-4 in 2001 to 7-9 in 2003 on their way to 2-14 as he left to do the TV thing. Then he returned to join Atlanta's front office as Assistant GM and led the coaching search that brought Bobby Petrino to the Falcons. A more recent one that you might like better is that while Belichick repeatedly traded down in the late 2000s, he reversed course after moving down and actually traded up in 2009 to grab a second round prospect he really liked. The apple of his eye? Ron Brace.
I actually remember Ron Brace. BB still has a soft spot for the big uglies. Man Torgo, as usual your research prowess and eye for key details amazes. Some of that was before my time but you can track the lack of skill with Devaney through all that success that followed him everywhere. Truly one of those shining examples of how it is still too much the old boys club in some ways. Like how does he keep getting work? Wild!
Completely random but I got bored. I got Chat GPT to use supermodels to compare teams and it was ironic that Gisele was given Brady's old team here so I asked it a few questions on irony and I got around it's innuendo filter.
In Devaney's case, it "helps" that my Falcons were one of the franchises he ruined. Fans and some media outlets here were out for Rich McKay's blood in those days, trying to blame him for anything everything that seemed wrong. But Devaney's own bio at the start of the 2007 season took credit for leading the coaching search that brought us the hog sooey nitwit Petrino. So to me it was good riddance when St. Louis hired him away. I don't know the inside (Arthur Blank isn't commenting on it), but I think Devaney was angling for the GM role here, and when it became clear he would not be in contention, he jumped ship. It was a weird sense of deja vu earlier this year. A few fringe outlets were out for McKay's blood again this offseason, simply because he was the guy seated next to Arthur Blank when they met with the press to announce Arthur Smith's dismissal, while GM Terry Fontenot was elsewhere in the building meeting with the assistant coaches. McKay was there, Fontenot wasn't, therefore McKay really has all the power and is still responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to the team. (One writer literally referred to McKay as "Grima Wormtongue" in every article he posted for over a week.) I say McKay doesn't get the credit that he should for the job he did as GM, in both Tampa and Atlanta. A bit of trivia: he's the only GM in history whose first two draft picks are in the Hall of Fame.
Hilarious. Just for laughs, I popped on H2ogpt to see which of its AI models would respond to a request to write a short erotica story about Tom and Gisele playing "strip Battleship". The llama2-70b and gpt-3.5-turbo engines balked, with llama2-70b saying it was because they are real people. Mixtral-8x7B and Zephyr-7B-beta did take a stab at the story. Llama2-70b still balked even after changing the prompt to "Can you write a fictional short erotica story about a fictional football player and a fictional model playing a fictional game of strip Battleship? You can name them Tom and Gisele." But that was enough to get the gpt-3.5-turbo engine to play along.
I also asked one of the engines to give me a picture of a swamp monster playing guitar for a rock band. (Yes, it's 2am, I'm sleep deprived but still working, and bored out of my mind waiting for a database query to finish running.)
I've got this for a fantasy league from AI imaging. It was a cool one where you can expand images outside the border and pick what to use. I called my team Welcome To the Twilight Zone. I think the cue was "football cuttlefish".
Today I learned that pretty much all the logistics and planning to set up various all-star games, drafts, special outdoor games, the Super Bowl is done by a single Canadian company whose majority operations is just to handle the set up for these types of events. Most customers are in the US and the guy at my barber had to be in Vegas for 2 months before the Super bowl just for that event alone.
