stitches

He's like... Dayo clone...

That one is interesting because Irsay's grades last year was much better and the quotes they had on Irsay were very positive. I wonder what changed. Was it the JT's situation? Was it some promise that Irsay gave and didn't deliver on? No idea...

Just to be clear - I am not saying he shouldn't be in the RoH. I'm saying Luck's place in there should be no brainer.

That + QBs have a bit of a different status than any other position. Even without having watched Jim Harbaugh with the Colts, to me it's hard to imagine he had anywhere close to the impact Luck had on this team.

I want to make one too, but I still haven't gotten into the draft much.

Like full off-season mock? Or mock draft?

The timing was horrible. One of the worst times to retire... I still think people use the timing as justification for otherwise horrible way to treat Luck. And I still think no matter when he retired... people would still have felt betrayed and * off about it. Absolutely. Especially since the GM didn't get the memo initially that we need to go draft our next guy immediately/as quickly as possible. So we were stuck in limbo for a while. Yep... I'd say he was great pretty much all the time he wasn't playing seriously hurt. Yep... Chuck has said before that Luck by himself probably prolonged his HC career by a few years... For as much as I crap on him for his coaching, Chuck seems like a great man with no sense of entitlement and overall good perspective on life. I'm glad the Colts continue to support his charity and I'm glad Luck will be back in Indianapolis for it.

Are you going through the guys in that 10-20 range? Nice to read your reports. Thanks. Who's your favorite so far in our area of the draft?

The daycare thing seems like something that shouldn't be that hard to give to the players. It's like... 2 days in a month... between August and January. Lets say 6 months, 2 home games per month. That's like... daycare for 12 days of the year. Come on! Teams should be able to give that to players. I bet there are areas of the stadium that don't get used on a game day... make a plan, make those area a multi-purpose facility... maybe daycare for those gamedays, easily transformable into something else for the rest of the time.

It's very interesting that the grades by the players have gone down compared to last year. And some of those are on things that I doubt have gotten worse... IMO they probably just expected improvements on some of those after last year and they didn't get those improvements. I remember one of the things in their report card last year was that the players believed the owner wouldn't hesitate to spend in order to improve the conditions... well... seems like the owner didn't take note and both his grade and the grades of a lot of those low-hanging fruit type of accomodations have gone down. Not to excuse the Colts for some of those but the team that's dead last in those report cards is... the Chiefs who have terrible grades throughout the whole card, except for HC, who they grade as the best in the league(A+)

I guess it depends on what his score was. Has there been any leaks about scores of this year's QBs? I haven't seen any so far...

Good. I hope he visits some games of the team during the season... maybe get inducted into the Ring of Honor at some point. It's not great look for the franchise for both of their last big time franchise QBs to be so far away from the team post retirement.

Yes, I think it was their founder who said in an interview that they started with just 1 team per division and then expanded to 2 teams per division. Part of it is those teams pay for that service and they pay for exclusivity as part of the deal... the other reason I would guess is they want to be able to do some research on the usefulness of the test(i.e. how successful at drafting are teams that have it vs teams that don't... or how successful at developing talent are teams that have it vs teams that don't, etc.) BTW, yes.. here's an article about the Titans getting the deal with S2: https://theathletic.com/4260941/2023/02/28/tennessee-titans-nfl-draft-bryce-young/

Don't quote me on that but for some reason I think they don't have access to the S2. I think it was just the Colts and Titans from our division. It wasn't meant to be as heavily sarcastic as it reads. I meant it more as an at-face-value descriptor. But yah, he was considered top prospect for years before the draft. And if he was bigger and faster, maybe his processing would have had better chance to shine. I just didn't see him succeeding on a physical and athletic level in the league. Agreed. Agreed. That Georgia game really had me spinning in my thoughts. I had no idea how to evaluate what I was seeing compared to the rest of his tape. And I taught me a bit of a lesson - don't discount things you see from top prospects at the biggest stage against the best competition. I think only about half of the teams get the S2 scores and this is by design.

Huge part of the pushback came from the people who do the test themselves. They were doing damage control after supposedly confidential information was leaked to the public and in this case one of the highest profile players in the draft was affected by it. At the time the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that teams actually value that test highly, especially the teams that actually have access to it. IMO it's very convenient and self serving to only come out with skepticism about it after the highest profile prospect in the draft exceeded expectations. And BTW I love that Ballard took that stand and I hated how Stroud was being treated too. But that's different from trying to rewrite history about Strouds results and trying to come with post hoc rationalizations about how he didn't really put effort into the test. And yes, the reports I saw actually said that he took the test multiple times and his scores didn't improve. We will never really know for sure what happened with the Panthers and what part of their evaluation was the S2 score, but we know their owner is big fan of new age metrics and analytics and we know Bryce had one of the highest scores ever while Stroud had one of the lowest scores ever from top prospects. If I had to guess that score had some impact on their decision. It's hard for me to decide if too much or too little is being made of the score. I guess by some people - too little and by others too much. For example, even though I think this test probably has some utility, I still had Stroud as my QB2 in same tier with AR and I had the S2 superstar Bryce Young as my 4th QB... So I think I very much agree with you that it should be just a small piece of the overall evaluation. But at the same time I think it should probably has higher weight than the Wonderlic scores. Where does that put me? I don't know...I guess somewhere in the middle. Yes, but players might not want anybody to have that information including their own team, because even seemingly irrelevant information might be used against them in the future - for example in contract negotiations... Or in case they change their team and now their rival has information about their weakest and strongest processing sides. Those are just a few examples that came to my mind.

It's very telling that nobody actually came out and said that Stroud's published test score was inaccurate. Yes there was pushback about the scores, but they all were very general and non-specific. "I've seen published scores that aren't correct", "Those scores miss a lot of context", etc. And especially when Stroud himself was asked about those scores. Do you remember what his answer was? He didn't dispute any of it. He just said he's not a test-taker, he's a football player. I think several big time reporters/analysts reported it. I think I first heard it from Zierlein. But can't find the original. Here's Pelissero reporting on it too: https://www.nfl.com/news/2023-nfl-draft-pro-execs-scouts-coaches-rank-and-evaluate-the-qb-class There have been some suggestions that the Panthers took Bryce Young over Stroud partially because of the S2 test, because they valued it highly. Yeah, I don't remember if it was reported as players refusing it or their agents not allowing them to take it, but this is what one of the podcasts I listen to reported. Not 100% sure which one it is because I consume a lot of those draft podcasts. They probably can... not sure if the players would do it. But if the teams knew it in advance they might have better idea of whether development in certain areas is even possible.

To me all this sounds like revisionist history. There were TONS of reports at the time about how much teams valued the S2 test, how some execs were worried about his S2 scores... how he took it MULTIPLE TIMES in attempt to get better score(very far from the assumption that he didn't give full effort). It's OK if a test doesn't 100% predict performance. It's on those GMs and execs that they put so much weight on it. At the end of the day Stroud is just another datapoint in the dataset of 1000s players that took that test. And the discrepancy between his score and his performance might help further improve the correlation matrix. Maybe the certainty last year wasn't warranted and from now on teams and execs will read more carefully into what that test is saying and what it isn't saying and how much they should value it. My guess is... the pendulum might swing the other way too much(into completely devaluing the test). BTW I heard on a podcast that this year's QBs have been refusing to take the test precisely because of how Stroud was treated last year and teams are now * off because that test is not only used for evaluation purposes, but also for planning of future development.

Ever since that LSU championship team, I kind of have been a fan of the reverse theory - when you have another dominant receiver on your team, it's even more impressive if you manage to stack up such insane production. Chase and Jefferson were amazing together and at the time everybody thought Jefferson is benefiting from Chase, but the reality is... there is only one ball. And if it goes to one player at disproportionately high volume, commanding huge portion of the remaining volume is actually a huge positive. It shows that even if you are not the 1st option on this particular team, you are able to accumulate big numbers and there is possibly some hidden potential to be a no. 1 receiver. Kind of like Jefferson has been able to prove in the league. Kind of like Olave has been able to do, too. Big production at high level, combined with high level traits is like catnip for me, when we talk about receivers, and the presence of another big time receiver on the team is not really something that will dissuade me from selecting that player. If anything, I feel like there is some unexplored value there.

This is the highest I've seen Chop Robinson BTW. Cooper Dejean has been receiving lower rankings by numerous national media analysts... I kind of expected him to be top 15-20 pick... but from what I'm seeing by those evaluators... it looks more like he would be lucky to get picked in the 1st...

The lenght measurements of CBs, LBs... EDGE like always are interesting knowing how much Ballard values them. And in general, we already know that Ballard likes his RAS all-stars... More specifically, I guess I would like to see how Brock Bowers measures(he looks small to me). I'd like to see the CBs in the 1st round too... I want to see Latu's athletic numbers, because I don't see him as a particularly athletic player. This is Lance Zierlein's rankings if I'm not mistaken.

There are yards per reception stats. Not sure if there are yards per target.

For whatever it's worth Wiggins' run defense grade by PFF is 65, which is the lowest run defense grade for any of their top 10 corners.

Did you hear what JSN said about Waldron? It's kind of hilarious...

My favorite CB I think is Terrion Arnold, but I kind of doubt he will be there when we pick...

https://www.nfl.com/news/daniel-jeremiah-2024-nfl-mock-draft-2-0-four-quarterbacks-selected-in-first-eight-picks Colts get a CB in his mock: