Draft: Need vs. Best Player

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by Oakland Red

Well I agree that you have to be practical. I would take a player with smaller wattage if he is not much smaller and he fit a position of need. I'm not talking about Brady Quinn right now; I don't get the sense he is standing out above the other players in a big way.

If there was a Dan Marino type there, and he was head and shoulders above other players available at that spot, I would try to trade out of that spot for a team that is willing to offer a fair deal to draft him. If there wasn't such a deal, I would consider drafting him anyway, knowing that he can be traded when the time is right later on. If I thought it wouldn't work out in the long run and we wouldn't get the value, then I wouldn't draft him.

It's not the most talented player necessarily, but to me it's the one who can give my team the most wattage in the long run by drafting him - whether he gets traded later, or other players do, etc.

Taking players with the idea of trading them later simply doesn't work solely because draft value does not correlate to NFL player value. Draft position loses its meaning after the draft. For a player to have trade value, he's going to have to show promise on the field.

I don't know how good Brady Quinn will be in a historical sense. Dan Marino was by all accounts one of the three best QBs ever to play. No statistical projection could possibly put Quinn or any other QB at that level. Peyton Manning, for example, had a wonderful statistical projection, but not significantly higher than Carson Palmer's or Philip Rivers' or Ben Roethlisbergers.

What I'm saying here is that it is absolutely impossible to predict a player to be as good as Dan Marino. Peyton Manning may very well retire as the greatest QB ever to play. But the Colts did not pick Manning with the expectation that he would be on Marino's level, much less potentially better.

The point is that "the next Dan Marino" is nothing if not an ideal. For draft purposes, such a player doesn't exist. Neither does the next Jerry Rice, or the next LaDainian Tomlinson. Pre draft research can seperate the good from the bad. It can NOT seperate the historically great from the very good.

On that defense, I think Quinn is as good of a comparision as you are reasonably going to get with your arguement. I think he does stand out above all the rest, at least in this draft. I mean, there will probably be a QB or two taken in the later rounds of this draft that will be very good NFL QBs, but there is no guarentee that they ever get their chance to play. With Russell expected to be somewhere between the levels of David Carr (low end) and Rex Grossman (high end), I don't see him being a starting QB in this league 6 years from now. Teams are too impatient to let guys like Russell completely develop.