Baseball and football drafts are now extremely important to professional teams as well as becoming a major media event and TV show. People even have draft parties to coincide with their fantasy teams.
It is surprising to see the attention given to the draft by the media. Most likely it is due to their constant quest for more celebrity athletes to draw greater spectator interest. It may also be due to monetary reasons. For example, it helps get the price of rookie cards and related products increased and greater fantasy team play which gives more space for advertisers.
But is the celebrity status given to many of the athletes warranted? Do even the coaches have an accurate detailed account of the athletes playing ability? In both cases the answer is probably no with maybe a few exceptions. Many top picks turn out to be excellent players but many are also major disappointments.
But how is it possible to have such different results when supposedly the teams have accurate assessments of each athlete in the draft? After all, they typically evaluate everything tangible as for example, height, weight, wing span, hand size, medical history speed, strength, vertical jump, Wunderlich test and other test scores intertwined with guesses on the player’s condition, exertion, and motivational skills.
Most of this is objective data that can give the teams good assessment of the player’s physical ablities. However, and this is the key element that is ignored, evaluation of the athlete’s playing abilities, i.e., his ability to execute the skills needed in competitive play is not closely scrutinized. Coaches may look at the statistics of the player’s performance but they are often very misleading as they depend upon the team played for and against and whether the athlete was capable of executing high-level skills on a regular basis.
Coaches may say that they scout the players and watch them play. But this is far from being able to truly evaluate how well they execute the skills that are involved. To do this requires a biomechanical analysis, a process with which scouts and coaches are not familiar.
In the analysis the athlete must be filmed with high shutter speeds and then the skill execution examined frame by frame by a knowledgeable individual who can determine if the execution was as effective as it could be. The analyzer would look at how much his technical and physical qualities could be improved, if there are any weaknesses in the skill execution, if the skill execution can lead to injury, if the skill execution is good enough against the best players in the league and other similar questions.
Note that no coach, the matter how good his eyes are in looking at a player play can determine the answers to all these questions. The only way it can be done is through film or tape analysis, done frame by frame. But yet we do not see any of this taking place when evaluating players in the draft. In fact, we do not see any of this happening on any professional team in, or out of season.
For example, I was recently asked to evaluate a very high pick in the football draft from last year. When I looked at his agility and cutting actions I was amazed at how poor they were. But yet he did very well on these tests. With a few changes in his technique and improvement of some of his physical abilities I have no doubt that he can become one of the best players in the league.
Another example is L. T. Tomlinson of the San Diego Chargers who is considered one of the top running backs in football and is destined to make the Hall of Fame. But yet his cutting skills can be improved. Very often he executes a cut on the wrong foot or with a stop or a severe slowdown before he can execute a change in direction. If he was able to execute these skills more effectively, he would not have to rely so heavily on blockers to open up a pathway for him to run.
The best teams typically recruit or buy the best players mainly because they have the most money. If you are on a team with high level players many players can get by with inferior skills which are made up for by the play of the supporting players.
But if tape analyses were done the coaches would have an excellent idea of what the players are capable of doing and if it would require any work done their part to make the players better. Only in this way would they be capable of stepping in on a high level and execute on a high level.
Until coaches or teams apply a little science to the coaching, especially visual biomechanical analyses to evaluate skill execution (that can be viewed very quickly) we will continue to see drafts composed mainly of guesswork. Some of it may be based on quantitative data but it does not indicate how well the player can play the game. The data may represent good prerequisites for playing the game, but they do not measure playing ability.
As a result, drafts will continue to be crapshoots. The teams will continue paying the general managers or whoever is in charge of selecting the players, top dollars if they make fairly good guesses. This is truly amazing especially when viewed in relation to the importance of the players that they draft for the future success of the team.
For more on the professional sports world, read Sports: Is It All BS? For information on what it takes to be a top athlete, read Build a Better Athlete.