FanPost

Draft Grief: Positional Value Matters and Accepting My Cognitive Strain

Now that I’ve had a moment to grieve that the draft didn’t go as I had hoped; it’s time to write a long fan post again. Before I delve into everything, I’m going to be up front about some biases that I have, Eminem style, because knowing what perspective I’m writing from is important.

A) I was a sports fan before I was a Lions fan - I neither grew up in a city with a major sports franchise nor was raised by parents who were particular sports franchise fans. I enjoyed sports and eventually settled on the teams that I wanted to cheer for, but I enjoy sports as much for their own sake as I do for my team winning. Because of this, I tend not to see many things as much like a fan does as most fellow fans of my teams. For them, every decision is centered through their fandom. Either every move is good because that’s what they want to happen, and they’ll justify it that way, or every move is bad because their experience with the Lions has been bad, so that means they’re going to keep being bad forever. I would say I lean a little more positive than right down the middle, but I do tend to try my best to think of each team neutrally when evaluating them.

B) I watch sports to entertain me - And while winning is more entertaining than losing, there are different types of winning, and I enjoy certain types more. I like watching the best players play the best, especially when they are unique or new. This is not all of why, but it is certainly a small part of why I wanted the Lions to draft Anthony Richardson. Yes, I thought he would give the team a higher ceiling and eventually more wins, but even if the record with him and Goff were identical, I was going to enjoy watching Richardson and the way the team would win with Richardson more. To put it another way, if I could go back in time and switch my fandom to a team with a lot of success, I’d choose to be a Golden State Warriors fan over a New England Patriots fan. I like watching the Warriors play more than I like New England. I really like what the Dolphins are doing right now and am excited to see them again. And any team that thinks an off ball linebacker is worth the 18th overall pick is headed in a direction that will be less fun for me to watch, even if they win more.

C) I spent more time listening to podcasts, reading analysis, and watching game tape about the draft than I ever have - And in doing so, I developed an affection for certain players. We’ll get to the issue of "trust" later in the post, but I do, for instance, trust that Holmes and Campbell chose the right TE in Sam LaPorta for the Lions. But Darnell Washington was my guy, and I wanted to see him in Honolulu Blue. So even though they definitely know better than me whose personality and skill set is better suited to the team, I was still bummed. The curse of knowledge. Holmes is right when he said there's a cognitive strain associated with things not going the way they did in your head.

D) I didn’t play team sports growing up - So I’m likely missing out on some of the social elements, and my way in to sports was more of an aesthetic and intellectual appreciation. My username comes from Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, and I think sports at its best is innovative competitive dance. The competitive and dominating elements have always been less interesting to me than most sports fans (based on my anecdotal evidence).

So now you know me a little bit, I want to respond to a number of comments and questions I’ve seen built around defending the Lions’ draft which I personally think went against the numbers and historical precedent. I saw it as a draft that made high risk bets with low ceiling outcomes.

1. Positional Value isn’t real/it doesn’t matter.

You either don’t understand what it is, or are being simplistic or reactionary because it’s being levied as a complaint against the Lions/Brad Holmes. Why are the best QBs paid better than the best EDGE players who are paid better than the best Guards who are paid better than the best RBs? It’s because front offices and coaches determined both through experience and statistical analysis that those positions are more highly correlated to wins than the ones they pay less. Positional value is obviously real; it obviously does matter.

2. If Gibbs is CMC and Campbell is Kuechly, you won’t complain.

Correct. And if Christian Gonzalez and Nolan Smith were the picks and also were complete busts, I would complain. But we’re talking about the analysis that can be done before you see them on the field. And as mentioned above, you see positional value play out in the free market as well, EDGE gets paid more than off ball LB, WR gets paid more than RB on average. In other words, if NFL teams had a crystal ball to properly determine who would have what careers before the draft, great RBs would still be drafted after good EDGEs and Ts as well as functional QBs because RBs don’t increase the win likelihood as much as other positions.

3. Winning a Super Bowl is the goal, not obtaining surplus value.

There is a strong correlation between surplus value and winning the Super Bowl. You take that surplus value and you apply it to free agents and retaining your own higher value players. Say the Lions need a RB and an EDGE for the team in 2024. In both scenarios, they have $15m in cap space to spend on the player they didn’t draft. In the scenario where they took Nolan Smith or Lukas Van Ness (and he’s good), that $15m will be enough for them to sign Tony Pollard, Saquon Barkley, or Josh Jacobs–a top tier RB. In the scenario where they took Gibbs, that $15m gets someone like Alex Highsmith (maybe), a good player but not a top tier edge. The surplus value from hitting on a more valuable position allows them to get better players in free agency and field a better team.

4. If positional value is so important, why doesn’t every QB get drafted then every EDGE then every T then every WR and so on?

Because positional value is more like a modifier applied to a rating than a ranking to be followed irregardless of the player. I’m just making these numbers up, but based on salary, if the top QB is paid $50m, the top EDGE is paid $30m, and the top RB is paid $15m, then you’d apply a .6 to your EDGE grades and a .3 to your RB grades to compare across the three positions. That way you’re accounting for the correlation with winning for each position.

5. The goal is simply to get the best players on the field.

Yes, but you have to do it under the salary cap. You have to assemble the best team under a hard cap, and so you are fighting against that constantly. The best way to get the most good players is to have highly valued players on rookie contracts who would be worth more on the open market. The tier 1 rookie QB contract is of course the holy grail of team building, but Hutch and Penei are extremely valuable as well. When they get their second contracts, they will be in the $30m-$35m per year range in all likelihood, and the current savings on their contracts are part of what allows Holmes to sign Sutton, Moseley, CJGJ, etc.

6. The Lions had no needs at the high value positions, so taking low value positions was the only option left.

At best, they had no needs at those positions this year (and I would disagree there as well, WR and DT were still needs even with positive assumptions for the rest of the Lions’ roster). Three of their CBs are on one year deals. They’ll have a hole at G next year, possibly both sides. Even if Hutch and Houston continue to build on their excellent rookie seasons, the pass rush will be losing a lot of depth in the 2024 off-season. Goff is only signed through 2024. This also ignores the entropic nature of football and how what seems like a strength can become a weakness very quickly in the NFL. And finally, you don’t have to draft a player there. Draft capital can be traded for players or different draft capital. If the best player on your board is still a bad bet, make a different one.

7. It’s better to draft players who will play immediately than depth/future starters.

Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. It’s definitely better for next season to get immediate contributors. But it’s often worse for the long-term health of the franchise to do so. It’s not as if those players not taking snaps don’t have value. If they’re doing well in practice and in limited action, then the guys ahead of them can be traded, for instance. But my main issue with this is not a team at the end of a long string of success trying to get over the top before their players age out, nor did all of the moves make sense as 1-2 year "all-in" strategies. If that was the plan, why didn’t the Lions acquire more veterans like a Jalen Ramsey or DeAndre Hopkins? Why go back to the well of underpaying a good player coming off injury like Moseley which is a high variance move best suited for a rebuilding team?

8. Maybe those were the best guys on their board after adjusting for positional value/this was a bad draft class, so it pushes low value positions up the board.

The good thing about draft capital is that it is just a currency. If you have pick 12, and it’s time for pick 12, you don’t have to take the best player on your board. You can trade back and pick up more picks in lower rounds. You can use the pick to acquire a player from a different team. You can use it to acquire draft capital in future drafts that might be better. If it’s your turn to pick and taking a low value, historical outlier pick is your best option, try to turn that into something else. Didn’t the Jets desperately want a tackle? You couldn’t have gotten next year’s 3rd from them or better to move back to 15? There was a big run on WR’s from 20-23. Not a single one of those teams would have preferred another one or was worried about their guy getting taken? You couldn’t have moved back 4 spots for a future pick and then taken Jack Campbell?

9. Those players would’ve been taken if the Lions traded back or waited on them.

That’s fine. A bad bet doesn’t become a good bet because other teams want to make it too. I’m not in the camp of saying the Lions definitely could’ve gotten Gibbs at 18 or Campbell at 45. We don’t know what other teams’ boards were. We do know they were low value risky bets at those picks. Better to have waited and missed out on them and made better bets. And hey if they had still been there, obviously that would have been the perfect result.

10. If you re-arrange the players they took, you’d be happy with the draft if it went 12 Branch 18 Gibbs 34 Hooker 45 Campbell and 68 LaPorta.

Well, personally, I wouldn’t because I just didn’t like Campbell and Hooker as prospects, and I also think instead of having a few big reaches and 1-2 value picks, you just have a mild reach at each pick instead, so is that really better? But putting that all aside, the main problem with this argument is that it isn’t reality. If you could have had Lukas Van Ness at 12 and Deonte Banks at 18 and still had LaPorta, Branch, and Hooker… isn’t that better? The great value in day 2 picks doesn’t mean the day 1 picks weren’t low value picks. In fact, it’s almost more disappointing when you think of what this draft haul could’ve looked like.

11. Don’t you trust Brad Holmes?

Apparently in the past I’ve said that I do, but now forced to evaluate it more closely, I think trust is an odd word to use when applied to the GM of my favorite football team. Brad Holmes has made more good moves than bad ones, and he has built a good football team. But also most of the good football moves he made are ones that I approved of at the time, so…? He was doing the kinds of things I think a GM should do, and it turned out well, and now he’s doing things I think a GM shouldn’t do. He knows more than me, and it could easily turn out well again. He didn’t really earn my trust though; he just was acting in a manner that aligned with what I think good GMing is, and it was working. Anyway, if you’re going to evaluate a football team, trust shouldn’t be part of the equation. Most importantly though, the thing I’ve always complained about with Holmes is that he doesn’t value draft capital as highly as I think he should. The Barnes, Benson, and Jamo trades are all moves I was skeptical of at the time, and while I thought he cared more about positional value than he obviously does, Gibbs and Campbell (as well as all the trades to move around day 2) highlights that this is still something I’m wary of him doing. It hasn’t really bitten him yet, but it’s historically been a bad idea, so unless Holmes is singular among GM’s, I believe it will go badly for him at some point (if it hasn’t already).

12. Jahmyr Gibbs isn’t a RB, he’s a weapon, he’s our Deebo, you shouldn’t apply the standard RB positional value to him.

He’s an RB. And the way I know he is is because his agent and him didn’t fight tooth and nail for him to be exclusively a slot WR in college. Because WRs play longer and get bigger contracts, every RB who can catch would be one if they could, but they can’t. The move for the NFL may eventually be positionless football, but right now Deebo and CMC are outliers. Every other example is typically a low value touch. Are we that confident Gibbs is number three on this list and not another Percy Harvin or Cordarelle Patterson?

13. The Lions are a better football team post draft than they were before, so be happy.

Well, first off I’m not exactly unhappy. I still think the Lions are the best team in the division. I still think they should be favored to make the playoffs. But the vast majority of teams and fanbases say this to themselves after every off-season. If a team isn’t facing cap hell and having to cut/trade a lot of talent, they’re all gonna believe they’re better but most won’t be. But also the complaint wasn’t that they didn’t get better, but well, the best way to put it is the Lions went into the draft with the 3rd most draft capital and came out with the 9th best draft class (according to Dane Brugler at the Athletic). You would hope with the 3rd most draft capital that you’d have the 3rd best class or better…you know?

Some final thoughts, I think the major difference between how I feel and how some others feel is that they think at a certain point a football team is a completed project, so not unlike a house. If you have the foundation and plumbing and electric all in place and working, it’s fine to spend a bunch of money on the nice windows you want to make it the house of your dreams. All that other stuff is done. But football teams aren’t like that, they’re never complete. Places of strength turn into places of weakness overnight, so the best strategy tends to be to make high floor bets with high surplus probabilities over and over again. It’s like spending your entire budget on windows when the foundation can crumble at any point, when the electric work can electrocute you if you don’t keep it updated. If all the Lions improve upon their performance last year, and the injured players come back fully healthy, and they don’t suffer any new significant injuries, then everyone who loves this draft will be right. If Vaitai and Levi aren’t going to be meaningful contributors again, well then we might really regret passing on Keanu Benton, Jalen Carter, Peter Skoronski, and/or Steve Avila. If Moseley needs more than a year to recover, we might have really liked having Christian Gonzalez, Emmanuel Forbes, or Deonte Banks. If James Houston was a one year wonder, Tyree Wilson could’ve been a perfect complement to Hutch.

I also think the draft is much more heavily a crapshoot than people think it is. Time and time again, we see GMs become well regarded because they have a good or great draft class or two and then, they’re wandering the desert. They’re John Schneider going from building the best team of my lifetime to not being able to buy a valuable player for 6 straight drafts. There’s a lack of humility in thinking you’ve got the draft beat and breaking from what the numbers say you should do. The house, or in this case the draft, always wins. Like someone else said, it’s not that going all in on 7-2 off suit pre flop can’t win, it’s just that it’s unlikely to win. It can be a good strategy in very specific scenarios, but generally, you’ll go bankrupt quickly if you do that a lot.

After some bad feelings though, I’m back to being excited to see this team play. Even if I think they took Gibbs too high, he is a dynamic player, and I’m excited to see how Ben Johnson utilizes him. Perhaps by the time the season rolls around, I’ll be excited for Campbell and Hooker too. But for now, let’s put an end to the positional value argument. The people who are aligning against it are tilting against windmills or creating strawmen to joust with. Positional value is real, and it’s useful, just sometimes your scouting will still say a position of low value player has more value than a position of high value player. If Holmes and the rest of the Lions’ front office are ignoring it altogether, well, in the long run, things won’t work out so well for the Lions.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pride Of Detroit or its writers.