S197 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 6:22 pm
fiestavike wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:37 pm
For sure, I understand you weren't talking about Simpson exclusively. I would say my same question applies to Kindley, Stenber and Dotson, etc collectively and individually.
I have not problem with anyone saying, I think X was a better pick than Y, but that seems to be the relevant point in regards to criticizing a GM. Saying, "I don't like trading back" assumes that the GM lost a player he valued more by trading back, which I would say is VERY unlikely. GMs grade in tiers, and rick isn't trading back 5 spaces unless he liked at least 5 players at the same level, or feels very confident the (let's say) 3 players he likes equally won't all be taken by the 5 teams in front of him given team needs, etc.
Basically, the criticism of trading back is based on an absurd notion that the GM would take the player the fan ranks higher, and, rest assured, he almost certainly wouldn't, else he would have selected him.
It's possible the guard tier was depleted in his mind by the end of the 3rd round. Although I don't think Rick is as "slick" in the draft as a lot of people give him credit for. And we have a couple of known examples.
The first is the Mike Hughes draft where they passed on a guard. And didn't proceed to draft one until the 6th round (Rick and those similarities again!). We know from post-draft comments that they had a number of guards in a similar tier but chose to pass thinking one would be around in the 2nd. Instead there was a run on guards and they missed out on all of them.
We know from this draft that they were looking to trade up for Jefferson, which turns out would have been a total waste. Now, that's hindsight but the fact still remains that they misread the board. Was Jefferson really in a tier all his own on their board? We'll never know but this was a really good WR class and it seems unlikely.
Then there is the trade back with SF, which on a purely quantitative measure (aka the "chart") wasn't very good value.
So we can sit and speculate and ultimately we don't really know what went on in that war room but it's not like Rick has played each draft amazingly and mistake free. He's yet to put together an offensive line in the last 10 years that quite frankly, hasn't looked offensive. Criticism is justified in my book.
If you want to point to the Hughes draft critically, that's good with me. They gambled that a guard would be there and lost. The board did not fall the way they predicted, and perhaps they wound up the worse for it.
I have no problem criticizing Spielman and co for undervaluing interior OL or QB as a general rule. Nor, as I said, do I object to criticizing them on their evaluations. All I'm saying is that the criticism of the trade back carries with it a logical fallacy, that the Vikings would have selected whoever the fan thinks would be better (or that the player selected at say 25 instead of 31 is necessarily going to be in a higher tier).
With regard to Jefferson, if the Vikings were looking at trading up, its probably because they thought the tier that he was in would be depleted by the time it reached 22. I don't know if he was in a tier with Lamb, Jeudy, etc, or if he was in a tier with Reagor. In any case if they were looking to trade up, it only makes sense if it was for THE TIER, and not for the individual player. Furthermore, I really hope my favorite team isn't basing their evaluations off of what Daniel Jeremiah and the NFL network put on their big board, because if DJ was so great, he'd be working for an NFL team, and I want my team and its scouts to make their own evaluations. I'm happy to disagree with those evaluations, but I would only really be alarmed if their evaluations proved to be far worse than the league 'standard', or if they disregarded their OWN evaluation in favor of those found on the NFL network and various draft sites. I really find criticizing them for playing the board, their evaluations, their tiers, to be deeply logically flawed when its based on the assumption that they should or would have taken player x (or players X, Y, and Z) instead of the guy they took 15 picks later. They probably wouldn't have.