Bracie Smathers
Footballguy
Chip Kelly has had this stance for awhile so no one should link the recent suspension of his first NFL pick from last year, OT Lane Johnson, to this story. Also Kelly signed free agent QB Mark Sanchez who was a top pick and had a ton of hype/pressure on him and he crumbled.
I thinks its safe to say that most NFL fans love the draft but it the hype diminishes coaching/organization/ownership and other factors play roles in the success or failure of a team.
Their is a huge disconnect with the hype and build-up to the NFL draft and the return on the emotional investment. Their is an undeniable impact on a team's succss/failure due to the success/failure of their drafts but how much?
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/29/kelly-elaborates-on-his-disdain-for-draft-hype/
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/28/chip-kelly-draft-hype-is-worst-thing-about-the-nfl/
It would be fantastic to accumulate the hard numbers of top picks, who makes it or of the busts.
That data have to show over time of two or three years of drafts to connect how drafted prospects translate into team sucess and on the opposite coin what if the players don't pan out, how does that add to failure if a team drafts busts?
Basically Chip Kelly's statements have a bottom line. How valueable is the draft to determing team success?
I thinks its safe to say that most NFL fans love the draft but it the hype diminishes coaching/organization/ownership and other factors play roles in the success or failure of a team.
Their is a huge disconnect with the hype and build-up to the NFL draft and the return on the emotional investment. Their is an undeniable impact on a team's succss/failure due to the success/failure of their drafts but how much?
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/29/kelly-elaborates-on-his-disdain-for-draft-hype/
The above is an elaboration on what he said the day prior, that the NFL draft HYPE is the worst thing about the NFL.Kelly elaborates on his disdain for draft hypePosted by Mike Florio on July 29, 2014, 8:21 AM EDT
Unlike most of his peers, Eagles coach Chip Kelly is willing to pull the curtain back on the draft process and admit that it’s more blind luck than science.
“You don’t know how it’s going to pan out,” Kelly said the morning after round one of the 2014 draft. “Just going through the analytics of it, 50 percent of first-round picks don’t make it. That’s through the history of time.”
More recently, Kelly bemoaned the hype around the draft, which is driven in large part by the ever-growing draft-expert machine. Apart from the fact that the draft experts never acknowledge that half the prospects bust and that we don’t know and won’t know who they are until they’re in the NFL, Kelly believes that, for some guys, the hype makes it harder to not be a bust.
“I think a lot of times the hype turns into really, really hard times for the individual who got picked, because there’s so many expectations of everyone building them up to be Superman because they had three months to write about them and talk about them,” Kelly told Peter King.
Kelly was asked to elaborate on his point during a Monday press conference, specifically as it relates to the hype surrounding second-round receiver Jordan Matthews. While Kelly said he’s not concerned about the talk regarding Matthews, who already has been compared to Terrell Owens, Kelly explained his position on draft hype generally.
“I think the draft is integral obviously with putting together your team but literally from the day the Super Bowl ends until the draft, at the ending of May, or the beginning of June or maybe push it to July at some point in time; that’s all everybody talks about,” Kelly said. “I felt the same way in college. You devote everything to the signing day.
Well, how many of those guys on the signing day are actually going to contribute? You may have one or two of your rookies that have an impact on your team but the rest of them it’s a part of having them develop. .
. .
“The fact that people would watch the Combine; there’s times at the Combine where I fall asleep,” Kelly added. “So I don’t know why people watch it on television. They are running 40‑yard dashes.”
Kelly then reiterated his comparison of the draft-hype dynamic to other industries.
“[Y]ou guys are in the newspaper business,” Kelly said. “If someone is a rookie coming into the newspaper thing, I don’t think you all just start applauding and saying, ‘Oh my God, the savior is here and our paper is safe because we just signed a kid out of Northwestern because the kid has really good prose.’ But in football it seems to be the biggest deal in the world and if a guy is not an All‑Pro in his first year but he was drafted in the first five picks, obviously he’s a bust.”
Kelly is right. But what he didn’t say is that the NFL ultimately stirs the draft-hype drink via a TV and online media machine that no one will pay attention to if it’s not generating content.
I’m not complaining. We cover the draft and the hype and everything that goes along with it. But we’re always honest about the fact that there’s a disconnect between the impression that the draft experts have it all figured out and the reality that no one does.
Still, if the NFL or the rest of the draft-expert industry would use slogans like “Tune in for the crapshoot” in the ads and promos, fans eventually would ask, “Why am I watching?”
“Because it’s on TV” would only work for so long.
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/28/chip-kelly-draft-hype-is-worst-thing-about-the-nfl/
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/05/09/chip-kelly-gets-pragmatic-about-the-draft/Chip Kelly: Draft hype is worst thing about the NFLPosted by Josh Alper on July 28, 2014, 11:10 AM EDT
There’s no question that the NFL loves the draft and all they hype that goes along with it.
They’ve added days to the process, moved it to prime time and pushed it further back in the calendar to expand the amount of eyes taking in the move from college to the pros for the top prospects in the land. They spend plenty of time and money to promote the event each year and get even more free publicity from around the country as mock drafts and draftniks help whet everyone’s appetite for the selections, a hyperbolic process that inevitably leads to huge expectations for players a few years removed from high school.
Eagles coach Chip Kelly has gone through the process twice on the NFL side and he doesn’t share the league’s fondness for the event.
“What’s the worst thing about the league? I said the draft. I mean, the hype that goes into the draft is insane.
Totally insane,” Kelly said, via Peter King of TheMMQB.com. “The biggest thing for me is that everybody thinks whoever you drafted or whoever you signed is now gonna be a savior. They come in just like me and you come in as freshmen in high school or freshmen in college, or your first year on the job at Sports Illustrated — you’re not telling people what to do, you’re just trying to figure out what room to go to.”
“I think a lot of times the hype turns into really, really hard times for the individual who got picked, because there’s so many expectations of everyone building them up to be Superman because they had three months to write about them and talk about them. Then when they get picked, they’re a very, very good prospect, but there’s a learning curve when you go from any job out of college into a company. If you take a job at Wells Fargo when you get out of college, your first day of the job they don’t say, ‘
He’s our first-round draft pick, he’s the savior to the company!'”
Kelly went on to add the NFLPA’s Rookie Premiere event, post-draft grades and just about everything short of the food in the Eagles’ war room onto the list of things he doesn’t like about the draft process. Kelly’s either going to have to grin and bear it or find somewhere else to coach, though.
While the draft came into existence as a way for teams to add young players to their rosters, it has gradually become a television show devoted to promoting the league and a new crop of future stars. That creates an industry for people trying to make it seem like there’s a science, rather than educated guessing, to picking 21-year-olds who will become great 26-year-old football players and a message that the moves made over seven rounds in the spring can profoundly change the fortunes of a team in the fall.
With those conditions in place, hype is an unavoidable byproduct and it is one that isn’t going anywhere.
Chip Kelly adds more creedence than others since he has consistently bashed the hype and although his drafts haven't been stellar or horrible he took a team with a bad record and turned it around in one year without a huge influx of rookies taken in the draft so their are other factors.Chip Kelly gets pragmatic about the draftPosted by Mike Florio on May 9, 2014, 10:41 PM EDT
I don’t know Eagles coach Chip Kelly very well, but I like him. I like him in part because he’s willing to explain things for what they are, not for what anyone wants us to think them to be.
When it comes to the draft, Kelly has pulled back the curtain on the notion, as perpetrated by the media draft machine, that there’s some sort of code that magically can be cracked. There’s not; it’s all a crapshoot and anyone who tries to tell the audience otherwise is dumb or lying.
“You don’t know how it’s going to pan out,” Kelly said Friday when discussing his team’s first-round pick, linebacker Marcus Smith, via CSNPhilly.com. “Just going through the analytics of it, 50 percent of first-round picks don’t make it. That’s through the history of time.”
With all due respect to the efforts of draft experts (real or self-titled) to make the process into something that can be figured out, Kelly realizes that the process is inherently impossible to solve.
“When you draft someone in the sixth round and you say, ‘Hey, we got a steal,’ my first question is, why didn’t you take him in the fifth, then?” Kelly said. “If you’re so smart and you knew what you knew and you knew everything about the draft and you knew the guy was going to be an All-Pro — the people who brag about, ‘We got a sixth-round pick and he became an All-Pro player’ — then the first question is, well why didn’t you draft him earlier if you were so smart? A lot of times you don’t know.”
That logic can be used against plenty of teams, including the Eagles themselves. Last year, when quarterback Nick Foles developed into an unlikely star after being a third-round pick in 2012, G.M. Howie Roseman explained what the Eagles saw at him.
So why didn’t they take him in the first or second round then? If they’re so smart and they knew what they knew and they knew everything about the draft and they knew the guy was going to be an All-Pro, then the first question is, well why didn’t they draft him earlier if they were so smart?
In an industry where people have a clear motivation to make things so much more complicated than they really are, Kelly keeps it simple. It’s refreshing and it’s authentic and it’s honest.
No one knows what a college football player will do in the NFL until he’s in the NFL. And many factors influence the outcome, from the player’s ability to overcome physical and mental adversity to the player’s work ethic to the player’s character to the team’s coaching staff to the team’s resources for developing players to the other players on the team to the systems used.
But if enough people understood that, the draft wouldn’t be viewed as a mountain that fans can climb with the assistance of the Sherpas who are paid to talk incessantly about prospects for five months. And plenty of those guys would have to find work that actually carries with it accountability for being flat-out wrong.
It would be fantastic to accumulate the hard numbers of top picks, who makes it or of the busts.
That data have to show over time of two or three years of drafts to connect how drafted prospects translate into team sucess and on the opposite coin what if the players don't pan out, how does that add to failure if a team drafts busts?
Basically Chip Kelly's statements have a bottom line. How valueable is the draft to determing team success?