Posts tagged Futures at Football Outsiders

Futures: My Expansion Franchise

April 23, 2014 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft

Welcome to my lab where will I concoct a winning franchise. Photo by the state of Victoria.

You’ve just been awarded an NFL expansion team and must build your personnel department. Go.

Futures: My Expansion Franchise

By Matt Waldman

When the writer of Smartfootball.com suggests that, “you should storify that series of tweets,” it’s a take on a subject worth further exploration. The topic came courtesy of Luke Easterling (@NFLDraftReport) who, on Sunday night, posed the following scenario on Twitter: “You’ve just been awarded an NFL expansion team and must build your personnel department from Draft-Twitter. Go.”

I gave my list of NFL writers, former scouts, consultants, and analysts that I’d use to build my organization, but what was more compelling to Twitter was the way I structured the jobs. My vision for team-building a front office and scouting department got a lot of positive response.

More than anything, I believe the way the Twitter community responded to my approach has to do with the fact that a lot of my audience is football writers and diehard fans who are critical of the NFL’s approach to managing its own. They’re ready to welcome a different vision.

Some of my plans aren’t unique to the NFL. There are teams that at least have an aligned vision from its ownership to its coaching staff. However, the way I’d create and continuously strengthen that alignment is a departure from the league.

I believe in the merit of my ideas, but I’m not dreaming of the day I win multiple Powerballs or inherit billions. Unless an NFL owner is alright with me reporting to work in jeans and sporting my collection of hats and caps, the likelihood of me becoming a GM went from infinitesimally small to impossible.

Then again, there have been requests for my consultation on prospect evaluation that I didn’t intend when began the Rookie Scouting Portfolio in 2006, so you never really know. Maybe my buddy Sigmund Bloom manages to raise $50 from the 20 million NFL fans around the world on Kickstarter and we’re in business. Until then, let’s call this a (hopefully) entertaining football and management exercise.

First, a couple of assumptions we need to get out of the way. If I was awarded an NFL franchise I would have done three things—among others—before I even applied for the rights to an expansion team:

A 10, 15, and 20-year cost analysis of owning a team based on my vision.
Studied the details of the city of Green Bay’s ownership of the Packers and formulated a 15-year plan to transition the team to a non-profit corporation owned by its fans (one person can own no more than 200,000 shares of its stock).
Determined the efficacy of current personnel and front office roles within most NFL organizations

The next step is building an organizational structure. There are several things that I’d do that due to time and space limitations, I won’t get into, but here are the highlights of how I’d implement a vision to build a brain trust responsible for evaluating, acquiring, managing, and developing talent on and off the field.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders.

Futures: Alabama MLB C.J. Mosely

April 16, 2014 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Players

Seeking an lesson in playing middle linebacker? C.J. Mosely’s game is instructive.

Futures: Alabama MLB C.J. Mosely

By Matt Waldman

He can’t catch, he’s had numerous injuries, and a well-executed read-option keeper can trip him up. But if these are the only damning aspects to middle linebacker C.J. Mosely’s game, and his injuries don’t present a long-term concern, there aren’t 10 players in this class I want more.

Mosely’s game is instructive to playing middle linebacker:

Addressing run gaps to help teammates
Beating lead blockers and attacking the ball carrier
Strong pass coverage—man and zone
Making good pre-snap diagnosis
Finishing plays

He’s not the best middle linebacker you’ll ever see, but the Alabama defender should become a stalwart for an effective NFL unit. The more I study middle linebackers, the more I see the commonalities between them and their natural adversary the running back.

I have always ascribed multiple definitions for a running back’s vision:

The patience to allow the play to develop as close as possible to its design.
The skill to find and anticipate the creases as they open.
The ability to see and set up unblocked defenders at the other side of these creases.
The peripheral vision and/or understanding of the opponents’ tendencies to identify the cutback lanes and the timing to exploit them.
The judgment to know when to be patient and when to be decisive.
The maturity to understand when to resist the urge for the big play in lieu of the short, punishing play that moves the chains.

The last two are of monumental importance if a runner wants to succeed in the NFL. And in many ways, all of these points of vision apply to a good middle linebacker like Mosely. Read the rest at Football Outsiders.

Scouting QBs: Separating the Dark From the Dark

March 5, 2014 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Matt Waldman, Players, Quarterback

Being wrong about Gabbert far hurts the ego, but helps my process. Photo by PDA.Photo.

After spending an insane amount of time during the last decade studying players, talking with scouts, and paying attention to history, I have learned three things about evaluating football talent:

Scouting and quarterbacking are about detail and nuance.
Experience matters, but not like you think.
Quarterback remains the untamed wilderness of football evaluation.

These are my personal lessons. No one shared these three points as teachable nuggets from the book of scouting. The last two insights are unintended consequences of professionals making opposite statements.

After 10 years of studying football games, I have gained enough experience to see that I’m not an expert. As the great poet Philip Levine wrote, I’ve “begun to separate the dark from the dark.”

Today, I’m sharing these degrees of darkness about scouting quarterbacks. The hope is that separating the dark from the dark may one day provide a process that is a more reliable way to find the light.

Detail and Nuance

During one of our frequent phone conversations, Footballguys.com co-owner Sigmund Bloom and I concluded that the simplest way to describe good quarterbacking is to compare it to another job. Cooks and musicians offer good parallels, but the best is that of a skilled craftsman.

I used to build sets at a theater. I learned how to use a wide variety of tools. I even gained some welding experience.

Give me directions and materials and a garage full of tools and I can assemble something bought at a store after I’ve taken it apart at least once. But I’m not the guy you want to help you with a home improvement project or a repair. Unless it’s the simplest of tasks, I’d be pulled from the job within an hour.

On the other hand, give my wife Alicia a small toolbox with half the tools and she’ll not only have the job completed with time to spare, she’ll also have spotted and addressed two other problems around your house that you didn’t know about. She didn’t start working on houses until her early 30s, but within three years she owned her own remodeling company and did everything but electric and plumbing.

You need tools to do a job, but nuance to do the job well. I had all the tools, but none of the nuance. Alicia had half the tools and a ton of nuance.

Good quarterbacking is craftsmanship. There are a basic minimum of tools (details) to complete the job: height, weight, speed, arm strength, accuracy, etc. However the craftsman integrates the tools, his knowledge, and his experience to execute at the highest level of performance.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders

Futures: Florida State WR Rashad Greene

October 12, 2013 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Matt Waldman

When I watch FSU WR Rashad Greene, I see shades of Desean Jackson's game. Photo by Avinashkunnath. — When I watch FSU WR Rashad Greene, I see shades of Desean Jackson’s game. Photo by Avinashkunnath.

Futures: Florida State WR Rashad Greene

By Matt Waldman

When it comes to workouts, interviews, and background investigations, I have nothing on the NFL. I’m just like everyone else; I’m waiting to hear the outcomes of whatever the league shares with the public. But after speaking with former and current scouts, I can say with confidence that the NFL has nothing on me when it comes to my process for evaluating on-field performance.

It sounds a lot like I’m saying that I know more about football than NFL scouts and front offices, but what I mean is that I believe I have a process that does a better job of helping an evaluator structure his thinking and get out of his own way. I’ve seen scouting reports from the National Scouting Service as well as reports form NFL teams. Based on the structure of their reporting, many teams don’t realize that their methodology often gets in the way of their collective knowledge.

They don’t have a written working definition for every positional technique they observe. They don’t possess a weighted score assigned to each. And they don’t categorize and define the level of difficulty to improve skills as a player transitions to the NFL.

I know of an NFL player-personnel man borrowing some of my ideas to incorporate into his team’s scouting processes. This is because the things I described eliminate some of the inherent variation that exists among scouts and management. But this type of change in thinking is a slow sell compared to upgrading technology that allows them to do the same things they’ve been doing for 50 years – only with greater speed and convenience.

While I believe my process is a good start towards a consistent approach when evaluating players, at the end of the day there’s no denying that scouting talent is a subjective process. Subjectivity can be a bad word – especially for a site like Football Outsiders, which strives to use data to arrive at insights that provide a counterpoint to fallacies stemming from what we observe on a qualitative level. However, I doubt anyone writing for this site would say all subjective analysis is bad.

I believe in the power of intuition. Some of you who lean hard on black and white thinking may be turned off to that idea. The idea that intuition is a bodily indicator based on factors we cannot fully explain (yet) is hogwash. I can’t help you there – you feel similar about it or you don’t.

When I evaluate a player and his performance evokes a feeling that I attribute to intuition, I accept that feeling. It doesn’t mean that I ignore my scouting process or change my outcomes, but I have learned to pay attention to those emotions.

Sometimes what resonates when I watch a player is something that is a part of my everyday life: I’m a magnet for the troubled. I’ve learned how to see it coming in life, but in football, I am still learning that many players I have a strong feeling about are prospects carrying a lot of off-field baggage that bleeds into their professional lives.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders.

Futures at Football Outsiders: Texas A&M QB Johnny Manziel

September 28, 2013 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Players, Quarterback

Manziel epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of a creative manager. See below. Photo by Matt Velazquez.

Futures: Texas A&M QB Johnny Manziel

by Matt Waldman

Management Style and Quarterbacking

In last week’s Futures on Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray, I described quarterbacking styles within the context of task-oriented management and creative management. Be it a white-collar, blue-collar, or athletic career, these are two basic ends of the spectrum when talking about management styles.

Task-oriented managers love the routine and rhythm of a predictable, reliable process. As they acquire more experience, a high-functioning, task-oriented manager knows the boundaries of his processes so well that he’ll often appear far more spontaneous to a wide range of problems than he is.

Matt Ryan and Tom Brady are perfect examples of high-functioning, task-oriented quarterbacks. They know every detail of what’s supposed to be happening in their environment and control it so well that they can anticipate most things that defenses will attempt to wreck an offense’s performance. When their teammates are playing efficiently, they appear far more creative than they are because their level of preparation helps them develop processes to avoid the same major issues that confound less experienced passers.

I mentioned Peyton Manning and Drew Brees as task-oriented quarterbacks last week, but I’m having second thoughts. It’s not an exaggeration that Manning is a coach on the field. I’ve talked to a former Colts player who has played with three other teams and he affirms that Manning is unique in this regard. His intelligence and preparation might exceed every other quarterback who has ever played the game.

This gives Manning a much wider box of operation than any quarterback in the game, regardless of style. His creativity comes in the strategic aspects of the game, but it’s rooted in having a fantastic memory and method of preparation. Last year ESPN ran a story about Manning contacting a former staffer with Tennessee to help him find tape of a play that he remembered was successful. Manning implemented it successfully as a red-zone call during the season.

If I had to make a final call, I’d stick with the task-oriented label for Manning. I’m not as certain about Brees.

I wonder if Brees is that rare individual who balances both worlds of task-oriented preparation and creative and intuitive problem solving when it’s time to perform. While the Saints quarterback is obsessive to the point that the smallest details of his workout routines don’t change –- to the point that teammates have to cut short what they’re doing to accommodate their quarterback — I’ve also seen Brees create when form and function go out the window and he does it as well as many of the quarterbacks on the far end of the creative spectrum.

I believe Russell Wilson is also one of those players. His task-oriented skills are strong. When he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin he learned the Badgers system -– a more task-oriented, rhythm based, West Coast offense –- in record time. His preparation was so strong that he not only earned the starting job without contest, he was also voted team captain.

But it was his play in North Carolina State’s offense for three years that impressed me the more than he did at Wisconsin. Wilson had to merge his understanding and execution of the offensive system’s process with his athleticism and creativity. He made off-balanced throws with anticipation and accuracy against blitzes that generally fluster most task-oriented passers. He could buy time, keep his head about him, and create productive results when the plays broke down beyond all sense of recognition.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders

Futures: Why Scouting Gets a Bum Rap – A Front Office Overhaul

April 17, 2013 0 Comments read Matt Waldman

It's time to take front offices to the Wood Shed. No beatings though. Photo by Richard Elzey. — It’s time to take front offices to the wood shed. No beatings though. Photo by Richard Elzey.

Scouting gets a bum rap.

“Of course Waldman would say this,” you proclaim. “He’s a scout!”

I may perform the fundamental role of one, but I am not a scout. This elicits laughter from my friend Ryan Riddle. The Bleacher Report columnist who holds Cal’s single season sack record and played with the Raiders, Ravens, and Jets says I have a misplaced sense of honor when it comes to refusing to wear that label.

I prefer talent evaluator, tape watcher, tapehound, or tapehead. My friends – if I have any left since I started doing this work eight years ago – might say ‘Film Hermit’ is the best fit. I’ve never worked for an NFL team, so these names seem more suitable to me. Scouts have responsibilities that I don’t – among them is reporting to management within a company structure.

If you have the chance to learn about the pre-draft process for most NFL teams, scouting is the study of a player’s positive and negative characteristics. It’s also an evaluation of how easy it is to fix the player’s issues and his potential fit within a team system. But based on what former scouts, coaches, and general managers of NFL teams say about the machinations that go into a team’s draft, I am thankful that I am not a scout.

While fans and writers may take the lazy route and blame picks gone wrong on poor scouting, it’s the general manager, coach, and owner who hold the weight of the decision-making power. This is a huge reason why scouting gets a bum rap.

To take it a step further, I’ll advance the popular Bill Parcells analogy of ‘buying the groceries.’ I can spend months in the grocery store and tell you that it has quality cuts of grass-fed steak; a delicious, rosemary batard baked in-house; and every variety of apple found in North America. But if those holding the wallet or cooking the food demand a papaya, I can tell them until I’m blue in the face that if they want a good one, it’s only found in Jamaica and they’re still going to pick an unripe one, take it home, prepare it, and then watch it spoil the meal.

It doesn’t help matters when I have to read Mike Tanier describe draft analysis as a pseudoscience. He’s right for the wrong reasons. Scouting is a craft, not a science. However, teams haven’t made it the same priority to address opportunities to improve scouting the way they have upgraded technology and embraced other forms of analysis.

With all the advances that the NFL has made with equipment, strategy, cap management, and technology, they haven’t done enough to advance the process of talent evaluation. It shouldn’t the sports equivalent of Madam Zora’s, but until teams address the problems, Tanier gets to write entertaining draft pieces at their expense.

I think there is a lot that teams can do to improve their talent evaluation processes. What I will propose here are things I’ve learned from my experience in operations and process improvement. I base my solutions on problems I’ve gleaned in conversations with former scouts, reading and listening to former NFL general managers talk about their past roles, and extensive study of college prospects for the past eight years.

Some of these ideas may be new to the NFL, but I don’t begin to think they are revolutionary in the scope of other industries. I’m sharing these things because it’s too easy to listen to a gray-haired man in a suit on a television network and take what he says as gospel – especially processes that are in fact fundamentally flawed and then perpetuated from generation to generation of football men.

When viewing NFL front offices and how they cope with change, I get the impression that many of them have a buttoned-up, low-risk culture similar in dynamic to Wall Street. It also takes a lot for newer ideas to take hold in an NFL front office as it does for an investment bank to accept “new blood” from a business school lacking a history of established connections with the firm as a personnel pipeline.

Some of what I’ll suggest is not even about new ideas; just better implementation of old concepts. The first point below is a good example where leaders tend to talk the talk better than they walk it.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders.

Futures: DE’s Bjoern Werner and Damontre Moore

February 20, 2013 0 Comments read Players

As a football fan, odds are high that you at least had a brief love affair with professional wrestling. Mine lingered a while. It was an obsession lasting long enough that when I think of defensive ends, they remind me of the ultimate “heels” from professional wrestling promotions: big, bad, freakish athletes capable of putting an end to their opponents with one swift and powerful move.

It’s no coincidence that Bruiser Brody and Superstar Billy Graham, who starred as collegiate defensive ends — and had brief NFL careers — fit the mold perfectly. This is because defensive ends embody the essence of what it means to be the “heel.” They’re the opponents you love to hate and secretly want to cheer. It’s the feeling that you’re doing something wrong, which is what also makes it so right.

Florida State’s Bjoern Werner and Texas A&M’s Damontre Moore are two collegiate defensive ends in this draft with the potential to join the ranks of NFL heels. Both juniors are in the range of 6-foot-4 and 260 pounds, both are early-round prospects noted for their athleticism, and both possess the upside to develop into technically capable 4-3 pass rushers and run defenders.

Although regarded among many as one-two in this class of defensive ends, the difference in potential is starker than their standing in most pre-draft positional rankings. The similarities these players share with physical dimensions, roles in scheme, and pre-draft grades also make it worthwhile to profile these two ends side-by-side.

Moore has all the physical traits to develop into an NFL starter, but I prefer both Werner’s current skill and his future upside. Werner can become a special player, and I think it becomes more apparent when using Moore as a foil for comparison.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders