Posts tagged Futures

Futures: Texas Tech TE Jace Amaro

December 28, 2013 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Players, Tight End

Jace Amaro has the physical skills and baseline football acumen to generate talk that he’s a future Jason Witten

Futures: Texas Tech TE Jace Amaro

by Matt Waldman

The best NFL teams possess three characteristics on the field: resiliency, intimidation, and explosiveness. Two are psychological and one is physical. All three are methods of managing the most pervasive elemental force in football: punishment.

Be it physical, mental, or emotional, or how a player takes it, inflicts it, or avoids it, punishment is a bellwether for success in the NFL. Name a good pro player or prospect and his game is an individual expression of how he arrived at slowing the cumulative effects of punishment on his body, mind, and psyche while redirecting it to his opponent.

On the football field, Jace Amaro is a powerful and explosive athlete whose size, strength, and speed can intimidate opponents. A unanimous first-team All-American and one of the two best prospects at the tight end position eligible for the 2014 NFL Draft, the 6-foot-5, 260-pound Amaro is a complete player with the upside to develop into an All-Pro with similar strengths as Dallas Cowboys tight end Jason Witten.

Click here to read the rest at Football Outsiders

Futures – Intuition and Process: FSU RB Karlos Williams

December 15, 2013 0 Comments read 2014 NFL Draft, Players, Running Back

Predictably, Peterson was the type of player that could trigger your intuition with one play. But there are many others who do the same. Photo by xoque.

Futures: FSU RB Karlos Williams

by Matt Waldman

People love the idea of being one step ahead of everyone else. It’s why the question, “Who is a player you like in next year’s draft?” is one of the most common I receive.

I spend so much time studying the prospects most likely to declare for this year’s draft that I’m not devoting in-depth analysis to next year’s guys. I get why people want to know and I respect the curiosity, but I dislike this question.

My work is about intuition and process. The longer I do this work, the more I believe in striving for a balance between listening to that inner voice and still honoring the value of a process.

Sometimes you know the first time you lay eyes on a person that there’s something special there. I knew it the first time I saw Alicia Johnson. After our first conversation, I had this feeling of absolute certainty that I just met my future wife.

It was a beautiful moment that was equally terrifying. And why wouldn’t it be? If you have any shred of logic in your being, the idea of knowing something as a fact without having conscious knowledge of the facts is unsettling no matter how many times it occurs during your life.

But there’s a difference between crazy and stupid, so I dated Alicia 13 months before proposing marriage. I needed to know that this “certainty” I was experiencing wouldn’t reveal itself as temporary infatuation. I wanted to make sure that flash of knowledge was illuminating the true dynamics of our relationship and not blinding it.

I may be crazy, but I try to avoid stupidity when at all possible. While I fail often in this regard, marrying Alicia was one of the smartest decisions I’ve made in my life. We have been married four years and the love and underlying certainty that I felt on that first day I met her has never wavered.

I share this Hallmark moment because there are occasions where I have felt that same jolt of certainty when watching football players. Although the implications of meeting the love of your life and identifying a talented college prospect are quite different, that feeling of certainty about a player despite limited exposure to his game is often unsettling. 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: Unknown, Unsung, and Underappreciated

April 3, 2013 0 Comments read Matt Waldman

There's a player in this draft who reminds me of Cruz in the sense that he's an unknown and underrated. Photo by Football Schedule. — There’s a player in this draft who reminds me of Cruz in the sense that he’s an unknown and underrated. Photo by Football Schedule.

When you’re in my line of work, the most memorable players are often the unknowns, the underappreciated, and the underdogs. One of the most memorable for me was a player I watched in September 2006, whose performance against a top-ranked Tennessee Volunteers defense was so good that it belied his 24-carry, 72-yard box-score entry.

Here’s what I wrote about him in my game notes:

This was an impressive performance for [prospect], who
demonstrated unequivocally that he is a tough, physical back than can carry the load and get the difficult yardage as well as break the play outside or beat defenders in the open field with his moves and quickness. He rarely went down on the first hit unless the defender made a perfect form tackle.

It’s very impressive how low he can run in short yardage situations to get 2-3 tough yards against stacked defenses. Players bounced off [prospect] repeatedly in this game. This was one of the more impressive efforts I saw from a back all year.

These are notes meant for my own use, otherwise I would have found an appropriate synonym for “impressive,” so I didn’t use it three times in a five-sentence span. This 5-foot-11, 192-pound runner had one of my favorite performances of the year -– a year where Adrian Peterson and Marshawn Lynch were the headliners at running back for the 2007 NFL Draft.

Like most, Lynch and Peterson were my top two backs. However this runner, who wowed me despite a sub-par yardage day, was ranked fourth in my pre-draft rankings. In 2007, 25 running backs went off the board.

Ahmad Bradshaw –- that No. 4 back on my board –- was the last runner taken in the draft; the 40th pick in the seventh round, going 250th overall. If we look at current career production, I was wrong about Bradshaw as my No. 4 back.

He has actually been the third-most productive runner from this draft class.

Players like these are memorable because let’s face it, unknown, unsung, and underappreciated usually means undrafted and unemployed. When a late-round or undrafted player makes his mark, it appeals to the part of us that roots for the underdog.

Whether it’s the small-school prospect with the big-time game, the well-known player whose skills are even better than advertised, or the overshadowed longshot with shocking moments of excellence, my favorite part of studying college prospects is watching talent that flies below the national radar.

Bradshaw’s obstacles towards reaching the NFL radar were injuries, off-field immaturity, and a B-list college program. I can think of others who fit the bill.

Victor Cruz was a small-school prospect with a big-time game. Ray Rice was a well-known college star who proved he was big enough, quick enough, and skilled enough to get the job done as a pro. Priest Holmes and Terrell Davis are great examples of talents that toiled in supporting roles behind talented teammates like Ricky Williams and Garrison Hearst after injuries cost them chances of earning more playing time.

My publication, the Rookie Scouting Portfolio, is a pre-draft analysis of offensive skill players that I publish April 1. (It also has a post-draft addendum.) What I enjoy the most about the April 1 publication is the opportunity to generate rankings where “draft stock” carries little to no weight. It’s a chance to focus more on the talent and less on the business.

This week, I’m sharing one unknown, one unsung, and one underappreciated prospect from my 2013 RSP analysis. I believe each prospect has the talent to out-perform his draft stock. These are excerpts from this year’s RSP that have been re-purposed for this column. It’s a small preview of what you’ll find in the publication.

Read the Rest at Football Outsiders

Futures: The Hybrid RB Evolution

March 27, 2013 0 Comments read Matt Waldman

Patriots RB Shane Vereen is a good example of the influx of backs capable of making receiver-like adjustments on the football. Photo by John Martinez Paviliga.

March is the month that I take 14-to-18 months of research and use it to generate rankings and analysis for the April 1 Rookie Scouting Portfolio publication. The labor involved in this compressed time period involves a workweek with hours averaging in the triple digits. I believe this will be the last year I have to do it this way.

I’m disclosing this because when you spend close to 100 hours in a five-day span reviewing play-by-play reports, scouting checklists, NFL Combine measurements, and watching several dozen sequences of plays another half-dozen times in order to write about running backs, you see things that you want to share. I’m not talking about hallucinations –- although I admit that I engaged in a brief, one-sided conversation with the side-view mirror of a red pickup truck parked near my favorite lunch spot in downtown Athens during the hour I took each day to leave the office that didn’t involve sleep.

That brief one-sided conversation reminded me of something Doug Farrar observed while having lunch at the Senior Bowl: Southern folk seem more accepting of eccentric behavior. I thought he was referring to someone else until that moment.

That Farrar is a perceptive guy.

Other than the realization that I’m eccentric, one of the big takeaways I had from these marathon analysis sessions of this running back class is that I think the NFL could be on the precipice of a more widespread change with how teams use the position in the passing game.

The hybridization of the NFL has been in progress for years. Marshall Faulk, Reggie
Bush, and Darren Sproles are the popular choices as heads on the pro game’s Mount Rushmore of runner-receiver hybrids. Personally, James Brooks would be my fourth bust in that crew.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/F68uk_EKCrs?start=110]

Brooks caught the ball away from his body on difficult passes even by wide receiver standards. And compared to other NFL backs of his era, Brooks saw a lot of downfield targets that many teams wouldn’t consider throwing to their runners.

These four would be my choices as the players who have ushered in the dawning of the hybrid runner era. Bush and Sproles have made splitting the back from the formation a more common and desirable practice, but Brooks and Faulk were evolutionary oddities. In fact, I’d argue that Faulk’s ability to run intermediate routes like a starting receiver made the Rams back ahead of his time in the same way that Jim Brown’s speed, change of direction, and short-area explosiveness in a 232-pound frame was ahead of the curve.

What is happening at the college level may be approaching a future that Faulk provided fans a glimpse of. The future is beyond the long handoffs and the occasional wheel and seam routes that Bush and Sproles execute. It’s the ability of runners of all shapes and sizes to make plays on targets in tight coverage or to see primary targets on so-called, “50/50 balls” –- even passes where backs are “thrown open” by design.

And it’s not just scat backs seeing these targets; prototypical bell cow backs and short-yardage types are getting into the act. This is a bold step forward in the evolutionary line of the position.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders

Football Outsiders: Three in the Boiler

March 20, 2013 0 Comments read Players

Always a fun challenge to boil down prospects. Photo by Kerry Lannert.

A series I started this year at the RSP blog is The Boiler Room. One of the challenges involved with player analysis is to be succinct with delivering the goods. As the author of an annual tome, I’m often a spectacular failure in this respect. Even so, I will study a prospect and see a play unfold that does a great job of encapsulating that player’s skills. When I witness these moments, I try to imagine if I would include this play as part of a cut-up of highlights for a draft show at a major network or if I was working for an NFL organization creating cut-ups for a personnel director.

The Boiler Room is focused on prospects I expect to be drafted, and often before the fourth round. One example a few weeks ago is a play from Syracuse quarterback Ryan Nassib. So this week, I thought I’d borrow this concept from my blog and modify it to introduce three players I like in this 2013 class with two plays each. Next week, I’ll share three players in this class I like who will likely be late-round or free agent prospects.

This week’s trio is Cincinnati tight end Travis Kelce, Clemson wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, and Kansas State linebacker Arthur Brown. What they all have in common is that draft analysts are projecting them to get picked between the late first and early second round. Despite having high grades, I think all three players are still underrated and I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to have better careers than their peers selected ahead of them.

Read the rest at Football Outsiders

Futures: Arkansas RB Knile Davis

March 6, 2013 0 Comments read Players

Shonn Greene wouldn't be my player comp for Knile Davis, but I understand the reasoning. Photo by Matt Britt. — Shonn Greene wouldn’t be my player comp for Knile Davis, but I understand the reasoning. Photo by Matt Britt.

When I saw the 2012 Lewin Career Forecast, I had already studied Russell Wilson. In fact, I told a panel of draft analysts on a National Football Post podcast (beginning at the 17:42 mark) that included Josh Norris, Wes Bunting, and Josh Buchanan that Wilson was my sleeper quarterback in this draft. I was cynical that Wilson would be picked before the third round, but once Seattle opted for the N.C. State-Wisconsin quarterback, my immediate thought was that Wilson would be a pivotal test case against height bias in the NFL.

I think there’s another potential test case in the draft this year, but on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to the dilemma of prototypical skills vs. prototypical measurements. The lead actor in this draft-day drama could be Knile Davis. If an NFL team selects Davis in the first three rounds of this draft, it will be a telling indication that they relied more on Davis’ Combine performance –- and to some degree sabermetrics –- than the opinions of scouts and draft analysts who lean hard on the game tape.

Davis was an All-SEC selection in 2010, rushing for 1322 yards and scoring 13 touchdowns. In 2011, the Arkansas running back missed the season with a broken ankle. Davis underwhelmed in 2012, losing the starting job to reserve Dennis Johnson and only showing flashes of what he did in 2010.

Fast forward to the 2013 NFL Combine, and the 227-pound runner put on a show: a 4.37 40-yard dash and 31 reps on the bench press. It was an impressive performance that vaulted Davis atop Football Outsiders’ Speed Score metric for running backs. According to Danny Tuccitto, a Speed score below 80 is “a giant red flag,” a 100 Speed Score is “average,” and “anything above 120 serving as a giant neon sign.”

This makes Davis’ Speed Score, “off-the-charts good.” If you listen to Davis talk about NFL players of comparison, his self-perception is also top-notch. Andrew Gribble reports that Davis describes his style as on par with Arian Foster and Adrian Peterson.

If you ask me, Davis has some sort of dsymorphic disorder isolated to running backs and American Idol audition candidates. He has the idea that he performs differently than he does. Davis’ style is nowhere close to that of Foster or Peterson. When it comes to talent, if Davis is one of the top-ten runners in this class, then it’s a stretch to place him among the top seven in what is a deep class that lacks superstar talent at the top.

While I can’t be definitive about an exact ranking because I’m about two days away from the month-long task of compiling my 24 months of analysis into rankings this month, I can say that I have similar concerns as other writers (such as Rotoworld’s Evan Silva, NFL.com’s Josh Norris, and Bleacher Report’s Sigmund Bloom) who have studied Davis.

Foster and Peterson don’t come to mind when they watch Davis run. The running back mentioned most often among them was Shonn Greene.

Ouch.

Read the Rest Football Outsiders

Futures at Football Outsiders: UNC Guard, Jonathan Cooper

February 27, 2013 0 Comments read Players

[youtube=http://youtu.be/RxnFNnW0IoM]

Explosive, agile, and purposeful, Cooper has what it takes to play in the NFL for a decade if he can stay healthy.

There was an important decision to be made at the offices of Futures this afternoon: the boss or the wife? The work boss saw Knile Davis run a 4.30-forty at Indy; calculated the Razorback’s Speed Score; saw my tweet that I’d take Jonathan Franklin over Davis 10 times out of 10; and Monday afternoon asked me to write a Futures piece that addresses my take on the fastest big back at the Combine.

Truth be told, I have mixed thoughts about Knile Davis’ prospects. In some respects his style reminds me of DeMarco Murray. His style also reminds me of Keith Byars and late-career Herschel Walker. As much as I like these two players, this isn’t a complement to Davis. I’m going to study another game and review my notes of the others before I take a final stand on the Speed Score’s latest darling.

This brings me to the boss at home. My originally scheduled player this week was Jonathan Cooper. My wife is from North Carolina. A Tar Heel through and through, she turned down a track scholarship to Florida as well as a spot on Syracuse’s vaunted women’s team to attend Chapel Hill.

The fact that I still have an office to write from tells you that Carolina won out. Read the section “But My Wife Might Be Smarter,” for a greater understanding of her Tar Heel fanaticism and uncanny skill at guessing a prospect’s state of origin by his first name.

On to Cooper, who –- compared to the flashy picks that teams with the top picks in the draft –- is this year’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich; a good, safe choice that will get the job done. Despite the fact that he has been starting since his freshman year, the 6-foot-2, 311-pound left guard still has room to get stronger.

Cooper is the total package who has the potential to work at center and, in a draft where the top end of the player pool lacks the perceived flash of recent seasons, that helps explain the speculation that the left guard might go higher in the first round than guards usually do. Even if Cooper falls to the late first or early second round, he is the type of prospect that a team in need of interior linemen will take in a heartbeat. 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