In-depth film analysis of NFL Draft Prospects With a Fantasy Football Lens - by Matt Waldman ©2025
The 2006-2011 RSP Rankings series that began last week with running backs will resume this week with the top 20 quarterbacks. Sundays and Mondays are usually pretty slammed, so expect to see the first installment of the quarterback rankings on Monday night.
By the way, I went 19-8 in my Fantasy Throwdown match ups this weekend and I only moved up two spots on the leaderboard. I’ve found the IDP challenges the most enjoyable. We had over 400 completed challenges last week. Join us.
I’m just a regular guy who has chosen to lead an irregular life.
And occasionally, there are people with websites and blogs that want to ask me questions about football and sometimes, how football contributes to my irregular life. If you’re curious, I have a short page of links to these Q&A interviews. (Link fixed, BTW)
At the top of this short page of interviews is a link to Dynasty League Football’s November 5 interview conducted by Eric Dickens.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Q5M37PYqJ1M]
“Welcome aboard the S.S. Campbell. This is your captain, Cecil Lammey!”
I couldn’t resist…
It’s that time of the week where I like to take a moment to thank all of you for making it a habit to read the Rookie Scouting Portfolio blog. Hopefully you find the content as enjoyable to read as it is to write. While I enjoy the comments on the blog and email messages a great deal – keep ’em coming – if you wish to show your appreciation and get a gift that keeps on giving order the 2011 Rookie Scouting Portfolio. It’s currently sold at what I call a “Lockout Jitters price” of $9.95. Get it while the aftershocks of those jitters is still in effect. Previous issues are available by emailing me (mattwaldmanrsp@gmail.com).
On behalf of the Footballguys staff and all of you who read his work, I’d like to wish Footballguy extraordinaire and RSP blog contributor Dr. Jene Bramel a speedy recovery. The good doctor did the fantasy football broadcast equivalent of “playing hurt,” by phoning in his segment on Thursday night’s Audible podcast from a hospital bed.
If you were in charge of player-personnel decisions for the NFL team that had the opportunity to choose between Cam Newton or Andrew Luck, which quarterback would you take? I think this is probably one of the most compelling questions I’ve seen all season. There are so many layers of analysis to explore with this type of question.
While Newton was considered a fine quarterback prospect, only a few really nailed him as a player capable of making a Peyton Manning/Carson Palmer impact early in his career. And even fewer did as good of a job debunking the “running quarterback” myth with Newton than Chris Kouffman and Simon Clancy. Their analysis of Cam Newton was dead-on this winter. I highly recommend you make this your lunchtime read. I think the work they did was most impressive and something to learn from.
But then there’s Luck, who is considered the best prospect in the last 20 years. Unlike Newton, Luck is a three-year starter in a pro-style offense that uses West Coast concepts. Luck also has freedom to change plays at the line of scrimmage with the authority of veteran pro quarterbacks while Newton played in what is conceptually recognized as a highly simplified offense by comparison at Auburn. Furthermore, Luck is an athletic quarterback who is more physically mobile along the lines of Ben Roethlisberger or Tarvaris Jackson than Peyton Manning or Tom Brady.
So what do you do, take arguably the “best quarterback prospect in the past 20 years” or take arguably “the best performing rookie quarterback in the past 20 years?” Continue reading
The idea of compiling a rankings analysis across several years of Rookie Scouting Portfolio publications has been a popular request by readers for years, but something I have resisted doing. For a complete explanation why please read Part I. If you want to know how my ranking of these players differs from the actual process I use for the RSP publication please read Part I. And if you want to know why I view this exercise as an entertainment piece and not a more serious analysis please read Part I.
Moreover, if you want to see players 11-20, you know what to do. See, I didn’t even need to say it.
One of the most frequent requests I’ve heard from readers over the years is to rank players at their position across several draft classes. It’s an entertaining thing to read, but I’ve always been reticent about doing it. There are a lot of approaches I could take with the ranking process and I’m not sure if any of them will feel good enough to stand behind.
I could rank by checklist scores, but I don’t believe in ranking players solely by the quantitative criteria I used to derive a score in the Rookie Scouting Portfolio publication. This is only half of the analysis that I perform. The other half is providing a detailed context behind the scoring that often fills in the gaps that the data leaves behind. Even then, there is a factor I call “The Great Emotional Divide,” which separates productive NFL players from massively talented NFL prospects. Another valid question is whether I should judge these players based on what I’ve seen from them in the NFL. If so then am I doing justice to the rookies from the 2011 class?
None of this makes me feel like I’m on solid ground. I don’t like rankings because they are highly fluid thoughts frozen during a brief period in time. Some readers may believe my business as author of the Rookie Scouting Portfolio is ranking players, but they’re mistaken.
My primary goal with the RSP is to profile these players and analyze their games. The ranking is perhaps the least important part of the analysis. It’s the conversation starter. The attention-getter. The marketing schtick. It’s the cocktail party, three-sentence summation of a complex subject that you need to learn or you come across as rude or socially awkward. As much as I value Twitter for attracting readers like you to the work I do, I’m not much on cocktail party chatter. Nothing wrong with it if that’s your thing, it’s just not mine if I can avoid it.
Ultimately, I only ranked players I studied during my time authoring the RSP (2006-2011). I decided to rank these players according to the potential I saw in them before they went pro. I don’t define potential by where I ranked them in the past, but what I think they could have (or did) become based on these factors:
Tom Moore, one of my Twitter followers, asked me to rank Alabama’s Trent Richardson within the scope of the top RB prospects during the last 10 years of drafts. I thought it was a good idea, but I simply haven’t finished my due diligence on the 2012 draft class to feel comfortable compiling that kind of ranking. However I can do a series where I rank the top 10 prospects at each skill position for the duration I’ve been writing the Rookie Scouting Portfolio.
Expect this series to begin at the end of the week.
I’m still determining whether I will rank my players based on the potential I saw in them or a combo of potential and hindsight analysis based on their actual pro performance, but I hope this will be an entertaining series. It’s going to be fun to write, that’s for sure.
I’m also hoping to land an interview with Chris Brown and/or former Scout Dave Razzano for you guys, but I’ve had some trouble getting them to respond after initially expressing interest. Maybe those of you on Twitter can give them a nudge and tell them that you’d be interested in reading about them in a Q&A at the Rookie Scouting Portfolio (you know, “Power to the People” and all that good stuff).
If not, that’s okay. I’m good buddies with this certain S.O.B. who I’ve been waiting to interview, but biding my time to make the request of him. I think he’ll make time though.
I don’t know about you, but my favorite part of fantasy football is the draft. Now you can draft every day and have new match ups at any time at FantasyThrowdown.com . I actually received an email from reader last week who thanked me for tipping him to the site. He said it was like giving cookies to a sugar addict.
We actually saw a lot of people try Fantasy Throwdown last week and the feedback was tremendous. If you didn’t try this strategic and addictive one-on-one fantasy football game last week, then you need need to challenge me to a draft. Just go the site, create a login, and enter my email (thegutcheck@gmail.com) when you create a private challenge. If you need a few more directions, see below.
How to Play
Starting a challenge is easy and the draft is really flexible. If you want to draft in minutes with a friend, you can do that online together. If you don’t have a lot of time in one sitting you can start a challenge on Monday and slowly pick a starting lineup before the first kick off on Sunday.
Some folks are playing dozens of times per week and telling me drafts take as little as 10-15 minutes when both parties are online. Others tell me they enjoy knowing they can draft over the course of a week if they don’t have the time to finish a game in one sitting.
Here’s how it works: Continue reading
DeMarco Murray’s 25-carry, 253-yard debut as the Cowboys starter bested Emmitt Smith’s single game rushing record for the team. As with most accomplishments of this kind, the performance tends to be the product of a confluence of factors: a weakened defense, a big lead, and talent allowed to get into a rhythm. With Sam Bradford on the bench nursing an ankle sprain and the Rams defense consistently folding early in contests, St. Louis was clearly a big part of the equation. But let’s not forget that Cowboys starter Felix Jones had only one game this year where he exceeded 60 yards rushing and the Rams defense’s worst performances against the run came at the legs of LeSean McCoy and Ryan Torain. If you combine the totals of these two backs, they only bested Murray’s output by four yards.
Murray may not go on a streak that Corey Dillon did over a decade ago during his rookie year or like Jerome Harrison’s 2009 stint with the Browns, but the third-round pick of the Cowboys is not a fluke. He was my No.4 runner in the 2011 Rookie Scouting Portfolio and a runner I saw up close at the Senior Bowl practices. He was the best back on the North squad and I heard two former running backs-turned running back coaches label Murray as a potential thoroughbred.
In a Q&A that I conducted with Murray at the Senior Bowl for the New York Times Fifth Down, I was impressed with Murray’s mature approach to the game and desire to hone his tools to become a better athlete and football player. He was one of those few players where his words and intentions matched his growth on the field.
One of the most revealing performances I witnessed during Murray’s college career came during his junior year Continue reading
[youtube=http://youtu.be/BuHPCsH1EBQ]
Check out Walter Payton’s 75-yard reception.
It’s been a great week at the RSP blog. Chad Spann not only provided great information for an enlightening interview series about his training camp experience with Indianapolis, but he’s now a part of the Buccaneers practice squad and in London for the team’s match up with the Chicago Bears. Jay Cutler gave us a rare, “take this job and shove it,” moment on Sunday night. And Jene Bramel writes a fantastic piece where he dissects a play from an angle that gives us a different conclusion than what television commentators saw at first glance.
The only downer was Skype failing me when I was going to deliver my “And Justice For All” defense parody of John Beck on The Audible Roundtable. Google Phone, we’re pals for now. Don’t let me down…
If you’re new to this blog, thank you for checking out the digs. Even more thanks if you liked enough of what you’ve seen to subscribe. Continue reading