Posts tagged Ryan Williams

Arkansas WR Greg Childs: Career Resurrection?

Ryan Williams is working his way back from a Career Near-Death Experience. See what WR Greg Childs was like before his.

The Career Near-Death Experience. This is one of my favorite Bloomisms of football writing. A Bloomism is what I call the slang that Footballguys and Bleacher Report Draft Analyst Sigmund Bloom (who is also a medalist in some Writer-Olympiad) creates to encompass various football experiences, states of mind, or rights of passage in the sport.

The Career Near-Death Experience is an event where a player faces his career mortality. All players face it at some point. Those that don’t cross to the other side discover a new and better way to approach the game. Former wide receiver Cris Carter had a career near-death experience as drug addict when playing with the Philadelphia Eagles and Coach Buddy Ryan helped save the receiver with a southern fried reprise of the ghost of Christmas Future.

The career near-death experience can also manifest Continue reading

The RSP Blog’s Top 20 RB Prospects (2006-2011) Part I

Ahmad Bradshaw easily made my top 20 RB prospects for the RSP. His performance on an undermanned team against superior opposition transcended his stats. Photo by Ted Kerwin.

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:

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