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A Nose for Talent for Winning the Lottery

 The NFL draft begins on Thursday night. When it ends Saturday afternoon, it's almost certain that the New England Patriots, or your favorite team, will not have selected their next great football player. 

It is even more certain however, that some lucky team will have done just that, and not unlikely at all more than one will have. Some healthy young man with a knack for football whose name is called this weekend will, a couple of decades hence, possess a gold sports jacket and a bust in Canton, Ohio. He'll probably have company from this allegedly mediocre draft class, too.

That's history talking, not me. The first combined NFL-AFL draft was in 1967. The last draft class to have a Hall member was in 2007, wide receiver Calvin "Megatron" Johnson, second overall pick of the Lions. That's 40 drafts, a sample size of over 10,000 potential NFL players. Of those 40 drafts, only one, the 1992 draft, failed to produce at least one member of the Hall of Fame or in the case of post-2001 drafts, guys who're surely gonna get in once they're eligible. I mean, technically the 2004 draft has no members in Canton, but I don't think Larry Fitzgerald and Ben Roethlisberger are going to create lengthy debate among the selection committee in 2026. Nor will Andrew Whitworth, a second round selection in 2006.

I used 2007 as the cutoff date for this little exercise because it takes time to build a Hall of Fame resume, and then there's the five year waiting period for eligibility for election. About the latest date I could find for a "hit by a bus today, he's in tomorrow" player was Aaron Donald in the 2014 draft. After that, it's a riskier proposition. No one would bet AGAINST Patrick Mahomes making the Hall, but stuff happens in football, mostly to major body parts. So a bet FOR Mahomes to become an official immortal is not like buying a T-Bill.

On average, about 3-4 members of each draft class made the Hall of Fame in that 40 year period. Sometimes there were more, many more. The famous John Elway-Dan Marino draft of 1983 has eight members in the Hall of Fame. Seven of them were picked in the first round (Elway, Marino, Jim Kelly, Jimbo Covert, Eric Dickerson and Bruce Matthews), meaning the 28 NFL teams had a 25 percent success rate in predicting immortality. But the eighth lasted until the eighth round, Bears defensive end Richard Dent. Pats fans of a certain age may remember him.

All this research was first sparked by the clatter of NFL gossip to the effect that the 2022 draft is a "mediocre" one with "more teams looking to trade down than up." The idea that the 2022 draft will be unmemorable really got going in January, when it became clear that there was a dearth of "surefire" (just like Peyton Manning, or Ryan Leaf) quarterback prospects in the class, far fewer than teams that dearly need new QBs. No glamor = no interest for a good portion of football's chattering class.

Note: The first quarterback picked in the 2014 draft was third selection Blake Bortles. Donald went 13th. I assure you the Rams find the 2014 draft absolutely fascinating and wonderful whenever they think of it. Quarterback is the most important position in football. But there are lots of other positions, 21 to be precise, and all told they add up to more than any QBs value, even Tom Brady's. When he and the Patriots parted ways, Brady was careful to select a new team full of good players. Then he went out and recruited more. He might make a good GM someday, not that he'd ever do it.

The first draft I covered was in 1988 for the Herald. It too was hyped as mediocre, and for the same reason. Not a single quarterback went in the first round, an almost inconceivable event today. But the class of '88 does have five members in Canton, starting with Michael Irvin and including Thurman Thomas and Tim Brown. They were reasonably glamorous NFL stars in their day.

My overall football conclusion is that every draft contains talent that'll help their teams win, if a team is smart/lucky enough to pick it. Given my druthers, I'd rather be lucky enough to pick a future Hall of Fame tackle or linebacker than a quarterback of the Jared Goff-Carson Wentz variety, no matter how wretched my incumbent QB is. Given Vince Lombardi's druthers, too.

(A digression: No team has ever been as smart/lucky as the Pittsburgh Steelers Iron Curtain dynasty of the '70s. Pittsburgh drafted at least one Hall of Famer in each draft from 1969-1972. They inexplicably whiffed in '73, but bounced back in '74 by picking four Hall-bound talents. Maybe their scouting department should have a bust in Canton.)

The reason my idle research has become a blog post was a telephone conversation with my daughter that didn't discuss football at all. She works in the wine business in Bordeaux, France, as a salesperson for a negociant, the middlemen who purchase wine from the wineries and then sell it to distributors around the world. Let's put it this way. The French equivalent of Two-Buck Chuck is not in her firm's inventory. It deals in the wines people read about more than ever drink.

This week, draft week for the NFL, is en primeur, the most important sales event for Bordeaux wines. In it, folks come from around the world to taste the wines of the 2021 harvest. These wines aren't in bottles yet, just barrels. They aren't ready to drink, and some won't be for a decade or more. To the untrained palate, they'd taste like a mild acid. They taste like that to the trained palate, too, but the trained ones can also taste, or guess at, the qualities that'll distinguish one wine from selling for $50 a bottle and one that'll go for $500. My daughter will taste as many as 40 such wines a day for a few days. Then she and her co-workers compare notes and come to a consensus as to what the firm should think. Where should it place its very expensive bets.

Now, what is that but the NFL draft, right down to the wine war room? Companies in a volatile and extremely weird business making their best guesses as to the products that'll being them the most success in the near and not-so-near future, products that are nowhere near ready to be judged with total confidence.

And in an uncanny echo of predraft chatter, my daughter informed me the skinny is that this will be a poor year for Bordeaux, mainly due to bad weather during the grape's growing cycle. That's the wine equivalent of "no franchise quarterbacks in this draft."

En primeur is the usual madhouse of tasting, schmoozing, rumor mongering and hard bargaining all the same. A bad year in Bordeaux doesn't mean the region won't have great wines of the 2021 vintage, just that it is predicted there will be less of it to sell. If anything, that just makes the bargaining harder, the bets more sporty. 

The draft will be different in this one way. There's no overriding factor like the weather for football players. There may be fewer Chateau Latours or Lafite-Rothschilds in the 2022 class and more cru bourgeois but it might also be the reverse. Don't fret if your team picks guards, nose tackles and safeties instead of guys you've seen on GameDay highlights. Football greatness most often comes in a very thick-necked bottle.

There are all sorts of draft prop bets extant, which indicates our country's gambling problem is truly out of control. If there's one on whether or not the draft will have a Hall of Famer in it, jump on it. It's a lock.

You do have to wait 20 years to collect, though.

posted by Michael Gee @ 1:25 PM