AsylumGuido

With all of the talk about draft "grades" today the following thoughts were brought up. What determines draft grades? Usually it's the ranking of players by the person doing the grading. That ranking can be, and usually is, a great deal different than what the 32 individual teams come up with in their own rankings. It was said that the individual teams put in countless hours by as many as 30 or more people and millions of dollars to delve into every draft eligible player to develop their individual boards. Nobody doing this grading can hope to have a microscopic fraction of that preparation. Those 32 team constructed boards are as unique as are fingerprints. No two will be near the same.

These graders include meaningless terms like "value" and "need" in their grading process. How do you determine "value" when every team has a different evaluation of the players? How does the grader know the team's "need" without being privy to their long and short term plans or goals?

Personally I believe that the Saints had Shough pegged as a must addition, a primary target. I would imagine these graders had him slotted as a 4th rounder or so for their own personal reasons. Therefore they deem it a bad "value" for the Saints to draft him where they did. However, the Saints could have had Shough at the very top of their priority rankings for their own reasons. I suspect Banks was a 1A or 1B on their board. They knew they probably wouldn't get Banks later so they made a smart pick at #9. Then came pick #40 and they could not guarantee Slough would make it to their next pick. With Slough being at the top of their board #40 was actually a great value.

As for my order of Saints pick favoritism, I'm going with the same 1A and 1B as did the Saints.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” — Winston Churchill