No! Good GMs do not draft for need. There are many other options for rounding out the roster and filling in weak spots. Passing on the BPA and throwing draft selections at needs is what perennial losers do. Not only is it poor roster building from a long-term perspective, but it is also a poor way to address a need since predicting the performance of a rookie player is impossible. Therefore, relying on a rookie to address a need is foolish.
I generally agree with your comments around here, and I'm not exactly disagreeing with the main point of the part of this comment that I gave
boldface and
color emphasis above. More specifically, I agree that relying on a rookie for a given role on an NFL team is risky. I just want to suggest the possibility that finding the distribution of likely results for any given player, including a rookie, is not impossible. However, I'll agree that most people (and teams) haven't figured out how to reliably predict the performance of rookies.
One of the myths about baseball that Bill James destroyed (working alone as a night watchman in a pork-and-beans cannery with time on his hands) was the idea that minor-league performance didn't tell you anything about how the player would do in the majors. James figured out that
if you adjust stats for league and park, minor-league stats can tell you quite a bit about how that player would do in the majors. An easy example is that the Pacific Coast League tended to inflate offensive performance, and then Dodgers players who had hit like Ted Williams in AAA were promoted to play in Dodger Stadium, which was then one of the most offense-
deflating parks in MLB, and their performance at the plate was nowhere close to what "experts" had expected. But this kind of lack of adjustment affected the evaluations of major-league players too. Wrigley Field used to inflate offense a lot relative to the rest of the league (this was before the abomination in Colorado), so the North Side Chumps always thought they had enough offense and needed more defense and pitching. Similarly, the Dodgers always thought they had enough pitching and needed better hitters because Dodger Stadium was inflating the performance of the former and deflating the performance of the latter. Some bad hitters who played in "hitters' parks" ended up getting big contracts and then not hitting like people had been expecting them to hit.
If you look at giant NFL trade (and contract-extension) busts like Jamal Adams and Russell Wilson, to use two examples with which we're all quite familiar, it's clear that in each case, the team paying a lot to acquire a player and then giving him an extension did a terrible job predicting the future performance of an established NFL player. So the difficulties teams have evaluating future player performance are not limited to rookie performance. One advantage of making such a mistake with a rookie rather than a veteran is that the financial impact tends to be lower. The Broncos are utterly screwed this year and will still be feeling quite a bit of salary-cap pain in 2025 because of a giant mistake they made in predicting the future performance of a veteran.
Another example from not all that long ago that shows that NFL teams have a lot of difficulty projecting veteran performance too is the 2011 Philadelphia Eagles' spending spree and construction of their so-called "dream team." The Eagles' 2011 "dream team" won two
fewer games than the 2010 team had won (10-6 in 2010, 8-8 in 2011). The early Carroll Seahawks convincingly beat that "dream team" 31-14 for one of just seven victories that season. Neither team made the playoffs.