Not a big fan of trading down this year

[kearly]

I didn't see a motivationally challenged OL in Shon Coleman Kip. If he wasn't motivated to play football after beating cancer after all. To me he looks like a guy who plays with a real edge, who loves to hammer a LB at the second level and he's chirpy. Perfect attitude IMO.

In fairness to him, I'm nitpicking. I see him letting up the instant the ball is out of the QBs hand, I see him giving really great effort for the first 90% of a play and then jogging through the finish line a lot. But I should probably give him more credit for the effort he has in that initial 90%. He does give very good effort during the meaningful part of a play.

JR Sweezy and Breno are guys that give not just 100%, but 110%. As in, literally 100% plus 10% more after the play is over. Sometimes that gets Seattle dumb flags, but it also sets a tone and wears down a defense. I think that last 10%, and the extra 10% after that, matters to Cable a lot.

That said, Coleman has the look of a top 10 pick. His size, arm length, core strength, and mobility when taken as a whole are at an elite level. My nitpicks with him all seem coachable. There is a cancer risk, but if cancer was all that big a concern to medical staffs then I don't think he'd be in the 1st round at all. If Seattle drafts him I'll be high fiving everyone around me.

 

[ivotuk]

In my view the argument for trading down is mostly about respecting the uncertainty in the process. If you know for a fact that Ogbah is going to be a stud then it makes sense to take him, but it's more realistic to look at his production as a probability distribution. Better prospects have distributions with a higher mean but there's still a huge amount of overlap given that UDFAs can end up superior to #1 overall picks. That's why it's easy to end up with higher expected overall returns by adding smaller distributions together (trading down)..

Could you expand on this? Maybe in it's own thread?

A lot of the value I put on players comes from gut feeling, how do they interview, how much effort do they give, do they love football, and what are those little, mostly unnoticeable things that they do? Like with Okung, I fell in love with him because he squatted so low at the LOS. It takes a lot of effort and self-training to do that. You always hear about "waist benders" vs "knee benders" and what Okung was doing demonstrated a lot to me. "This guy must LOVE football."

So I'd love to find another way to look at players, much like the Lewin QB Forecasts.

 

[kearly]

When Seattle traded their 1st round pick for Harvin in 2013, there were some really nice players being projected for the late 1st, including DeAndre Hopkins. When Seattle traded down for Paul Richardson the next year, they passed on Joel Bitonio to do it. And while I think the trade down for Irvin was worth it, they passed on Fletcher Cox to do so.

Of course the flip side of this is that they also passed on Cordarelle in 2013 and Kouandjio in 2014. You could make the same criticisms about teams trading up or staying put if you just look at hits after your pick. E.g. the Fletcher Cox pick was worth more than Wilson/Wagner combined that year according to the traditional chart.

In my view the argument for trading down is mostly about respecting the uncertainty in the process. If you know for a fact that Ogbah is going to be a stud then it makes sense to take him, but it's more realistic to look at his production as a probability distribution. Better prospects have distributions with a higher mean but there's still a huge amount of overlap given that UDFAs can end up superior to #1 overall picks. That's why it's easy to end up with higher expected overall returns by adding smaller distributions together (trading down).

The argument against trading down is roster space. The Seahawks wallet only has room for a certain amount of lottery tickets and it takes effort to check whether lottery tickets are winners in the first place. The overall roster strategy needs to be cohesive as the draft strategy and FA strategy need to link up. Strict BPA trade down theory crafting falls apart when you spend your first three picks on DTs due to the depth there after you had already resigned Rubin and Mebane.

I get your argument, but I'm not cherry picking. Cox, Hopkins, and Bitonio were all consensus BPA when Seattle moved down those years. Meaning that if you set the draft to Mel-Kiper Auto draft those years and didn't move down, you would have ended up with Cox, Bitonio, and Hopkins.

It just happened that all three ended up being very, very good players. And yes I'm infusing my personal opinion here, but I thought all three were going to be studs before those respective drafts and was surprised when Seattle turned them down (albeit indirectly, in the case of Harvin).

I agree completely about probability distribution. But to me, Hopkins and Bitonio were not your average #25 and #32 pick options. The same way that Russell wasn't your average option at #75. Sometimes a draft bargain isn't all that hard to see, but Seattle wasn't able to see it when it was staring them in the face in those instances. It's a different story from say 2011, when the best player available was a 2nd round talent. Basically, I think there are good situations to trade down and sup-par situations to trade down. It really depends who's there.

If you need a QB and Aaron Rodgers is sitting at #25 when he should have gone #1 overall, it's probably safe to say this isn't like your normal situation for a team picking out of the 25th slot most years. Even when factoring all outcomes, clearly Green Bay made the right decision to stay put.

Anyway, we are all human and we all read things wrong sometimes, but at least for me, I would not have traded down on any of those picks. In retrospect, I think the Irvin trade down was okay, since Seattle got good chart value and as luck would have it, the two extra picks turned into Jaye Howard and Jeremy Lane. Unfortunately, Seattle inexplicably cut Howard just as he was turning things around.

 

[kobebryant]

Giving the FO some benefit of the doubt, when you pull the trigger on the Harvin deal you're likely thinking that the rest of the league isn't dumb enough to let Hopkins reach your pick - thus acquiring, in Harvin, a considerably better talent than those who they projected to be available.

 

[HawkGA]

I think Seattle moves out of the first round just because of the contract structure. I don't think the available talent has much to do with it.

 

[McGruff]

I think Seattle moves out of the first round just because of the contract structure. I don't think the available talent has much to do with it.

Aren't first round contracts advantageous to the team?

 

[DJrmb]

Our 1st round pick if we stay at 26 would be slotted to only make about 1.6M, which we have plenty of cap space to absorb.

 

[ivotuk]

Our 1st round pick if we stay at 26 would be slotted to only make about 1.6M, which we have plenty of cap space to absorb.

2015 #26 pick signed for "4 years, $8.7M; $4.6M signing bonus"

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap300000 ... ng-tracker

The nice thing about 1st round picks is that 5th year option. It's a money saver.

 

[HawkGA]

I think Seattle moves out of the first round just because of the contract structure. I don't think the available talent has much to do with it.

Aren't first round contracts advantageous to the team?

They cost more money but I thought I recall having read that JS doesn't like the 5th year option thing. Could be wrong though.

 

[titan3131]

In order for the Seahawks to continue dominance and not go the way of harbaughs 49ers. We have to have a 2012 impact draft. I agree we need to keep our first rounder but I really think if we can trade out of the 2nd we can stock another 3rd and 4th pick. There is such good depth from offensive line to defensive line in the 3rd.

 

[AgentDib]

To be clear I'm not commenting on scouting itself but rather on how clubs should use the output of the scouting process to make efficient decisions in the draft.

Imagine rating player production from 0-100 where 0 signified no contribution and 100 represented a hall of fame career at an important position. The scouting process is an attempt to estimate this within a range. The output is often buzzwords like ceiling and floor, discussions of risky vs. safe picks, and comparisons to other players when it comes to unknowns.

The problem with this sort of approach is that the NFL draft can be extremely uncertain and in an attempt to provide value the analysis will often be overconfident about projections. After all, what good is a scout if his analysis is that a prospect could be anything between a hall of fame player or a complete bust? The problem is that historically UDFAs can indeed look like first rounders and first rounders can indeed look like UDFAs.

The way to consider all options and yet still have something valuable to say is to factor in the probability of each outcome. The peak of each curve is the most likely result and the area under the curve on each side of a value is the likelihood that a player will be better or worse than that number.



In the example above a first round pick has a much more favorable distribution than a 5th round pick. However, the area of overlap between the green and red curve shows that there's still a chance that the 5th round pick will turn out better. You can also simply add these curves to compute the likelihood of getting a player at a certain range with a combination of picks. In this made up example you could add three round picks and come out of ahead of the single first round pick on average. Figuring out the value of trading up, staying put, or trading down becomes as simple as calculating the cumulative projected probability outcomes under each scenario. Of course roster limitations are a huge constraint in reality and every option also has to weigh value against practicality.

 

[kearly]

I think the draft is for the most part, a gut feel process. Pete Carroll has said as much. He takes all the information into account that he possibly can (including analytics), but at the end of the day he goes with his gut.

Most teams, especially Seattle, are aware of the mathematical benefits of going shotgun mentality with their draft picks. In a vacuum, trading down at chart value is pretty much always the best move a team can make. However, there are other factors to consider beyond simple math. Context and timing.

Back to the Aaron Rodgers example. If Green Bay trades away that pick, the next best QB they could have hoped for in that draft was Jason Campbell. If Campbell hadn't made it to them, the next best QB on the board was... Charlie Frye.

There are ledges among talent groups in the draft, and if you are right on that ledge with a player you need, it's conventional wisdom in NFL circles that you keep the pick and take that player.

Trading down is absolutely a good thing, but it's also a surgical thing, you have to pick the right spot to do it. Say for example you enter the draft with 8 picks and you want to end up with 10. You could make deals for picks at almost any time... but preferably not when the steal of the draft is staring you in the face.

If your first round pick is a guy you rate super high, you take him, then figure out how to get that trade down done later. If you don't love your options in a round, that's when you start working the phones to get those extra picks.

In 2016, I see some bargain players that might just barely make it to #26 if we are lucky (namely Ogbah, Coleman, and Floyd), and if one of them does make it then I hope like hell Seattle rushes to the podium for that guy. It's actually pretty rare that I feel this way, most years the end of the first round is pretty bad. But this year is one of those years where some of the best players are going a lot later than they should due to some of the quirks in the NFL scouting process. It's something that happens maybe every third year. This is looking like one of those years.

One of the reasons Seattle has drafted so well is they know who to exploit the weaknesses of the scouting process to their advantage. Sherman and Wilson are two great examples of that. I just think that this year, that exploitable moment will come at pick #26.

 

[AgentDib]

There are ledges among talent groups in the draft, and if you are right on that ledge with a player you need, it's conventional wisdom in NFL circles that you keep the pick and take that player... If your first round pick is a guy you rate super high, you take him, then figure out how to get that trade down done later. If you don't love your options in a round, that's when you start working the phones to get those extra picks.

This is where the concept of uncertainty is important. One way of describing the above philosophy is that a team may believe the distributions are narrow (higher certainty) around guys they rate super high. According to the traditional chart the #26 pick is worth #38 and #82. Here's the same graph as above but with much higher confidence about how guys will end up.



In this hypothetical staying put at the #26 is the clear winner because the sum of #82 and #38 (vertical sum) still leaves you with a much lower chance of getting a star. That could be right about specific players as each distribution is going to look different for every player. Perhaps Ogbah (#26) is modeled by the green line while Johnson (#38) and Kaufusi (#82) are represented by the yellow and red.

My point is that when you look at past drafts the distributions end up looking much more like the earlier graph. In order to account for things like Sherman being an elite corner you have to draw that 6th round distribution very wide (fat tail) and thus there is significantly more overlap at a tiny fraction of the cost (traditional chart wise). Individual outcomes from the past must be single points under those curves, which is what I meant by the cherry picking discussion earlier. Aaron Rodgers sure looks like that latest green curve now that he's ended up at a 100 but we only see a single outcome and what we've observed is also plausible in the uncertain green curve in my first graphic. Presumably not many teams think that their first round pick is going to suck and yet a surprising amount do every year, seemingly especially the "safe" ones.

Of course the other problem with trading down besides roster constraints is that you need to find a trading partner. Outside of the top of the first round teams have increasingly departed from the traditional chart in later rounds. If our best offer for the #26 is the #50 and #95 I would still probably want to trade down but it would be a lot closer.

 

[kearly]

I get it, but I think you are missing my point. I'll try rephrasing a bit.

Just because you draft a guy at a spot doesn't necessarily make that number his value. So for example, when Seattle drafted James Carpenter at #25 in 2011, did they really think he was the very best player available at that time? No, but he was the best OL available and Seattle had made up their mind to draft OL come hell or high water. In terms of big board value, Carpenter was more along the lines of a 35-40 type pick.

This is why JS wanted to trade down so badly in 2011, because he didn't think Carp was actually a #25 overall value. Cue Nick Saban in the audience shaking his head as the pick was announced...

If we are talking about range of possibilities for James Carpenter (green line) vs the picks acquired in a trade (yellow and red), you'd have to adjust the green curve from #25 to #35 to get a more accurate picture of Carpenter's value. And if you did that, then suddenly trading down looks like a no-brainer. This is why JS wanted to move down so badly, and why he had such a hard time finding a trade partner.

Now I'll give you an example of the opposite.

In 2014, Seattle owned the #32 pick, fresh off a SB victory. Going into the draft, Teddy Bridgewater was widely considered to be a top 15 pick, and was even in the running to go #1 overall. However, when the draft occurred it set up a situation, much like Rodgers in 2005, where the teams that all needed QB picked super early and had other players ranked just barely ahead of Bridgewater. Once Bridgewater lasted to the mid-1st round, all the teams that needed QBs had already picked, so he had a free fall all the way to the end of the first round.

Now he's sitting there at #32. Seattle doesn't need a QB. But Minnesota does. To Minnesota, Bridgewater was a top 15 player who through unique circumstances fell to #32. In their eyes, they were getting much more than a #32 pick by trading up with Seattle. The result was the Seahawks getting a fairly generous offer to move down a few spots, good enough for them to forgo a shot at heralded guard Joel Bitonio.

Whether Bridgewater lives up to his potential or not is not really my point. My point is that Bridgewater's real value on big boards was a lot higher than where he was actually drafted. And so if we are looking at a probability distribution for Bridgewater, it would be misleading to compare him to 'typical' players selected #32 overall, since if Bridgewater had gone #10 overall, nobody would have blinked an eye.

NFL teams generally view a players value based on where he sits on their big board, not on where that player is actually picked. This sometimes sets up whacky scenarios where GM's "build their draft" around a mid-round player who rates very highly on their big board, but due to odd circumstances, can be had much later. Russell Wilson is the classic example of this.