The good news, sort of: For all the breath and bytes we've spent decrying the Falcons' drafting acumen, research indicates that no NFL team has actually cracked that code. From Chase Stuart of Football Perspective in 2013: "There appears to be no real evidence that picking winners in the draft is a repeatable skill."
From Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight in 2014: "Teams can't regularly predict which prospects will outperform or underperform relative to where they were drafted."
(Local takeaway: “See, Thomas Dimitroff mightn’t be so awful after all.”)
Given the above conclusions — Messrs. Stuart and Paine have data to buttress their conclusions, which is the idea behind research — Bill Barnwell of ESPN reduced the NFL draft to its simplest form, writing this month: "In the scratch-off lottery that is the draft, the smartest strategy is simply to have more tickets."
This brings us to the bad news, sort of: The Falcons enter this draft with five picks in seven rounds. They lost their fifth-round choice as a penalty for piping fake crowd noise into the doomed Georgia Dome; they sent their sixth to Tennessee for guard Andy Levitre, who led the Falcons with 11 penalties last season. If the draft is indeed a volume business, the local team will be pressed to speak above a whisper these next three days.
There’s thought the Falcons might trade down, so as to acquire more picks. (There’s thought that every team might trade down, seeing that the Titans and the Browns, teams holding the Nos. 1 and 2 overall picks, already have.) That wouldn’t be a bad idea, except that Dimitroff isn’t exactly the Peter Lynch — the former Magellan Fund steward who excelled at finding undervalued stocks — of general managers.
The Falcons’ three best players are Julio Jones, Matt Ryan and Desmond Trufant. They were taken sixth, third and 22nd in the respective drafts. Dimitroff famously sent five picks to Cleveland to move up 21 spots to choose Jones in 2011. To advance eight slots to nab Trufant in 2013, the GM sent three picks (and got a seventh-rounder in return) to the Rams. If we return to our Lynch/Wall Street metaphor, Dimitroff’s best work has come when buying blue-chip stocks — even if it meant flouting the now-conventional wisdom that volume is king.
Even as we conceded that no team aces every draft, there can be gradations in the sameness. (If that makes any sense.) This week Sharon Katz of ESPN Stats & Information reviewed the past 10 drafts with an eye toward identifying the organizations that find the most value in Rounds 4-7. You won't be surprised to learn that the Falcons ranked 22nd among the 32 teams at bargain-hunting.
To be fair, Dimitroff has managed only eight of those 10 drafts. (Rich McKay was the man the two years preceding.) But the guy in charge of scouting/drafting for the Falcons now is assistant GM Scott Pioli, who wrangled the drafts from 2009 through 2012 as general manager for the Chiefs. Which team ranked next-to-last among Katz’s savvy shoppers? Kansas City.
As has been mentioned a time or two, the Falcons have become a convoluted operation. There’s the high-profile owner; a big-name president (McKay); a GM who came up as a scout but is no longer in charge of scouting; an assistant GM who is in charge of scouting after getting fired in K.C., and coach Dan Quinn, who’s essentially the head of football operations, personnel apparently included.
Had the Falcons consolidated the gains made in Quinn’s 5-0 start and reached the playoffs last season, we might be looking at this org chart and saying, “Makes sense!” Alas, 5-0 became 8-8 and we’re still wondering what’s what. Trading down in this draft might be the way to go if we believed the Falcons could make hay of it. But why should we?
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