Look at Dammy's sig... that tells you how obsessed with himself being right and everyone else being wrong he is.

I said the move for Fisher was a good one, and the way he executed it was even better. But aren't you Mr. BPA? Because to me, Jenkins was BPA at 21. I know you're going to say "but Ballard and the Colts didn't", but we've already established that Ballard isn't infallible. One thing I will say for sure is that I value a combination of floor and ceiling much higher than what it appears most NFL front offices do. They all appear to want to swing for the fences every time, which is why it's not surprising that the first round bust rate is 50%. What's funny to me is how much you all get on me about looking at measureables, but don't recognize when Ballard is unnecessarily obsessing over measureables (in this case arm length for OTs). Based on his statements, I'm betting he had Rashawn Slater, the guy who shut down Chase Young, as a Guard because of arm length. There is a validity to looking at arm length to project a player to LT in the NFL, but I think that's more about failure rate than it is about requiring abnormally long arms as Ballard seems to. Basically, if a potential OT has shorter than 33" arms, he's probably going to have to kick inside to OG in the NFL. The failure rate on OTs with arms shorter than 33" is 100% over the last several decades according to others who have done research on that sort of thing. Jenkins and Slater both had longer than 33" arms and incredible tape. I know Jenkins played RT at OKSU, but so did Tyron Smith at USC, and he's been a pretty solid NFL LT. When you watch Jenkins on tape, you see LT traits. Great kickslide, excellent technician who occasionally toys with DEs with his technique, able to handle speed (demolished Ossai the whole game), able to handle power, doesn't cheat outside and leave inside rush lanes, finishes every play strong. When the testing numbers came back, that eliminated any doubt he could play LT at the next level, at least in my mind. His RAS score was 9.74 or something ridiculous like that. At 21, Jenkins was the best combination of floor and ceiling, and Paye was the best ceiling. I'd rather have the former, but since we now have the latter, I hope it works out.

Doesn't matter if they can outrun Paye if he's stuck on a block.

LOL you mean because I ripped the one time in the history of the board that Omaha actually admitted he was wrong about something? That's more a commentary on him. I have no problem admitting when I'm wrong, feel free to dig through my post history. An example I know off the top of my head is that I was wrong about Nelson being a bad pick at 6. It's hard to project someone to be the next John Hannah, though.

While Ballard isn't infallible it sure seem like you think you are Dam. I, like most of us freaks, like to think I think for myself. Me personally, I think Ballard is correct and you are wrong. Nothing more to it than that. I will say that I enjoy your strongly held opinions, without them this would be a dead board right now, so please keep telling me how stupid I am :) for not thinking like you do. It is fun to argue over shit that matters not.

Jenkins WAS NOT the BPA at 21. Paye was

I certainly don't think I'm infallible and I haven't called anyone stupid for not sharing my opinion. You hit the nail on the head with that last sentence, though.

I disagree for the aforementioned reasons. Time will bear out who is right, and quite frankly because of who the Colts drafted, I hope I turn out wrong, but I don't think I will.

So you would feel better with a Jenkins at tackle and Justin Houston at End?

I’d take Fischer /Paye over that any day

Gotta look at the possibilities

Yes. I think Odeyingbo is going to be better than Paye anyway, so the experienced, productive Houston at DE and the NFL ready Jenkins lining up at LT next to Nelson appeals to me a lot more than the raw Paye being DE1 with the injured Eric Fisher hopefully being back in time for Week 1 and providing slightly better play than Jenkins.

Houston’s play was severely declining and there’s no way you can say Fischer is only slightly better than Jenkins if he was that dam good he would’ve been gone by 21

Give me the solid LT

And the DE with upside

Odengbo was a luxury pick at this point

Jared Allen and Marques Colston were 7th round picks. Alvin Kamara was a 3rd round pick. Jeff Saturday was a UDFA. NFL scouts don't always get it right.

Dam Our pass rush sucked last year Is it your take that Houston is capable of improvement with aging, because if he isn't and we had signed him our pass rush does not improve and we would be fucked. No guarantees with Paye but every player was just potential at some point. More fun to root for a young guy, watching the ones who succeed is special as a fan.

My take is Odeyingbo is going to likely be the better of the two drafted DEs, and that drafting Jenkins and Odeyingbo and signing Houston would've been better especially in the short term but also in the long term than drafting Paye and Odeyingbo and signing Fisher. Really, whatever other pieces you want to throw in there, for me it's basically Jenkins is IMO the better player than Paye.

Jared Allen was a 4th round pick.

You're right. I thought I'd heard him talked about as a 7th round pick before somewhere and didn't bother to check. Still, 4th round is a long way from where he should've been in the 2004 draft, which is Top 10-15. Side note: wow that class was loaded.

What Ballard has available is getting input from the scouts and the college coaches of these draft picks. I dont know what the coaches have done in the age of covid, in the past the coaches had interviews with the future picks at the combine. Its not all arm length and bench presses. I recall Polian was sold on Dallas Clark on the interview. Polian saw the talent, but was impress by Clark’s character. Same reason the Colts took Edge over Ricky Williams, it wasnt about talent as it was his character.

All the tape measures and video tape cant give you the character, desire, or drive of an individual. That comes from person to person interaction. Ballard knows Fisher. There is an added dimension to his decision to trust a known quantity rather than a rookie at LT. IF Fisher can recover, he is a better choice.

I understand the obsession with numbers, but football is all about players and how they go about their profession. Some one needs to see how many current Colts were captains on their college teams. Bet you there are a few

I really like Jenkins too, just not as a left tackle. Houston is getting too fucking old. Me and Spears like Paye, obviously you have doubts about him and that's ok. I've added a video of Spears talking about Paye. If I remember correctly, I ranked Sewell as my number one tackle, and you had him ranked a lot lower. Yet Sewell was the first LT taken in the draft. These fucking scouts know a hell of a lot more than you and me. I watch a lot of Pac 12 games due to the fact that I live in Commifornia and Sewell was a beast. I'm no fucking expert on these prospects coming out of the draft, I readily admit that. But that's ok, there is a lot more going on than either you or I know about. At the end of the day, we are just fans, we don't get paid for being right or wrong. You have takes that make you look like a smart MF if you are right. You liked Russel Wilson over RGIII, and after the first year you were right. RGIII was a hell of a talent until he got fucked up in his rookie year. Be happy we drafted two top DE's that have the potential to be game changers, Jenkins is not a game changer and never will be. Outside of Sewell and Slater, I wasn't very high on any of the other linemen doing jack shit at the left tackle position, including Darrisaw. Oh well, it's fun to debate this shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JptL7uUq3A

I am hoping we have drafted our Mathis and Freeney this year. That is one element that we have sorely missed.

I just don't get the idea that these scouts know so much more than us, especially if you can watch the same games (they do have the advantage of college All-22, which is the holy grail of scouting) and learn what makes a player good and what doesn't. Also, I'm obviously not the only person who thinks Jenkins is a LT, because the Bears released a perfectly solid starting caliber NFL LT to plug Jenkins in there. I know you disparaged the Bears front office before, and I'm inclined to agree with you on their overall incompetence, but they had one hell of a draft, and by your logic, they are an NFL scouting group that believes in Jenkins's ability to play LT. I think they're right, they got 2 of the top 15 players in this draft, and they filled 2 of the 3 most important positions in football with them.

Irsay is hoping for that too. I will say this: I hate Kwity Paye the draft pick because his floor is bust, but I love Kwity Paye the human, because he appears to have a great deal of internal motivation to succeed as well as such an amazing story, and I hope that that translates into Kwity Paye the player developing an arsenal of pass rush moves and becoming the devastating edge defender he could be at his ceiling.

Well, the Bears might be right about Jenkins, time will tell. Hell, I've been wrong more times than I care to talk about.

And that is the fatal flaw almost all of us have.

I play golf. I have played golf since my teenager years going on 35 years at this point. At one point in my late 20s, I held a 10 handicap on PGA rated courses which means I was a pretty good normal golfer but nowhere near good enough to try the pros.

I got to play one round with a pro at a pro-am (Brad Bryant) who in 1997 was the 81st ranked player on the PGA tour by money. That was the highest ranking he ever had on the tour. Sufficient to say, he was only a marginal PGA golfer.

As we played, we talked through his logic on each holes and the factors that he used to determine his landing zone. His understanding of the game was LIGHT YEARS better than mine. He considered factors that I did not even comprehend existed. The type of grass, how it was mowed, how the wind was folding the grass over, how the bunker was raked, his reading of the green was so much better than mine.

In 2012, I was a little league coach for my son's 5th/6th grade team. I coached the O-Line and the D-Line. I played both O-Line and D-Line through high school, attempted to walk onto a Big 10 football team and spent three weeks in summer practice with Purdue before being cut, have watched and studied O-Line and D-Line play for decades as a fan.

Before the season, I went to talk to the high school O-Line and D-Line coaches (two different folks) about how they wanted technique taught at our level to then filter up to the middle school and high school teams.

Again, night and day about their understanding of technique, footwork training drills and mindsets that mine. The depth of what they understood about what makes for a successful skillset and mindset was much deeper than mine.

I have been in my profession for 25 years. I get kids out of college all the time disagreeing with my logic and recommendations on how to do task completion only to come back a couple of weeks later asking for advice since their project is all messed up.

There is a light year difference in those who DO and those who WATCH.

This is exactly why you get so much push back. You ALWAYS think you're smarter than everyone else When you can see you're not, more people will take you more seriously

It is somewhat insulting to think that what I do as a hobby I’m just as good as someone who has committed their lives to a job. No way my hour every few days is as good as spending 8 hours or more a day every day studying these dudes. Expertise takes time.

Not only that like I said earlier they get to sit down and talk to these guys talk to their coaches, parents, and teammates it’s not only what we see in game day or pro day

Per his agent, Leno has agreed to a 1 year, $5M deal with Washington.

https://twitter.com/RapSheet/status/1392508265704140801

I understand your point, but I would counter with: scouts watch, same as us. Yes, understanding of the game is important, but there are ways to get that. The subtle nuances of the best handfighting techniques, how to engage and defeat a blocker (DL), or how to reestablish hands and reanchor once a rusher has successfully defeated hands or gotten the blocker off balance (OL) are in fact techniques and worries best left to the coaching staff to understand and develop in the player, I would 100% agree with that as a big part of their job is player development. But scouting is more like checking off boxes on a quality check. You want to see the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly to determine what you think a player can and can't do. Then you get testing numbers, and if something stands out as unexpected, you cross check again. Of course the NFL front offices get a deluge of information we just don't get access to, and I think the Colts' employment and deployment of Brian Decker is brilliant and necessary in the modern NFL. Obviously that additional information is going to change their evaluations some, probably mostly by taking some players off their board. To me, that is the biggest difference between pro scouting departments and people who learn it on their own. After all, there are independent NFL draft experts, and they get a lot of things right that the NFL gets wrong (of course it goes the other way as well). I'm not saying that I'm one of those, but there also has been crossover between NFL front offices and independent draft experts, so I guess the question would be where do you draw the line?

There is no line. We all get to have our opinions, hold them strongly and argue over it. It is great because in the end it is just a game-the best game but still just entertainment. I am opinionated enough that every once in a blue moon I get it right over the pros. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.

Another factor is what will sell where they are playing. What are the coaches looking for, and what is the organizational philosophy. What one franchise needs is different from another one. Fan bases expect a certain quality for their team. For example, Pitt players and Cheats players are somewhat different.

I don't really understand this. We're discussing opinions, I'm not just going to change mine because there are more or louder opinions from others. If I'm trying to change anyone else's opinion, I'm going to cite evidence that can be verified. Again, I'm not claiming to be an expert, but the best experts get it wrong more than half the time. That makes the margin between the best experts and random chance (which comes in at about 22% success) about 20%.

You're right, expertise does take time. According to people who study such things, expertise takes approximately 10,000 hours of investment in any subject to obtain. I'm no Dane Brugler, but I'd say over 16 years of doing my own film analysis of prospects, I've put in about half that amount of time. It would be neat to put Dane Brugler levels of time into it, but I don't have that much time available to me.

When does it become more than "a blind squirrel finds a nut"?

When you get paid by an NFL team and be in the room on draft day

Oh absolutely situation matters. It can be the most important factor in success or failure of a prospect.

Really? You don't think Daniel Jeremiah or Dane Brugler has more knowledge than a scouting intern who was "in the room on draft day"? Because that's a foolish opinion.

When does it become more than a blind squirrel finds a nut? For me never. I don’t care enough to spend the 10K hours.

Your opinion seems to always be the loudest.

Now this is where you really lose me Dam. A scouting intern? Do you really think these NFL teams who are run by billionaires rely on a scouting intern? What the fuck are you talking about? Ballard really liked Paye, and he was not going to be swayed by some scouting intern. SMDH!

These so called draft gurus don't talk to the players, they don't know how they think or how committed they are. Mel Kiper said Mahomes would be a bust and the Colts should have drafted Trent Dilfer. I like Jeremiah, but he is no smarter than most of us on this board, well maybe he is, but not by much.

Seems louder to me if 3 or 4 people are responding back with the same opinion, but could just be me.

Who said anything about Ballard being swayed by a scouting intern? I certainly didn't. My comment about a scouting intern was in response to JAFF's comment that seemed to imply that "being in the room on draft day" was the only thing that could make one an expert, which is ludicrous on its face, because there are some people in some of those rooms with almost no experience, and let's not forget that Ryan Grigson ran several draft rooms, and he might be the worst drafting GM ever. I challenge anyone to read The Beast and tell me that Dane Brugler doesn't have as much or more knowledge as an area scout who is "in the room" with 1-5 years of experience.

This is what Kiper said about Mahomes. Seems pretty spot on to me. As for Dilfer, he was an NFL average starting QB and would've been way more valuable than Trev Alberts was.

Right. Sure. Must be hard, never being wrong

Guessing you think you know from experience?

I’m wrong on occasion, watch my spellink.

But I dont claim to be something that I’m not. And those two guys you mentioned earlier, never heard of them. Which NFL teams have them in their scouting office?

https://www.colts.com/news/eric-fish...fs-free-agency


Eric Fisher talks about joining the Colts^^^

What did I claim to be that I'm not?

Your standard is arbitrary and therefore not worth acknowledgement.