Monday, April 12, 2004
NFL Draft.
The Providence, R.I. Journal provides an interesting look into New England Patriots Heac Coach Bill Belichick's mind:
Coach explains how Pats' picks stack up
Imagine this: It's midway through the NFL Draft's second round and you're on the clock. You need a guard. Only one has been drafted so far. But you also could use a cornerback. Four of those have gone. To confuse the equation further, a defensive tackle you really like is still on the board. You figured he'd be gone by now, but he looms there, complicating your conversation about the merits of the guard and the cornerback.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
This is the kind of eventuality the New England Patriots are preparing for right now. In a conversation that made us realize once again that we don't know what we don't know, head coach Bill Belichick detailed what his coaching staff, personnel and scouting departments are doing between now and draft day on April 24.
"Anywhere between 95 and 98 percent of the information
on players is in," Belichick said from his cell phone, while driving away from Gillette Stadium around 7 p.m. Tuesday. "Some of our scouts are still out on the road and we'll get the final information from them later in the week."
Then he began explaining what the team was doing in-house.
"What happens is, when you set the board you run into clumps where you have a group of guys in together, and then you break those clumps up and try to break that clump up relative to each other, not to position. You have the sixth guard and eighth receiver and the fourth safety, all are sitting right there together, and you don't have a definitive feeling on which one should be rated higher, so you have to figure out what the best fit is for you.
"The other part [currently being done] is figuring out what we do when a grade on a player doesn't jibe. When we stack the board we do it independently. So we sometimes have a guy with a 75 [rating] that is better than a guy with an 81, and you have to figure it out and talk about that."
Great. Not more than 90 seconds into explaining the process and already we had to ask for clarification on some of the terms he was using. But Belichick's a pretty patient guy when it comes to explanations. So we opted to ask the question and run the risk of looking like a moron instead of writing a poorly reported story that would remove all doubt.
"What does 'stack the board' mean exactly? What goes into that?"
"Stacking by position is, in relative terms, the easiest thing to do," he explained. "You simply stack guards 1 to 10 or whatever."
It's a simple matter of figuring out how players stack up at each position, Belichick explained. This is how it works. After each player has been thoroughly scouted, he is given an overall grade that generally runs from 1.0 (extreme longshot to make any team) to 9.0 (possible franchise player). Most first-rounders come in between 6.0 and 7.0.
Every single draftable player isn't stacked, Belichick pointed out. At some point the decision-makers conclude that they've reached the end of the players who could make their team. Sometimes that's after four players. Sometimes it's after a dozen.
"As you vertically stack, it's just, 'The first is better than the second, the second's better than the third,' " Belichick pointed out.
After the vertical stack, the next step is the horizontal stack. This is where the player grades really figure in.
"Once it's all up vertically at every position, then you look across horizontally. You have a 6.0 grade for linebacker X. Then you follow across on the board and find the guys with the other 6.0 grades.
"This part is hard to do," Belichick explained. "Here you start talking about a corner on the rise versus a center who's a good player but not a good athlete."
With so many players on the board, it's inevitable that there will be bunches of players with the same overall grade.
"At some point you have to break up that clump and say, 'OK, this is one, this is two, this is three.' Even if you have 15 guys in the 6.0 range and another 15 in the 6.1, you have to determine, 'This guy over that guy, that guy over the next guy,' and now you're in another vertical stack within your horizontal stack."
Belichick said the horizontal stack is usually the most difficult to complete. But when it's done, it becomes easier to take the final step in setting up the board. That's the final vertical stack in which the players are listed from the best player in the draft through the final draftable player.
"In the final stack, all those guys with 6.0, they should have a number next to their name that rates them higher or lower than the other guys at 6.0," Belichick said. "You rate the players 1-50, 51-100 and on down. So it's vertical, horizontal -- which is hard -- and then another vertical stack."
Belichick said this process shouldn't be hard, but added, "It inevitably is, because you get situations where you see a guy at 65 and you know you'd take him before the guy you have at 51. So who's in the wrong place? The guy at 51 or the guy at 65?"
This is where the scouting information that's been compiled since last fall becomes crucial. Belichick, vice president of player personnel Scott Pioli and the rest of the indispensable scouting department now go back and look at films and reports and make determinations on players.
The scouting process is long, intricate and multilayered. Consistency in evaluation is one of the top priorities.
"We want the same eyes to see the same players," Belichick said. "First we scout regionally, then we have our scouts who scout nationally come in and look at those players. [The national scouts] will see all the players on offense, defense, east of the Mississippi, west of the Mississippi. Then by the end of November we break it up and do it positionally. By the time the combine comes [in March], a regional scout, the national scout, a position scout, a position coach and, ultimately, Scott and I will look at them. We get six or seven looks at a guy. When we put the whole board together, that's where Scott and I and the national scouts come in and start stacking horizontally."
And whether he's a projected first-rounder or a player who's barely draftable, you can't just give him one look.
"There's no shortcut," Belichick said. "You have to see the players. The hard part is when you have bad information. Like when you're scouting a player, looking at him and the guy's playing on an ankle sprain and toughing it out for two weeks and you don't have that info. If you get a player on the wrong games, things like that that can skew information."
Even after all the scouting and stacking is done, the decision-makers still leave themselves wiggle room on the day of the draft.
Asked if the team remains locked into its "stack," Belichick said, "Once you get the draft board set, as the head coach and director of personnel, Scott and I still have the authority to make determinations based on the football team. You have this guy rated at 55, but we really need the guy at 63. Sometimes you do that within the draft. But I know if I take this 63, the 55 might still be there. You may have graded the player at 55 higher because of your system and you know you're higher on him than other teams. So we're going to take the player at 63 and hope for the 55 on the next pick. Or sometimes you look and say, 'This is the last tackle on the board for a long time. We have linebackers rated higher, but there are more of them.' So you need to take the tackle. That's just draft strategy."
Another draft strategy -- one which the Patriots often summon -- is dealing.
On the table in front of the principal decision-makers is a draft-order page, a "needs page" listing each team's weak spots, and a value page with information about each pick's relative value and trades made for those spots in the past few years.
"After every pick we make, we talk about what the needs of teams five, six, seven spots ahead of us are so we have idea of what they're looking at," Belichick said. "If you know a team needs a receiver, for instance, and they didn't get a receiver in the first round, they pretty much have to take a receiver in the second round. That second pick is more predictable."
Also indispensable to the Patriots: the trade phone. Sometimes it's Pioli or Belichick on that horn. Sometimes it's the team's "trade expert." But someone's always sitting near to it. And it often rings.
"Some teams don't make trades," Belichick pointed out. "Other teams -- like us -- will. And a lot of teams will call us because they know we will deal and pull the trigger. More opportunities come our way because of that.
"Usually, we get the guys we want to get where we want to get them. Sometimes we don't. Like with Ty Warren last year, we had to move up [one spot in the first round] to get him. With [Eugene] Wilson we could move down and take him in the second, then we had to move up again [to get him at 35]."
With their 4 picks in the first two rounds, 10 overall and 5 on the first day, the Patriots are the biggest players in this year's draft. The trade phone will be ringing off the hook, the debates on whether or not a player will be on the board when the next pick rolls around will rage and New England will make decisions that help ensure the length of its stay among the league's elite.
And on the days between now and April 24, decisions that lead to the final decisions are already being made.
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