Philadelphia Eagles Draft | Post-Senior Bowl Big Board

The dust has settled in Mobile, Alabama. How did the Senior Bowl affect the overall rankings for the NFL draft prospects especially as it concerns to the Philadelphia Eagles?

It’s crazy, man. Eastern Washington WR Cooper Kupp snags a nice ball, and you start hearing “third WR overall.” Temple OLB Haason Reddick–who I scouted last week–bends the corner real well, and you get “end of Round 1” chatter. People see the prospects jogging around Alabama in bright orange, playing solid coverage, running solid routes, winning solid reps…and go absolutely nuts.

If you already had high grades on some of this week’s risers, all the respect to you. Everyone draws different opinions from tape. Not only is that understandable, it’s necessary. Beyond that: it’s crucial. Scouting doesn’t grow as a process without contrasting ideas.

It’s like when you (probably) learned about evolution in high school: some moths were black, and some were gray. Over time, as the trees on which the moths rested grew more gray, the gray moths hid more successfully from predators, and more gray moths survived. Eventually, all of the moths were gray.

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This is what scouting is–and has to be–especially in a community such as #DraftTwitter. At our core, we’re a gaggle of hooligans disproportionately certain in our (usually) unschooled ability. What gives us viability is only our capacity to both change and cause change. We change through capitalizing on resources provided to us, slaving away behind the tape, growing in our craft; we cause change through the collective brunt of our efforts. When we find that small-school, easily-overlooked prospect, start sharing tape and generating some hype, we change the course of the Draft process. That’s pretty crazy to think about.

But this observation serves a cautionary function: throw a few grains of salt onto Senior Bowl buzz. There are a few players–Iowa CB Desmond King and East Carolina WR Zay Jones come to mind–that drastically distinctly impacted their grades because the work they did answered big question marks I had. Players like Kupp, Alabama TE O.J. Howard, and San Diego State CB Damontae Kazee all had great weeks, but they did so via the strengths/weaknesses I had already seen and graded on tape. The Senior Bowl isn’t for discovering players, but discovering traits. Teams like the Philadelphia Eagles go with questions they want to answer, not just now beginning to evaluate these prospects.

With this in mind, here’s my post-Senior Bowl Top 100 Big Board:

Big Board

If you’d like to see a bigger table, with positional rankings (woah), you can check that out here.

And if you’d like the breakdown in groups of ten, with some comments, you can check out this thread here:

My 5 biggest risers since the last Board were:

1. Rasul Douglas, CB, WVU
2. Evan Engram, TE, Ole Miss
3. Jaleel Johnson, DT, Iowa
4. David Njoku, TE, Miami
5. Haason Reddick, OLB, Temple

Rasul, Engram, and Njoku are all great examples of my earlier point. I hadn’t heard much about these three prospects and thereby looked into them only casually. As more people grew more excited about these players, I needed to take a longer look. Douglas isn’t a stat sheet hero, but West Virginia’s unique 3-3-5 defense puts an incredible amount of stress on its corners. At 6’2 with over 32″ arms, Douglas has ideal size but plays with great fluidity, anticipation, and acceleration. His straight line speed will open eyes at the Combine, and his ball skills pop off the tape. The Eagles will have an eye on him moving forward.

Engram and Njoku play similar, stretch TE sort of games–all the rage in today’s NFL. After the Senior Bowl and a closer look at the tape, I feel comfortable with their respective abilities to work the seam and the middle of the field. I like Engram a touch more for his smoothness as an athlete, and his blocking ability, but Njoku is a monster, and I expect his Combine grades will improve his stock for me.

As a fun note: awesome Twitter follow, draft expert, and notable Ben Boulware foil Jon Ledyard took a solid amount of time and patience to explain to me how I was mis-scouting Haason Reddick, which led to Reddick’s big jump for me.

My biggest fallers were:

1. Desmond King, SS, Iowa
2. DeMarcus Walker, DE, FSU
3. Dawuane Smoot, DE, Illinois
4. Malik McDowell, DT, Michigan State
5. Devonte Fields, OLB, Louisville

Around this time of the year, most prospects who fall will do so given reports about their time at college. While I don’t incorporate legal concerns into my rankings (e.g. Mixon, Cook, Westbrook, etc…), the publicized opinions that previous coaches/teammates/reporters have regarding prospects will affect their spot. McDowell and Fields both have been questioned for their effort/commitment to football, and their general character in the locker room (Fields also has a legally murky past). They fell for those reasons, while Walker fell because I simply can’t sell him as a true 4-3 DE. His limits as a pass-rushing 5-tech really hurt his stock.

Smoot was a guy I expected to rip it up at the Senior Bowl, assuaging my concerns about his pass-rushing repertoire–instead, he tried to sprint around every tackle in Mobile and regularly ran himself out of position. I really doubted King’s ability to play man coverage, and after he validated those doubts in Mobile, I had to swap him over to safety, and he plummeted for that reason. Two good examples of how the Senior Bowl answers questions for scouts.

How the Big Board was created

I wanted to field a question I received over Twitter. I tried to answer it in 140 character snippets, but it deserves a more cohesive response:

If you’re going to scout, you have to grade. There’s an awesome podcast on trait-based scouting here by NDT Scouting stalwarts Joe Marino and Kyle Crabbs, in which they touch on this topic. Comparing two positional groups is comparing apples and oranges. You might be able to sift through a pile of oranges and say “Yes. This is it. The best of all the oranges.” You might be able to do the same for the apples. But can you take the best orange and the best apple and say which is the better quality of fruit?

It just isn’t that easy.

So you assign grades to prospects, that you have a numeric standard to which all of the prospects can be compared. My grading scale runs from 9.00 to 5.00, where players under 5.0 are undraftable, and players at or above 9.0 are Optimus Prime in shoulder pads. I only have two prospects above 8.00 this year (Texas A&M DE Myles Garrett and Alabama LB Reuben Foster).

Every position gets graded with different criteria, different traits. Catch radius accounts for about 10% of the tape grade of a WR–obviously, it doesn’t matter at all for an OLB grade. Hands (in its varying manifestations for different positions) is 20% for WRs, 15% for OL and DTs but only 10% for DE, so on and so forth. I scout nine different traits for CBs but only six for S. Each position is discrete and treated as such. Using the positional criteria to evaluate each game, the tape grade is synthesized as a percentage, which comprises the bulk of a player’s final grade.

That final grade is also affected by a player’s measurables, usually taken from the Combine. I use the outstanding resource 3 Sigma Athlete to get my SPARQ scores, which are contextualized within the SPARQ scores for that specific NFL position. And–you guessed it–the percentage to which the measurable grade impacts the final grade varies from position to position (Big for CBs and EDGEs, not huge with QBs).

An overall percentage is derived from the tape score and the athletic score, and that percentage is superimposed onto the 5.00-9.00 scale. Players above 7.50 are Top-10 talents; 7.00-7.50 are Day 1 picks; 6.00-7.00 are Day 2; 5.00-6.00 are Day 3.

Next: The Blueprint to a Successful Offseason

The most important thing I can say, if you want to scout prospects, is this: establish a grading system. Even if it isn’t perfectly accurate–as I’m sure mine isn’t–you can’t create a legitimate Big Board without grades. When you discover a flaw in your grading system (mine really didn’t like Ronnie Stanley last year), adjust it. It should be a living and breathing thing, that changes as the demands of the NFL–and your well of knowledge–change. Eventually, you’ll have a bead on what to look for, how to look for it, and what it means in the grand scheme. And then…you’re scouting.