01-15-2019, 11:49 PM
(01-14-2019, 04:23 PM)Shake n Blake Wrote: I'm a bit worn on hoping crappy players suddenly get better though. Excuses are also getting pretty tiring.
A fan's patience with a player's rate of development is directly proportional to how the fan felt about the player when he was drafted. And "fans" includes me. But here is a general rule I try to follow, and I think most NFL teams feel about the same way I do.
1. Never write off any player after just one season. Way too many examples of good players who did nothing as rookies.
2. Most picks from the first three rounds will get a full second year. Unless a player has been injured or moved around in different positions or schemes you should have a pretty good idea of what kind of player you have after two seasons. He may not be a finished product after two seasons, but you should be able to see a significant level of improvement from year one to 2.
3. Unless a pick is a total disaster it is better to keep them for their full rookie contracts. It is hard to replace rookie scale players in free agency, and cutting a guy on his rookie contract is like losing a draft pick. Since you can't really keep all of your draft picks every year anyway most players cut still on rookie contracts are replaced by true rookies.
It seems that if a high draft pick flounders his first coiuple of seasons it sours the fan base on him and it is hard for the player to get any respect even when he does play well.
And sometimes it turns out that those "crappy players" may not have been so crappy after all. People mocked Margus Hunt like he was a joke. He was only a backup with the Bengals but this year he started 15 games for the Colts and only 12 defensive linemen had more tackles for loss than Hunt's 13. Russell Bodine also went to a starting job with another team. I am not saying those guys were great players here, but they were not the garbage that some claimed. If it was so easy to just draft better players every year guys like Hunt and Bodine would not still be playing.
