Coming up with a viable NFL drafting strategy is an elusive skill for even the most experienced front office professional, let alone the average fan. You must balance the Best Player Available (BPA) concept with the reality that your team has specific positional needs. Add to that basic balancing act the Darwinian evolutionary factor: it often takes two to three full seasons before a quality draft pick realizes his ultimate potential as a professional player.
You’re mixing a lot of variables, not to mention you have to get a “feel” for the individual candidate’s character and work ethic, not just his athletic upside.
GK Brizer was the first to use the term “mBPA” (which stands for “modified Best Player Available”) in the context of draft discussions here at the EYE. Basically it means you try to incorporate the big picture in your draft board and modify your perspective of the Best Player Available at a particular slot in the draft order by at least considering present and future positional needs.
Our emerging draft guru ~BROZ (who also writes as a contributor to Drafttek) picked up on the mBPA concept many years ago and ran with it.
Both Brizer and ~BROZ agree; the cardinal sin of drafting for positional need is “reaching” for a player who may or may not fill a positional hole in the roster, thereby missing out on another guy at another position who simply ends up being a more valuable player in the future.
So you have to walk a thin line between “BPA” and “need”… you have to MODIFY your choices accordingly.
Lately ~BROZ has taken the gospel of “mBPA” philosophy to the unwashed masses of the Bleeding Green Nation fan gallery.
This week he provided a free lecture on the subject. Here is how he framed mBPA for the benefit of mostly young fans who had never heard of the concept:
“Everyone knows this is what smart teams do:
C: Repeat…. while giving slight preference to your roster strengths……. i.e. if a CB and OLineman are equally ranked, and your corners suck but your OLine is awesome, pick the CB. If the OLineman is a good deal better than the CB, screw your depth chart and pick the OLineman.
It’s really not that hard,….if you just stop and think about it for a while.”
That’s mBPA in a nutshell. It requires a little more discipline of thought than most fans are willing to give, as ~BROZ pointed out with glee to his youthful critics in the BGN gallery. But it really is the professional way to go.
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