Today we welcome the Ratings submissions of Draft Daddy to the Draft Project.
On March 11, 2010, we announced the creation of The Draft Project, what we feel is a groundbreaking and revolutionary way to grade the Draft analysts so that we eliminate the noise from all of these draft yahoos. Hell, we here at UltimateNYG could be ADDING to the noise, for all we know! We sincerely do not believe so, as our cherry-picked comments from the past two years of Wonder’s strobe light have been pretty solid. But that is not comprehensive enough. We need verification. We need to hold our commentators accountable. Ideally we will hold anyone and everyone accountable for what they say. Wonder and Pete have both supplied their ratings. Greg G of NFL House has accepted the challenge.
On April 1, 2010, the NY Times Fifth Down announced the NFL Draft Project. Matt Bitonti of Draft Daddy saw this and accepted the challenge. Here are his ratings.
Andy- I am the publisher of the NFL draft website draftdaddy.com. We really enjoy your site. Also we would be proud to submit to any long term grading of rankings, as per your mention in the New York Times blog. We had Michael Oher ranked higher than Jason Smith. We had Austin Collie ranked higher than many WR last year. We feel our judgments rank as good or better than anyone’s in the draft world. Thanks, Matt
Do you notice how everyone, including ourselves, has the cherry-picking strobe?! A broken clock is going to be right twice per day. In this case, Matt was responding to Wonder’s success in dropping Smith and highlighting Austin Collie. The problem is that every analyst is going to have their bright moments and their terd. By making every player get a verifiable grade, you get rid of the gaps, everything is there and you can no longer ignore mistakes. Matt Bitonti may indeed be the draft expert we are looking for. But now we stop guessing and start verifying.
I am willing to bet this entire exercise will make our analysts actually get better because they will actually have the analytical feedback mechanism they missed.
Matt Millen eventually gets fired. Mel Kiper can be a windbag for years and years, living off of one confrontation with one GM back in the 80’s. There is no tenure here- you have to show us what you have.
It looks like we will likely get a fifth set of ratings from The Mayor, a commenter on this blog. Our goal is to keep getting the word out over the next 12 months and get a lot more than 5 people for next year.
Without getting too philosophical about all of this, let’s take a step back and review why we are even here. Blogs exist because they are a virtually free medium. “The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan. Blog messages are grass roots attempts to share insight and other information hitherto unavailable before. We’ve come a long way from the Gutenberg Press to being able to theoretically voice anything and have it air on the other side of the globe in a fraction of a second. While this new medium offers incredible power, it also corrupts itself because now billions of people can yell and scream. In an age where everyone can speak, nothing gets heard!
The Draft Project is attempting to filter through all of the noise of the myriad numbers of draft analysts and challenge them all to be verified. We’d be lying if we expected Mayock and Kiper et al to be joining the Draft Project anytime soon- they have too much to lose and little to gain. But we know better. This is inevitable. Verification is coming for everyone. Yes, even the people who are entrenched at ESPN et al. They will be weeded out and dispatched as noise too if/when enough good surviving analysts emerge who are verified.
So who’s it gonna be? Will Pete, Wonder, Eric, Matt, or possibly Mayor be the one who shows skill? We do not know and that is specifically why we are doing this. There is no prejudice. Anyone who wants to enter gets to enter. We emailed around 7 or 8 others and only Eric accepted. We hope to see more and more people join each year so that the track record becomes even stronger and more discerning. Our goal is selfish- we just want to find out who has a clue about the draft and let them get our ear. The internet can afford to lose a little bit of the noise and get a little bit of the truth. We deserve that much. It may take a little longer to make it happen, but this is worth the time.
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