Draft for Need vs. BPA

One small observation I have made was that in an ideal situation, you draft the best player available but AT a huge position of need and who fits your system.

This year w/o a doubt, we had, in this order, the following needs:
FS Eric Reid - filling the void of Goldson, Reid should be on the field 100%
RDE Cornellius Carradine - heir to Justin Smith and depth for Aldon Smith (pass rush)
TE Vance McDonald - replacement for D.Walker (more of a blocker with potential better hands and bigger target in the RZ/EZ)
OLB Corey Lemonier - depth and rotation for Brooks (pass rush)

The final pieces will be a small, quick slot CB to help cover Harvin/Austin, a developmental WR, swing T, NT and some ST competition.

This draft was clearly about filling our most pressing needs d/t FA and finding players who could end up being upgrades. Whether you agree on the picks or not, it clearly seems like HarBallke had a "plan" and stuck to it.

PS: Not drafting a TE high over a WR tells me a TON about what type of offense we plan on employing this year. I had a feeling that if we took a WR high, we might be shifting towards more of a spread offense. Not!

The old dictum of drafting BPA over need probably still holds for Jax, jets, raids,maybe philly, and Cleveland. But in a team so close to SB ready, drafting BPA seems to be fine as long as it is in a position of need. And that is pretty much what they did.Sometimes the lines just intersect, but in this draft we drafted BPA of our need on virtually every pick. Drafting purely BPA is probably ok for a team like the jets, jags, raids, and the St Louis offense. Also, i think for some time now, BPA is not a strict dictum, and truly is BPA based upon need, as long as the team is not in total rebuild format.

From what Baalke has said, this draft was pretty flat when it came to BPA, so that resulted on them focusing more on need.