Originally posted by jbeale49:
Originally posted by Jd925:
Wow. That's awesome. It shows a lot about the dynamics of a draft. I like how they went after players who they wanted instead of using the best player available + needs strategy. It shows the hits and misses and the psychology of trades.. it's true there are too many cooks in the kitchen these days and it's better to have one really good guy making the final decisions so you can really make some bold moves. It seems Baalke is good at making moves, but in terms of evaluation a great coaching staff would be highly valuable input in finding the right players, not the BPA or just a need. Not everything is so clear cut and having coaches that can work with players is definitely huge. This really changes my perspective on coaching and talent evaluation. All the various short background stories around each player were great. Walsh could see a lot in just one or two tapes... I like the simple rating system they had .. and having +5, -5 ..and no 5 because he wanted scouts to make a decision... In regards to coaching the Harvard Business Review article mentioned he would rate players 1-10 on the coachability scale... top 2 you wouldn't need to really coach, bottom 2 you couldn't coach, but the middle 6 were important based on the level of work they could be taught via drills. Fascinating stuff. It's also great he gave an outside groupie like Dillman a shot at choosing the 10th round pick ... I used to love looking for sleeper picks myself...lol
Glad you enjoyed it. So much has changed. Hearing BW liked Rathman because he ran track and performed in the high jump shows you how little info they had to use. We know everything about each player now to meticulous detail. It wasn't a fair fight back then, he was light years ahead of his contemporaries.
Yeah Rathman was a fascinating story. His athleticism stood out, but the funny thing about is most of the niner scouts had him rated lower than 5 which meant he wasn't projected to make the cut, but Walsh trusted Al Davis's judgement and took him anyways.
I think the big thing from an talent evaluation standpoint was how confident they were in coaching players. They looked at the very best of what a player could do on film because they thought as good coaches they could make most of the players perform at that high level consistently. That's a pretty key insight.
