FanPost

A History Of The Top Pick 1967-2016: Part 2

Having looked back on fifty years of the common draft and the #1 picks in those drafts (the looking back took place here), a few things stand out:

1. Selecting the best player is a lot easier in years where a quarterback is the consensus #1. Let me go back through that history of the last 50 drafts and isolate just the years where the top pick was also that draft's eventual best player:

Terry Bradshaw
Earl Campbell
John Elway
Troy Aikman
Peyton Manning
Matthew Stafford
Andrew Luck
Jameis Winston


I'll concede those last three names are penciled in pending the rest of their careers and their peers' careers. But what sticks out about that list? Is there a reason why many quarterbacks who are taken first are eventually seen to have justified that pick, while it almost never happens for non-quarterbacks? It might be simply that when you see someone like Peyton Manning in college, there's less you have to project -- the talent is just obviously there (though in truth, Manning's college career became infamous for near-misses in the biggest games).

While the talent was also obviously there for players as diverse as Lawrence Taylor, Joe Thomas, and Marshall Faulk, those men didn't have the leg up on being the top pick that being a quarterback provides. Andrew Luck was a top pick by acclimation (except for those few Robert Griffin backers who are now presumably in witness protection) and was seen as such from the time he was a college sophomore, but when you're a "generational talent" at another position, your case for going #1 is never going to be as airtight.

Finally, quarterbacks and skill players generally have stats and objective measurements to go by. Maybe Bruce Smith really was "better" than Jerry Rice, but he's perceived as slightly lesser because he didn't get the rings and because Rice has those reception and yardage figures to bolster his case. When you're an offensive lineman or play defense, your value lies in how you contribute to a unit, and one's contribution to that unit is more subjective.

This is not to say that if circumstances dictate that a quarterback is not seen as the top prospect in a draft, a team is doomed to pick some loser. There are years where the top pick turned out to be a star, even a Hall of Fame-level star, but there just happened to be someone even better chosen later on. Let's divide all the top picks since 1967 into very general productivity categories (there's projection involved with the more recent picks):


Immortals: Simpson, Bradshaw, Campbell, Elway, Bruce Smith, P. Manning
Stars/"second-tier" Hall of Famers: Bubba Smith, Yary, Jones, Selmon, Fryar, Aikman, Pace, E. Manning, Williams, Stafford, Newton, Luck
Good Players: Plunkett, Bartkowski, Billy Sims, Rogers, Jackson, Testaverde, Maryland, Bledsoe, Wilkinson, Johnson, Vick, Palmer, Alex Smith, Long, Bradford, Fisher
Meh: Matuszak, Bell, Cousineau, Kenneth Sims, George, Couch, Carr
Busts, from injury or simply liking purple drank too much: Patulski, Bruce, Emtman, Carter, Brown, Russell
TBD but looks good: Clowney, Winston
TBD but start to worry: Goff


So a team with the top pick historically stands to have about a 1-in-3 chance of drafting a player who will be in the Hall of Fame conversation, even if it's not much of a conversation (I strongly doubt Irving Fryar will ever be in Canton, but he was very productive and seemed to play forever). But there's about an equal chance of drafting an absolute bust, or someone like Jeff George or Tim Couch who can play well enough to be promoted from bust to disappointment.


2. Odds are the Browns will eventually be seen to have made the "wrong pick," but he still might be a good or even near-great player. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking: "Well, no kidding. The Browns always make the wrong pick." But it's apparent that taking the eventual best player in a draft with that draft's top pick is no sure thing for any organization, and extremely difficult at best when the consensus top pick is not a quarterback. Take Jimmy Johnson's leadership of the Dallas Cowboys, which was spectacularly successful any way you look at it. The Cowboys had the top pick twice during Johnson's tenure. The first time around, they chose Troy Aikman: bulls-eye. The second time, they picked Russell Maryland, a good run-stuffer who eventually made it to one Pro Bowl, but not someone whose memory stirs the hearts of Cowboys fans today (though admittedly 1991 was a mediocre draft year overall).

The point, though, is that mistake picks at the top spot are almost never totally illogical. It's easy now to say that the Raiders should have known that Jamarcus Russell was never going to have the work ethic to succeed in the NFL, was never going to be the sort of quarterback you could plug into a bad lineup and say "OK, win games for us," or both, but the truth is that a lot of teams loved the guy leading up to the 2007 draft. There's no case I know of, at least in the modern era of professional scouting and front offices, where a team has gone completely off the map to make the top pick. That choice is always either obvious or made from a list of what are considered equally decent options.

If Myles Garrett turns out to be a giant bust, every football writer will laugh at the Browns and claim they knew it all along. But ask yourself: if they really knew it all along, how come none of them are saying it ahead of time?


3. Since 1967, there has never been a year where a defensive player was picked first, and that player was later universally viewed as the consensus best player in that draft. Amazing, but true. Fifteen defensive players taken #1 since 1967, but none was ever clearly the best player in his draft class. Not only that, in all of NFL history, only three defensive players were ever both the top pick in the draft and an eventual Hall of Famer: Lee Roy Selmon, Bruce Smith, and Chuck Bednarik (1949), who was famously a two-way player (though all indications are that as "just" a linebacker, he would still have been very HoF-worthy).

There are three defensive #1 picks who were at least arguably the eventual best player in their draft. There's a case to be made for Mario Williams; though I don't think it's an especially strong case, the 2006 draft class is devoid of true all-time legendary talents. The first player ever taken by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Selmon, was limited to nine seasons by injury and was still All-Pro level when he retired; had he played as long as the man I had ranked ahead of him, Mike Haynes, it's possible he might have been seen as the best from the 1976 draft by acclimation. And 1985 top choice Bruce Smith was just born in the wrong year. The Virginia Tech giant would have been the best player in the vast majority of drafts in NFL history, but not the same year Jerry Rice came out.

Now, let me say this so people don't think I had an ulterior motive for going on at this length: THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT AGAINST TAKING MYLES GARRETT WITH THE FIRST PICK! There is a huge difference between saying

"Here is something that has never happened before."

and

"Here is something that can't ever happen."

Examples of something that has never happened before would be "X rushing for 2200 yards in an NFL season," or "A team winning a Super Bowl in three straight seasons" or "Now accepting the Vince Lombardi Trophy are Jimmy and Dee Haslam." History shows us these will be difficult feats indeed, but there's nothing inherent to how pro football works to indicate that any of them would be literally impossible.

Examples of something that can't ever happen would be "A guard being named MVP of the National Football League" or "Billy Cundiff has made a 78-yard field goal" or "Let's see if this 180-pound guy can play nose tackle." I feel safe in saying that barring a fundamental change to the nature of the sport or to the human body, these will never occur.

Let me give a further example. Back when Mike Holmgren was associated with the Browns, one would occasionally see calls for him to come down from the front office and start coaching the team. But I also saw people arguing against that on the very strange grounds that since no one has ever coached two different teams to a Super Bowl title, naming Holmgren coach would mean giving up on the Super Bowl as long as he was here (I'd love it if this was ever something other than a hilariously hypothetical concern for Browns fans). But clearly, someone will eventually become the first person to coach two Super Bowl champions. There's no obvious reason this has never happened before, other than good coaches tend not to move around very often. Holmgren himself came one league-sponsored Jerome Bettis Retirement Party away from actually winning that second Super Bowl championship.

And one other important point: the best player in the draft has been a defensive player, several times. It's just that no one has ever recognized it ahead of time to the point where that player was also taken #1. I'd love to go back in time to the war room of the Saints during the 1981 draft season -- and trust me, the Saints in 1980 were as bad as any team has ever been, very much including the 2016 Browns -- and find out how their people could look at game film of Lawrence Taylor and not realize that he was the best player on the board. Was it just that Earl Campbell was laying waste to the league and everyone thought they needed their own version, so New Orleans went with George Rogers? At any rate, had the Saints done the obvious thing, no one would be going "But you can't make a defensive player the top pick in the draft, because someone else is bound to be better!"

More recently, you can still make a good case that the Panthers did the right thing in taking Cam Newton over J.J. Watt in 2011 -- Newton was certainly the overwhelming consensus choice, and Watt's talents were obviously not universally recognized given that a third of the league passed on him (including the Browns, who traded out of the chance to draft him). And considering Newton's MVP award, one NFC championship, and the quarterback bonus, the Panthers probably aren't losing collective sleep over the pick. But thus far -- and keeping in mind that he may already be on the downside due to the injuries that ruined his 2016 season -- Watt is the class of the 2011 class.

If history showed that a defensive player can never emerge as the best player in a given draft, then I might be forced to say that taking Garrett will be the wrong move. But it does happen; it's just never happened when the first pick has been a defensive player. And going back to Bruce Smith, there is a case of a great defensive player and top pick who just came along in the wrong year to be acclaimed as the best player in his draft class.

One day, some woebegone team will make a defensive player the top pick in a draft, and we will all look back 20 years later and say, "Yep, he was the right pick." If the Browns think this is the year and Garrett is the player, they should not hesitate to pull the trigger.



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