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2020 Week # 5 GDT Steelers vs. Eagles


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1 hour ago, Ward4HOF said:

I thought I had responded, but my posting didn't 'stick' I guess...basically, I was making my case for why all the draft analyst 'herd' tend to follow some draft 'pundit', who makes a statement about a draft prospect, and the rest of the 'herd' follow suit...and now, Claypool is showing how silly they look, now, for spewing such garbage like...

"I thought he was a very straight-line guy. I thought he was pretty stiff. He’s not a sudden or explosive athlete. He’s kind of a one speed guy. He’s not a guy who’s going to get in and out of breaks with a whole lot of quickness. So, I viewed him as a guy that in terms of route separation and separation quickness at the top of his stems, that that’s something he would need to significantly work on."

Doesn't matter who said it...there's 20 other similar statements, just with some words changed around...funny how many 'quick' cuts/breaks he made in and out of his routes yesterday, and how, yes, he was able to get behind coverage, lol...and now, everyone is figuring out that Claypool really is a 4.42 guy, haha...

Partially what @MOSteelers56 said is part of it.  Part of it is that ND didn't really use him in a role that suited him.  Kelly treated him more like a gadget WR by not using him down in and down out, as well as only having him run the 7-8-9 routes on the tree.  Add in the, frankly, craptastic QB play, and Claypool was running a bunch of fly/post/corner routes with poorly thrown balls that he had to try to adjust to.  Even the smoothest and best of athletes can only do so much with bad ball placement from QB's.  And that's my issue with draft pundits.  They struggle to separate WR ability from QB play.  Heck I still remember when I had disagreements on here of Johnny Manziel or Mike Evans who made who (if that isn't clear now, you are bad at this).  At the combine Claypool tested fine when it came to that explosive athlete stuff.

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20 hours ago, warfelg said:

Partially what @MOSteelers56 said is part of it.  Part of it is that ND didn't really use him in a role that suited him.  Kelly treated him more like a gadget WR by not using him down in and down out, as well as only having him run the 7-8-9 routes on the tree.  Add in the, frankly, craptastic QB play, and Claypool was running a bunch of fly/post/corner routes with poorly thrown balls that he had to try to adjust to.  Even the smoothest and best of athletes can only do so much with bad ball placement from QB's.  And that's my issue with draft pundits.  They struggle to separate WR ability from QB play.  Heck I still remember when I had disagreements on here of Johnny Manziel or Mike Evans who made who (if that isn't clear now, you are bad at this).  At the combine Claypool tested fine when it came to that explosive athlete stuff.

Exactly...it's a case of 'what did he do in college' vs 'what he is showing through the draft process (Senior Bowl, Combine, pro day, etc.)'  What these pundits also struggle with, is if an athlete 'shows' he can do all these things in the pre-draft process, maybe, IDK, go back and watch the film again...see what the coaches were coaching him to do, at both the micro and macro levels, and actually think for themselves, instead of being lazy and simply agreeing with the herd...and...what makes sense!  Sorry warfelg, don't take this the wrong way, but my goodness if a dude on a football forum can put 2 and 2 together, and actually consider all factors, instead of just 'well he was this way in college, it means he'll be this way in the pros', then why can't at least one of these analysts figure that out as well???

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1 hour ago, Ward4HOF said:

Exactly...it's a case of 'what did he do in college' vs 'what he is showing through the draft process (Senior Bowl, Combine, pro day, etc.)'  What these pundits also struggle with, is if an athlete 'shows' he can do all these things in the pre-draft process, maybe, IDK, go back and watch the film again...see what the coaches were coaching him to do, at both the micro and macro levels, and actually think for themselves, instead of being lazy and simply agreeing with the herd...and...what makes sense!  Sorry warfelg, don't take this the wrong way, but my goodness if a dude on a football forum can put 2 and 2 together, and actually consider all factors, instead of just 'well he was this way in college, it means he'll be this way in the pros', then why can't at least one of these analysts figure that out as well???

So there's a few things with that problem:

1) As we talk right now we have the benefit of hindsight.

2) Most the pundits have research teams do a bunch of the work for them.  The issue there is they aren't just doing the work for a specific team and what they are looking for, but rather they are trying to analyze close to 500 prospects.  Being kinda blunt, they just don't have the time to go back through every single player after the combine, workout days, senior bowls, and re-evaluate every player based on the new information.  Think of it this way: Mel Kiper/Todd McShay are trying to do 500 players, 25 different positions, 32 teams worth of work.  The Steelers go into the draft maybe analyzing 100 of those tops, by the time you take out who won't be in your pick range, positions that aren't a need, and taking out guys who aren't scheme fits.

3) Team workouts are the biggest missing variable to the whole thing.  We don't know what goes on during those.  Now this year was stranger than most with everything going on, but in those workouts teams can do some of the work to divorce players from each other and player from system.

In the case of Claypool, Ian Book got a lot of credit for being the engine that made the offense run.  Not the RB, not the OL, not Claypool.  Now the issue for some of these pundits are when you only see Claypool run flys, posts, and corners and not a lot of balls he needs to highpoint, you start to build a profile that they don't have him do other things rather than he can't do it.  What's interesting is Baltimore took what's basically, on paper, a clone of Claypool in Boykins.  Boykins did the same thing as Claypool.  So when the pundit looks at Claypool used the same way as Boykins, sees the troubles Boykins has in the NFL, they kinda copy and paste the same issues over assuming the coaching staff knows something we don't.

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