https://www.reddit.com/r/NFL_Draft/c...71_40_in_1985/
https://news.google.com/newspapers?n...8,597545&hl=en
This artificial divide between "real" football and "fake numbers" football is such utter nonsense. I don't think that anyone actually believes that the NFL works like a Disney movie where the player with fundamental deficits in athletic ability can overcome those and make a star turn because of heart and desire. That just does not happen. At best, you can carve out Matekavich's career.
Numbers have a great sorting role. They can cause you to take a closer look at a players tape to see if you missed anything. Or they can assist in sorting players into categories for analysis and comparison.
For this year's TE class you have three bins of players:
1. Guys who have demonstrated good catching but poor blocking. Most of them tested to be "average" NFL athletes at best. So, this makes it difficult to argue that their "all catch no block" TE style will be really impactful. Young Jimmy Grahamn was with that style because his athletic abilities created physical mismatches. Old Jimmy Grahamn is "meh" with that style because he isn't an overwhelming mismatch anymore.
2. Guys who can block, but we don't know a great deal about them as receivers. Here, the limited game tape should be the guide, but on some of these guys their college teams just didn't ask them to do NFL TE things. So, we can look to testing numbers. Do any of these guys put up athletic measurables that would warrant an NFL team using a later round draft pick and developing the player? There are a few names here, but not as many as in other/recent TE classes.
3. The top 2-4 prospects in the class. Some tested well and have good and bad stuff on tape. Others tested poorly and have good stuff on tape. No prospect that has both just knocked out of the park. Obviously, you have to acknowledge that all of this is a guess anyways...
My opinion, is that based on the track records and physical abilities of the 3 TEs now on the roster, the Steelers are far more likely to pick someone from bin 1 or bin 2 rather than bin 3. A combination of looking at video clips on the internet, reading the opinions of others, and (heaven forbid) numbers and (oh the humanity -- won't someone think of the children!) analytics is how I got to that apparently fundamentally controversial opinion.
I don't think the idea that the signing of Ebron, the retaining of McDonald, and the existence of Gentry being used to support the opinion that in the absence of a consensus dominant ready to roll NFL TE in this year's class that the Steelers take a later round prospect to stash and develop is all that out of left field or somehow out of step with reasonable potential outcomes.