It absolutely is debatable. We may not know what their board looked like, but you can say whether a pick was an excessive reach or not. I can all but say absolutely that Strange and/or Bigsby were not the top guy on their board. But, when their time came to pick, the team saw positional value, roster need, and remaining board strategy as ways to dismiss other players on their board. We have no idea if they attempted to trade back, or had offers from other teams to trade into our picks. Could we have landed either guy if we moved off the picks? Maybe not. Could we have picked more immediate needs that might not have been ranked on our board as highly? Maybe.

Any and all of these factors help shape the argument whether a pick was a reach or not. We don't need the absolute for a debate. If we had a picture of their board, a statement from all the other 31 owners regarding their strategies with respect to each player, and a full foretelling of their future performance it would simply be statement of fact, and not any debate as to whether the selection was a reach or a savvy choice.

It's not a reach when you take the top player on your board.  That's just your board sucks.  But we have no clue they were the top player left on their board.  I think they were, then the pick makes sense.  Their board was just bad is all.

I think your statement describes the exact same thing, "reaching" is that your draft board doesn't match up with all of the other teams.  'Reaching' is defined from a perspective that is outside the team.  If you draft a player in the 1st round, where every other team wouldn't draft him until the 3rd that is the definition of reaching.  The quality of the player is irrelevant (ie. Taking Tom Brady in the 3rd round would have been a reach.) And the term 'reaching' is for the most part subjective (though sometimes it's obvious) because no one has every teams draft board at the time of the draft.

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Ive said many times there are instances you dont take the top guy, its just rare becuase most teams arent stacked to a point where they wont need a good player at a position this year or next.  Some GM's just fill holes for need and some take the top guy even if its not as big of a need.  There are BPA type GMs and there are needs based drafting GMs.  

Thats bolded isnt debateable either because we dont know what their board looked like and dont know if we took the top guy or not. 

 Im going to believe they took the top guy because neither TE or RB were a bigger need than G.  You could still debate the Strange and Bigsby picks and come back in a year and check it out but we just dont know if they truly were the top guy available on their board.  CB is the biggest need on the team but if Bowers falls im taking him even though i dont think TE is a huge need.  If i have one of the pass rushers available thats higher on my board over a CB ill take them as well or OT etc. even though corner i feel is the biggest need.  Some GMs wouldnt do it because they dont think its a bigger need.  Some on here have said they dont want Bowers because its not a need.  That is needs vs PBA drafting.  Thats the debate.

It absolutely is debatable. We may not know what their board looked like, but you can say whether a pick was an excessive reach or not. I can all but say absolutely that Strange and/or Bigsby were not the top guy on their board. But, when their time came to pick, the team saw positional value, roster need, and remaining board strategy as ways to dismiss other players on their board. We have no idea if they attempted to trade back, or had offers from other teams to trade into our picks. Could we have landed either guy if we moved off the picks? Maybe not. Could we have picked more immediate needs that might not have been ranked on our board as highly? Maybe.

Any and all of these factors help shape the argument whether a pick was a reach or not. We don't need the absolute for a debate. If we had a picture of their board, a statement from all the other 31 owners regarding their strategies with respect to each player, and a full foretelling of their future performance it would simply be statement of fact, and not any debate as to whether the selection was a reach or a savvy choice.

Well yeah you can say it or anything you want for that matter, but can you say it while also knowing it's in fact true?  I don't see how.  The talking head created big boards and mock drafts are fun and might loosely be where the consensus of 32 team boards are, but the further away you get from pick 1 overall the looser it gets and the confidence level goes down.  Each team is doing significantly more work on their board than any talking head or fan will ever do.  So if Mel Kiper says a particular pick was a reach, great.  He's welcome to his opinion, but he can't possibly know where said player was on any team's board unless a picture of the draft room and board is leaked ala Dallas during the Alualu draft years ago or unless after the draft someone from a particular front office offers up the info (rare).

We actually traded back and landed Strange while missing out on Torrance.  Who knows for certain whether that was the plan all along or if a tier grade on our board disappeared before that selection, but usually trading back a few spots means one of a few things.  Either there are several guys you have graded at a similar tier and no real preference on which one you get as long as you get one of them, OR, in the case of Harrison, being relatively certain you will still get your guy while picking up some extra draft capital, OR lastly, a grade tier perhaps evaporated just before your pick and you are trading back to regroup and re-think your strategy because you have no obvious target any longer at that particular point in the draft.  The first and 3rd explanations are similar except in the 3rd one you probably have a lot of guys now graded similarly in the lower tier you find yourself selecting from all of a sudden.

There are of course scenarios where it makes sense to grab a player from a position of need where the well is running dry and perhaps there is one last viable DT candidate while there are plenty of solid WR candidates.  Perhaps you select the lower graded DT while hoping to still get a solid WR in the following round where DT would no longer be a wise choice.  I think, on hypothetically taking the DT earlier in this scenario, that he'd still have to have a quality grade and be in a similar tier as the WRs, otherwise I don't know how smart it would be.  I guess it's all very scenario specific, but I could see scenarios such as that where not taking the 88 graded WR over the 86 graded DT, because there are 5 other receivers with 80+ grades, one of which might be there for you the following round where the next DT behind 86 is a 75 grade.  Take the DT and hope the odds are in your favor for WR in the following round vs. taking the WR and knowing you're getting just a rotational guy at best at DT in the following round.

In short, positional scarcity can drive up grade/value as it does every year with QBs getting pushed to the top of the draft when there are better overall prospects at other positions. Positional scarcity can and does manifest itself at various positions at various points in the first few rounds of a draft in any given draft.

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It's not a reach when you take the top player on your board.  That's just your board sucks.  But we have no clue they were the top player left on their board.  I think they were, then the pick makes sense.  Their board was just bad is all.

I think your statement describes the exact same thing, "reaching" is that your draft board doesn't match up with all of the other teams.  'Reaching' is defined from a perspective that is outside the team.  If you draft a player in the 1st round, where every other team wouldn't draft him until the 3rd that is the definition of reaching.  The quality of the player is irrelevant (ie. Taking Tom Brady in the 3rd round would have been a reach.) And the term 'reaching' is for the most part subjective (though sometimes it's obvious) because no one has every teams draft board at the time of the draft.

I don't care about other teams boards.  I'm talking about our board.  You go by your board and stay true to your own board  It's not a reach if you take your top guy regardless of other boards.  What if he ends up the best player and Baalke was right and the other 31 teams were wrong?  You call that a reach?  Naw, his board was just accurate.

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I think your statement describes the exact same thing, "reaching" is that your draft board doesn't match up with all of the other teams.  'Reaching' is defined from a perspective that is outside the team.  If you draft a player in the 1st round, where every other team wouldn't draft him until the 3rd that is the definition of reaching.  The quality of the player is irrelevant (ie. Taking Tom Brady in the 3rd round would have been a reach.) And the term 'reaching' is for the most part subjective (though sometimes it's obvious) because no one has every teams draft board at the time of the draft.

I don't care about other teams boards.  I'm talking about our board.  You go by your board and stay true to your own board  It's not a reach if you take your top guy regardless of other boards.  What if he ends up the best player and Baalke was right and the other 31 teams were wrong?  You call that a reach?  Naw, his board was just accurate.

Yes, I call that a reach. 

On your board you have:

Player A graded at 88
Player B graded at 85

However all the other teams have Player B as a first rounder just below your pick, and Player A as a second rounder below your pick on the other teams boards.

You can either draft Player B in the first, and then draft Player A in the second by not reaching, and only using your draft board.  Or you can draft Player A in the first, and not have the opportunity to draft Player B in the second (because he's already been drafted.)  The second option is reaching, and costs you the opportunity to add another highly graded player to your team by not being aware of the other teams draft boards.

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I don't care about other teams boards.  I'm talking about our board.  You go by your board and stay true to your own board  It's not a reach if you take your top guy regardless of other boards.  What if he ends up the best player and Baalke was right and the other 31 teams were wrong?  You call that a reach?  Naw, his board was just accurate.

Yes, I call that a reach. 

On your board you have:

Player A graded at 88
Player B graded at 85

However all the other teams have Player B as a first rounder just below your pick, and Player A as a second rounder below your pick on the other teams boards.

You can either draft Player B in the first, and then draft Player A in the second by not reaching, and only using your draft board.  Or you can draft Player A in the first, and not have the opportunity to draft Player B in the second (because he's already been drafted.)  The second option is reaching, and costs you the opportunity to add another highly graded player to your team by not being aware of the other teams draft boards.

You don't know what other teams boards look like, you don't know if player A will still be there.  Another team could take player A before your pick.   Hell another team could even have player A rated higher than you.  You don't know what other teams boards look like.

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I don't care about other teams boards.  I'm talking about our board.  You go by your board and stay true to your own board  It's not a reach if you take your top guy regardless of other boards.  What if he ends up the best player and Baalke was right and the other 31 teams were wrong?  You call that a reach?  Naw, his board was just accurate.

Yes, I call that a reach. 

On your board you have:

Player A graded at 88
Player B graded at 85

However all the other teams have Player B as a first rounder just below your pick, and Player A as a second rounder below your pick on the other teams boards.

You can either draft Player B in the first, and then draft Player A in the second by not reaching, and only using your draft board.  Or you can draft Player A in the first, and not have the opportunity to draft Player B in the second (because he's already been drafted.)  The second option is reaching, and costs you the opportunity to add another highly graded player to your team by not being aware of the other teams draft boards.

The problem with this is no one is privy to multiple or all other teams' boards.  You're letting talking heads and their boards influence what you believe to be a reach but in reality neither you nor the GM that makes the selection nor anyone else have any idea what the only draft boards that matter look like.

If you have someone graded as an 88, you'd be foolish to presume that other teams haven't given him a similar grade.  The real reason you might take the lower graded guy though is positional scarcity.  If 85 is a position that has crap left on the board behind him and you also need this position, then it might be worth it to forgo the 88 at another position if you can reasonably expect to get someone at a slightly lower grade at that same position as the 88 in the following round.

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And the term 'reaching' is for the most part subjective (though sometimes it's obvious) because no one has every teams draft board at the time of the draft.

Yes, I already pointed this out already ^.  These posts are just trying to define reach, that's it.  If we take the presumption that no one has any information on other teams boards, then there is never a situation where someone is reaching, the term itself is meaningless.

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Yes, I call that a reach. 

On your board you have:

Player A graded at 88
Player B graded at 85

However all the other teams have Player B as a first rounder just below your pick, and Player A as a second rounder below your pick on the other teams boards.

You can either draft Player B in the first, and then draft Player A in the second by not reaching, and only using your draft board.  Or you can draft Player A in the first, and not have the opportunity to draft Player B in the second (because he's already been drafted.)  The second option is reaching, and costs you the opportunity to add another highly graded player to your team by not being aware of the other teams draft boards.

You don't know what other teams boards look like, you don't know if player A will still be there.  Another team could take player A before your pick.   Hell another team could even have player A rated higher than you.  You don't know what other teams boards look like.

So you're saying it's not a problem if our board is way out of skew with the rest of the GMs, if we have a guy that everyone else deems a second round pick graded above what everyone else thinks is a second round guy?

In other words, you are totally cool if we take Max Melton at 17, and leave Byron Murphy on the board, so long as Baalke shows you his board had Melton at 14 and Murphy at 20? Think about that.

And yeah, other teams can have guys ranked differently. Some teams may take Sweat completely off the board after his recent arrest. Others may knock him down a few pegs, others might not give a flip. But in the hypothetical presented, the condition was already stated where the consensus stood with respect to player ranks. In the hypothetical, we DO know the other teams' boards. So again, Melton over Murphy at 17...reach? Does it really change your answer if some dumbbell GM in Denver is the outlier who also thinks Melton is a top 15 pick, but he's the only other GM who does?

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You don't know what other teams boards look like, you don't know if player A will still be there.  Another team could take player A before your pick.   Hell another team could even have player A rated higher than you.  You don't know what other teams boards look like.

So you're saying it's not a problem if our board is way out of skew with the rest of the GMs, if we have a guy that everyone else deems a second round pick graded above what everyone else thinks is a second round guy?

In other words, you are totally cool if we take Max Melton at 17, and leave Byron Murphy on the board, so long as Baalke shows you his board had Melton at 14 and Murphy at 20? Think about that.

And yeah, other teams can have guys ranked differently. Some teams may take Sweat completely off the board after his recent arrest. Others may knock him down a few pegs, others might not give a flip. But in the hypothetical presented, the condition was already stated where the consensus stood with respect to player ranks. In the hypothetical, we DO know the other teams' boards. So again, Melton over Murphy at 17...reach? Does it really change your answer if some dumbbell GM in Denver is the outlier who also thinks Melton is a top 15 pick, but he's the only other GM who does?

  I definitely wouldn't like it because he's not to me but if Melton ends up better than all of the players picked after him it was the right pick.  We have no clue how other GMs are ranking there board.  If Melton is the highest guy on our board than it's not a reach, he just better be the best player, if not the board is the problem.

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Ranking a player way too high on your board is basically the same as a reach.

The "it's not a reach if they were at the top of your board" argument is just a ridiculous way of trying to defend the losing side of a pointless debate about need vs BAP.

Whether you reached for a Strange or Bigsby type-of-pick - or you legit thought they the best players available - either way you screwed up.

(FTR - I think Bigsby will be good if the line improves and I Strange seems like a 50/50 chance of proving worthy in time.)

The fact that the draft capital of those picks wasn't utilized differently is my rub.
For whatever reason our FO/HC didn't think our IOL needed help when it clearly did - or they didn't think the IOL prospects available at those picks were a good fit. The result of not doing enough to bolster those interior line spots ended up being a major reason they lost the division and did not advance to the playoffs.

ANNNNNNNYway -
I'd love to see them find a quality IDL player in this draft.
I hope they don't think they are "good" in the trenches yet.
And I don't care if they reach down their board a few spots to take him as long he turns out to be impactful.

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With as deep as this draft is at 3-tech DL, I'm highly confident there will be a "Madubuike" type player that slips into the third round. If I could find the scout that led to drafting him, I would give him a significant raise to jump ship.

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So you're saying it's not a problem if our board is way out of skew with the rest of the GMs, if we have a guy that everyone else deems a second round pick graded above what everyone else thinks is a second round guy?

In other words, you are totally cool if we take Max Melton at 17, and leave Byron Murphy on the board, so long as Baalke shows you his board had Melton at 14 and Murphy at 20? Think about that.

And yeah, other teams can have guys ranked differently. Some teams may take Sweat completely off the board after his recent arrest. Others may knock him down a few pegs, others might not give a flip. But in the hypothetical presented, the condition was already stated where the consensus stood with respect to player ranks. In the hypothetical, we DO know the other teams' boards. So again, Melton over Murphy at 17...reach? Does it really change your answer if some dumbbell GM in Denver is the outlier who also thinks Melton is a top 15 pick, but he's the only other GM who does?

  I definitely wouldn't like it because he's not to me but if Melton ends up better than all of the players picked after him it was the right pick.  We have no clue how other GMs are ranking there board.  If Melton is the highest guy on our board than it's not a reach, he just better be the best player, if not the board is the problem.

Part of the equation that defines a reach has to be where others value the guy. It's 1000% the reason why nobody liked the Alualu or Anger selections, if you want concrete examples. I don't care if they were #1 on our board before the darft even started, taking either guy where we took them was bad, not because our board was flawed (it might have been), but because virtually nobody was planning to take either guy in that area. We lost heaps of value by not moving to where the picks fit more appropriately, based on the general consensus you should have derived from your scouting.

Doesn't mean you know the EXACT spot anyone values them, or that you trade to a specific pick to take them. But if general thoughts are teams see Alualu as a 25-35 guy, you move back to 17-20 and pick him there. Same thing for the Melton example. If everyone sees him as 30-45 range, taking him at 17 is boneheaded, even if he is top guy on your board. It's a reach, because you could have netted something in a move backward to take him at 24, say. You might not win the trade value chart in the move, but maybe tossing that trading partner a bone here nets you a little more later in the darft when they want to move to fit a guy they like. You still get the guy that's tops on your board, but you don't sacrifice nearly the same value to get them.

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Ranking a player way too high on your board is basically the same as a reach.

The "it's not a reach if they were at the top of your board" argument is just a ridiculous way of trying to defend the losing side of a pointless debate about need vs BAP.

Whether you reached for a Strange or Bigsby type-of-pick - or you legit thought they the best players available - either way you screwed up.

(FTR - I think Bigsby will be good if the line improves and I Strange seems like a 50/50 chance of proving worthy in time.)

The fact that the draft capital of those picks wasn't utilized differently is my rub.
For whatever reason our FO/HC didn't think our IOL needed help when it clearly did - or they didn't think the IOL prospects available at those picks were a good fit. The result of not doing enough to bolster those interior line spots ended up being a major reason they lost the division and did not advance to the playoffs.

ANNNNNNNYway -
I'd love to see them find a quality IDL player in this draft.
I hope they don't think they are "good" in the trenches yet.
And I don't care if they reach down their board a few spots to take him as long he turns out to be impactful.

Gabe Hall in the third, must cite NYC

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