(03-06-2019, 06:31 PM)Deacon Wrote: Along the lines of BAP vs. Need, I read the book War Room by Michael Holley. It goes through Bill Belichik's mental image on how a football organization was shaped and how it communicated with itself. This post may get a bit wordy, but I think there are some very good "eye-opening" aspects to the book that really changed how I thought about the draft.

One of the major issues that Belichik tackled while with Cleveland and then in New England was that the Coaching Staff, the Pro Personnel department and the Scouting department all used different terminologies when they rated a player. The details here aren't that important but for example, a position coach would rate his Linebacker as a 'B', the Pro Personnel people would rate a Free Agent as 'Silver' and the Scouts would rate potential draft picks as a 'Third Rounder'. So when you tried to view what you had versus what was available, there was no easy way to rate all of the players. Furthermore, he made certain that all scouts did as much research as they could to determine a player's 'coachability'.

Belichik, through much struggle, finally got everyone onto the same page in terms of language and then pushed the idea of "who is out there that can come in and help us?" Essentially, placing Need at the forefront of the process but making sure that Value, read as Best Available, was in the discussion. Due to this, rating a player in relation to the draft went away. They would actually be surprised when they would hear teams rate players in terms of Draft Round. This simplified both their Free Agency and Draft approach down to a statement of 'this player can come in and help us' or 'this player cannot help us'.

Thoughts?