NFL Draft 2008 Grades

I linked y'all to Mel Kiper's Draft Grades. I do not believe in grading a draft anything before two full season after its conclusion. You cannot project exactly how a player is going to fit and perform in your system. So evaluations of this kinda are pointless. Yet millions of NFL obsessed fans will pour over these draft grades for the next couple of weeks. With such a high demand the sports outlets feel obligated to put out something. In my opinion, evaluating the draft picks 24 hours after the draft is more difficult than projecting next years first round 364 days before it occurs. But in the name of content I feel that there are several ways in which a draft can be evaluated in the immediate aftermath.

-Filling needs. In this case we will not penalize any team for "reaching" to fill a need. It happens, especially when you cannot find a team to trade down with. Free agency is over and this draft is basically the only way to fill the remaining holes on your roster. Taking the best player on the board is great but your lineup needs to be almost complete before you have that luxury.

-Getting value. This is the good old "take the best player on the board" mantra. This happens when a player falls for an inexplicable reason. Most of these falls are either because of medical issues, character issues or teams drafting to meet their needs. This is how players like Randy Moss slide so far.

-Paying off your mortgage. This is when teams stockpile future draft picks. It's not always a success and it's never sexy to the fans. But acquiring multiple picks in the next draft allows a team to greatly increase their options. They can trade for veteran players much easier and target specific players in the draft because of their wealth of picks. New England, San Diego, Dallas and Philadelphia all excel at this.

You cannot assign a letter or numerical grade to a draft class at this point. This is one area where a college grading system can help. In my system teams can get a "+" a "/" or a "-". A "+" means teams met at least 2 of my 3 criteria. A "/" means a team met at least 1 of my criteria. A "-" means a team failed to meet any of my criteria.

So without further ado here's my "grades" in particular order within their tiers although the teams I think of first probably did a little better in my mind. But I always forget somebody for a minute. It's the curse of not making enough notes before I start writing these things.

+ TEAMS
Kansas City
Minnesota (Jared Allen is included in this grade in my system)
Carolina
Green Bay
Washington
Dallas (Pacman Jones is included in this grade in my system)
Pittsburgh
Miami
Buffalo
Cleveland (Shaun Rodgers, Brady Quinn and Corey Williams are included in this grade in my system)
Philadelphia
Baltimore
Indianapolis (Tony Ugoh is included in this grade in my system)
New Orleans
New England
New York Jets
New York Giants
Jacksonville

/ TEAMS
San Francisco (Joe Staley is included in this grade in my system)
Cincinnati
Arizona
St Louis
Oakland
Tampa Bay
Atlanta
Chicago
Seattle
San Diego (Eric Weddle is included in this grade in my system)

- TEAMS
Tennessee
Houston
Detroit
Denver

You'll notice a few trends here. 18 teams had "+" drafts. And with good reason. These players were drafted for a reason and everybody should be looking for them succeed. The players are young and healthy so there is great reason for optimism. Only 4 teams had "-" grades. And all four teams have had some trouble drafting in recent years. This happens because when teams miss on draft picks they fail to fill needs. Which means when the next draft rolls around you have more needs to fill than ever. It's a vicious cycle which can only be broken by having an outstanding draft, dabbling in free agency and trying like hell to find some good undrafted players. The NFC East is really setting up to be a war zone this year. All of those teams genuinely hate each other and they're all in win-now mode. San Diego just didn't have enough picks to properly place them this year.

We're all drafted out for a bit. We'll delve more into this later. Enjoy beeoches.