If the 2020 NFL season was considered weird because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the college football season was even more unimaginably strange.
Games were postponed or erased with no notice. Seasons were canceled and then reinstated. One school with a notable prospect for the 2021 NFL draft -- North Dakota State and quarterback Trey Lance -- scheduled and played just one game. Others, like Oregon offensive tackle Penei Sewell and LSU wideout Ja'Marr Chase, opted out of the campaign altogether. NFL teams have less tape to work off for this year's draft class than any in recent memory.
As a result, the league's 32 organizations are faced with a frustrating quandary. Every team wants to find talented players in the draft, but with less information on this class, finding value picks is murkier than ever. As ESPN Seahawks reporter Brady Henderson noted after Seattle sent two first-round picks to the Jets for Jamal Adams, the Seahawks felt the uncertainty of the college season would leave them less confident in their evaluations.
Each of the league's teams is grappling with this issue as they prepare their boards for April's draft. In addition to trying to calibrate picks as teams try to trade for players such as Texas quarterback Deshaun Watson, there will be trades on draft day in which the organizations involved have dramatically different opinions about the value of 2021 picks as opposed to the picks in an ordinary year. Should teams discount those picks and make trades designed to minimize their exposure to this draft?
My instinct is no. If anything, this could be a year in which teams should be more aggressive to acquire at least certain types of picks. I might even have one of the greatest investors in the history of the stock market on my argument's side. Let's look into why:
Teams are overconfident
Start with the idea underpinning teams' fears. During a typical draft year, team scouts and personnel executives get to visit campuses, meet with coaches and watch players throughout a full college football season. Coaches then watch that game tape and join the rest of the organization at the scouting combine in Indianapolis, where players work out on the field and engage in endless meetings with interested teams. Potential draftees then get one final workout at their pro days or in a private workout before the draft in late April.
Of course, teams are getting only a fraction of that information for this draft. Scouts spent their time on virtual calls. College teams played reduced schedules with limited rosters. The combine has been canceled. Teams are relying more heavily on 2019 film as a supplement to what they saw in the shortened 2020 campaign. It's unfamiliar territory, and that is leading teams to consider that their picks might not be as valuable as they are in a typical season.
I'm not so sure that's true. To start, the idea that the typical flow of information leads to an informed, organized decision-making process does not appear to be true. The vast majority of public research suggests that the NFL draft is a crapshoot, with no team exhibiting any long-term ability to pick players better than the league as a whole.
The most recent example of this in practice is the Patriots, who followed years of useful first- and second-round picks with six years of struggles in the first and second rounds. Bill Belichick's drafting hasn't been consistent, but he has typically been able to get a leg up on the league by amassing extra selections in the middle rounds. With the league getting smarter about the value of midround and compensatory picks, those deals have been harder to come by.
Organizations thinking that they have a great grasp of the draft class in a typical year are likely overconfident in their own evaluative abilities. In a typical year, teams don't know much. The picture might be a little blurrier in 2021, but the level of knowledge teams collectively have about this draft class is closer to that of a typical year than they realize.
It's not as if this class as a whole is likely to be significantly less talented because of the reduced season. There might be players who come into the league without as many reps as they would in a typical season, but those concerns might be outweighed by the fact that they took fewer hits in practices and games. Sewell looked like a franchise tackle heading into his final college season. Chase looked like a superstar wideout in the making. They might have fallen off those tracks if they had played a normal college season, but they had already proved themselves to be great prospects.
The most likely problem that would have derailed their pro careers would have been injuries. The reduced number of injuries from the abbreviated season might make this year's draft class better. I'm also not concerned about the lack of offseason reps, given that rookies went through a drastically reduced practice schedule last spring and still managed to make an immediate impact at the NFL level. Tristan Wirfs and Antoine Winfield Jr. sure looked like veterans for the Bucs in the Super Bowl.
If teams believe that their picks are less valuable because they know less about the players in this draft, well, where do they think those players are going? If you think your pick is less likely to produce a useful player than it would in a typical season, another team is going to end up with that player. If your pick is worth less, another team's pick is eventually going to end up being worth more.
Take a look at the curve on Chase Stuart's draft chart and you'll see how a typical draft delivers value. The traditional Jimmy Johnson chart believes that value is concentrated at the very top of the draft, but a more realistic view from Stuart's research notes that the curve isn't quite as steep as Johnson might have thought. Furthermore, as Stuart noted in 2019, midround picks have played larger roles on rosters as teams have relied more heavily upon rookie scale players.
In 2021, the player value curve for the draft could be flatter than it is in a typical year. Teams will likely be more confident about their first-round picks, given that they have fewer flaws or problems to pick apart than prospects elsewhere in the class, but if the league knows less about the rest of the draft pool, there's going to be a better chance of landing a "true" first-round talent in the second, third or fourth round than ever before.
So if you're a general manager worried that you're going to make a mistake, what can you do? Well, if you don't want to listen to me, you can take Warren Buffett's advice ...
Value investing and the NFL draft
One of Buffett's most famous adages applies to this (and every) NFL draft. In speaking to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett explained one of his investing philosophies. "We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy," Buffett said in 1986, "and to be greedy only when others are fearful."
If you were ever looking for a situation in which other teams are fearful as they entered the draft, well, 2021 is that year. Teams that devalue their own draft picks out of concerns that they don't have their usual amount of information to make a selection are creating an opportunity. Teams that are greedy when their counterparts are fearful are going to put themselves in a situation to succeed.
How can a team be greedy in this draft? The easiest way is to amass more 2021 picks. Teams are generally smart to trade down in the draft, but this is a year in which they should be more aggressive in trying to trade down than ever. If a team is less confident that any one pick is likely to deliver a starting-caliber talent, the best chance of finding a starter is to amass multiple selections. Given the uncertainty with each individual pick, having more selections also gives teams a better chance of coming away with multiple starters than those same picks would in a typical season.
There are a few teams in great shape to attack this inefficiency without having to make any new trades:
The Dolphins have extra first- and second-round picks from the Texans.
The Jaguars have an extra first-rounder from the Rams and a second-rounder from the Vikings.
Minnesota doesn't have its second-round pick, but it does have an extra third-rounder and two extra fourth-rounders as a product of trades and compensatory selections.
The Browns have extra picks in the third and fourth rounds.
Other teams that are going to be awarded extra selections in those rounds, such as the Saints and Rams, are already missing selections as a result of trades, leaving them closer to neutral than it might seem.
Organizations might also have a one-year opportunity to flip the traditional discount for selections. When teams trade future selections, they're usually forced to do so at a reduced rate. If a team wants to acquire a third-round pick in a typical draft and use the subsequent year's choices to get that selection, it typically gives up a second-rounder to get that deal done. Teams make fewer of these trades now than they have in the past -- and it can be disastrous when they get them wrong -- but this year could offer a unique alternative.
Given the chances of talented players dropping further than they would in a typical season, midround selections are likely to be more valuable in 2021 than they would be in other years. I wouldn't encourage a team to send a future second-round pick to acquire a third-rounder, but with the uncertainty surrounding this year's draft, a team might be able to acquire a second-rounder this year for a second-rounder next year. A team might even be able to get a late second-rounder for a third-rounder in 2022.
Unless a team is taking a quarterback in the top half of the first round or one of the few non-quarterbacks regarded as something close to sure things, this is a draft in which teams should be trying to get extra selections. That's also true in a normal draft, which reveals a weird paradox: In this most spectacularly absurd of years, teams should be more aggressive about doing what they should already have been practicing.