A repeated refrain in athletes’ criticism of media members is “You never played the game.” Former NFL executive Dave Gettleman, most known for his stints as general manager of the Carolina Panthers (2013-17) and New York Giants (2018-21), also didn’t play football at a high level, but he did work in the NFL from from the 1986-87 season through the 2021-22 one. And he dropped the equivalent of a “You never played the game” on draft analysts in general and The Athletic’s in particular (perhaps specifically Dane Brugler, but he doesn’t mention an individual name) in an interview this week.
That interview was with Neil Stratton, who runs Inside The League. Funnily enough, as per that site’s bio information, Stratton started his media career working with Troy Brown on “small draft-oriented publication” Lone Star Football in 1997. He then launched Inside The League in 2002 as an “information service solely for the football professional,” ran it through 2007, stepped down to run the Hula Bowl, then revived it in 2008 with a wider focus.
That site from Stratton has a lot of different offerings, some free and some paid. The Gettleman interview appears to have come in the free weekly Friday Wrap email newsletter. There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to access past issues of that, but one subscriber shared quite the comments from Gettleman on Twitter/X Saturday:
This wk’s @InsideTheLeague newsletter has a brief interview w/DG, who’s miffed that owners listen to the “clowns” who put grades on draft classes. “Who are you? What have you done? When have you put your nuts on the line?” pic.twitter.com/jfWNyAlZT2
— NYGfaninCLT (@clt_ny) May 4, 2024
Gettleman is not the first executive to complain about media draft coverage and rankings. Indeed, Indianapolis Colts general manager Bill Tobin famously did that about ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. in 1994, ranting “Who the hell is Mel Kiper?!” (in Kiper’s 11th year of working for ESPN) after Kiper criticized him for passing on Trent Dilfer. (That actually made Kiper more famous, and Kiper offered a tribute to Tobin after his recent passing.) And there have been many other shots at draft analysts over the years. But Gettleman’s stands out somewhat for its coarseness and sexist nature with “When have you put your nuts on the line?” and how over-the-top it is with “clowns.”
The NFL Draft receives a massive amount of coverage at this point, but it is a difficult event to cover. And it is covered from a lot of different perspectives, and it’s worth taking the time to understand those. The ultimate verdict on how a team does in a draft may not come until five or more years down the road when those players’ impacts are fully seen.
Even there, there can be factors involved (such as injury, or coach or scheme changes, or opportunities to acquire players elsewhere) that dramatically affect the player’s outcome with the team. And many of those couldn’t have been foreseen during a particular draft. Still, a lookback five years or more down the road is probably going to be the “best” in terms of evaluating a draft.
But that doesn’t mean one-year lookbacks or even immediate post-draft grades (which are what Gettleman appears to be particularly complaining about here) are pointless. And they’re worth further discussion. That’s especially worth talking about in terms of how post-draft grades often use different approaches and criteria.
In terms of the post-draft grades, Athletic draft analyst Brugler presented national ones for 2023 here. That publication also has had many other grades from others, though, including one focused just on first-round QBs, thoughts from anonymous executives, and individual team grades from many of their team beat writers and columnists. And there are obviously tons of national grades elsewhere from people at other publications.
As mentioned above, the draft is covered from countless perspectives at this point. And Arif Hasan of Wide Left broke down an interesting one recently in a discussion (paywalled) of why various “consensus boards” (which are representing the averages of a wide group of sources), with that being thanks to the different sources and methodologies they use.
That piece explores many of the differences in how people approach covering the draft. But a few paragraphs particularly standout for our purposes here. Those are on how mock drafts (and consensus rankings that include them) differ from big boards, especially when team-specific reporting or aggregation is mixed into that evaluation:
When writing mock drafts, analysts often decide between “predictive” and “ideal,” which is to say they sometimes attempt to game out what they think will happen in the actual NFL draft and at other times will attempt to produce their ideal draft in a world where every NFL team made the most optimal pick (or executed the most optimal trades) under their understanding of value and player position.
…Mock drafts are also much more sensitive to the rumor mill that courses through the NFL media environment every off-season. It’s difficult to parse through everything and many of those producing team-specific mock drafts aren’t draft analysts – their expertise is often through team reporting, aggregation or high-level sourcing.
…There’s a very good chance that the NFL Mock Draft Database’s approach will produce a big board that’s much more predictive of the order that players go in the NFL draft.
In fact, when asked, that’s what the explicit goal was. “I want my board to be a reflection of the draft spot of a particular player,” said Denny, who runs the site. “For example, if I rank a player 57th overall, I project he’ll land at or very close to that draft spot.”
But that’s not what the big boards (which are focused on players’ overall talent rather than specific team needs or projected moves) are doing. And that’s worth keeping in mind in terms of draft grades as well; grades from people who focus more on boards and overall talent are going to be different from those who focus on predictive mocks. And yes, they’re going to be different than how teams feel internally about players, and yes, teams sometimes have information media figures don’t. But that doesn’t invalidate draft grades.
And regardless of the approach, “What have you done?” is not really a fair response to most draft grades. It’s a somewhat understandable response to someone who puts out grades without any verifiable history of draft analysis or without any explanation of what approach they’re using. But that’s absolutely not the case for most people doing grades at major national publications at this point.
Consider Brugler, for example, because he appears to be the one being specifically complained about here. He started attending scouting events and creating a massive annual draft guide on his own. He then worked for NFL Draft Scout and CBS Sports for seven and six years respectively, then joined The Athletic in 2018.
That means there is a giant amount of published material on the draft by him. So he definitely has put his record out there. And while he certainly hasn’t hit on every mock or grade, his body of work has been good enough to keep him employed at prominent places and keep large numbers of people reading what he does.
And Brugler is far from alone there at this point. Things have come a long way from the decades-ago era where most of the widely-available draft-specific coverage in terms of big boards and mocks was just about Kiper (who played a huge role in the event’s increased prominence, and has received Hall of Fame discussion recently as a result). With just about any draft-specific analyst at a major publication, they have a trackable record.
That record is going to differ based on their approach. And evaluations of records should take approach into consideration: mocks are more about where players will go, big boards are more about if they’ll find NFL success. But, in either case, these records are findable. So “What have you done?” is a silly criticism. Yes, these analysts have not yet had the ability to actually draft players. But their record is just as trackable as any executive’s.
Moreover, if Dave Gettleman is going to lob out questions of “What have you done?”, it’s at the very least fair to turn that back around at him. After Gettleman retired following the 2021 NFL season, Ryan Honey of Elite Sports NY wrote a piece titled “Dave Gettleman’s legacy: An ugly, unproductive draft record.” Some highlights:
In four drafts (2018-21), Gettleman was responsible for the selection of 33 different players (one of whom was a supplemental draft pick). Many should be key players throughout the roster by now.
Instead, only 23 remain with the team up to this point, including an inconsistent guard in Will Hernandez, an edge rusher who hasn’t recorded a sack since 2019 in Oshane Ximines, a wide receiver who tends to disappear in Darius Slayton, and the likes of Matthew Peart, Carter Coughlin, T.J. Brunson, Elerson Smith, Gary Brightwell, and Rodarius Williams, none of whom are exactly game-changers at their respective positions.
…In his first draft as the Giants general manager back in April 2018, Dave Gettleman made the move that has continued to set this franchise back: the drafting of [RB Saquon] Barkley at No. 2 overall.
…That decision subsequently led to the Giants needing to draft a signal-caller in 2019, when they essentially had to choose between Daniel Jones and Dwayne Haskins — not ideal.
Thus, there is definitely a solid case that “What have you done?” is not all positive in terms of Gettleman either. And that’s perhaps especially true with the pick of Jones sixth overall in 2019. For the record, Brugler’s “What I’m hearing” predictive final mock had Jones to the Giants, but not until pick No. 17, and had Jones 53rd overall on his Top 100 prospects. So he might have done a better job than Gettleman there.
However, though, it is amusing that Gettleman’s most controversial pick, Barkley second overall in 2018, got some support from Brugler. Brugler had him going exactly there in his final mock, and had him fourth overall in his top 100. Of course, the big board doesn’t consider team needs. But still, it’s funny that Gettleman seems to be particularly mad at a draft analyst who actually came to similar conclusions at the time around his move that proved most controversial in retrospect.
[@CLT_NY on Twitter/X; Inside The League]
