re: Saints' beat writer Jeff Duncan thinks Saints will take DE Taco Charlton

quote:

---

Meh, I trust Mayock more than just about anyone, and he doesn't have Taco in his top 5 (unless he recently updated).

Barnett is number 3 fwiw.

---

Mayock's edge rusher ranking. It's obvious that Mayock, unlike many here, weights what happens in pads more heavily than what happens in shorts in Indianapolis, because these rankings are direct reflection of actual production

quote:

---

Edge rusher

1. Myles Garrett, Texas A&M
2. Tim Williams, Alabama
3. Derek Barnett, Tennessee
4. Solomon Thomas, Stanford
5. Takkarist McKinley, UCLA

---

The combine is important, and it serves as an environment to do a mass scouting at one time...but really what they're looking for is to verify that a players measurables match what they see on tape of them playing football. If a player matches what they expected to see, then their tape evaluations were on. If guy performs better or worse at the combine than he appears on tape, then they watch more tape. More often than not the combine carries little weight compared to on field production.

So Thomas is fast and strong and jumps high for a guy his size, okay, why wasn't he crushing quarterbacks in a pass happy league? That's what Mayock is asking. The measurables are nice, but a guy with his measurables should have better production. People get way too carried away with the combine numbers. These team are drafting ball players not exercisers. People see the combine and immediately forget everything they've seen for the last 4 years and decide that player X is now better than player Y because he ran faster or jumped higher, even though player Y is actually better at the game.

It's fascinating really, and I would assume due largely in part to recency bias and our relentless desire to compare guys in this class to previous classes based solely on measurables. This guy is 6'3" 247 and ran a 4.54, holy shite that's the same as Von Miller! This guy could be as good as Von Miller, I could see him going in the top 5!

Meanwhile that guy got 10 sacks in 3 years and Von Miller was an animal

That's not anyone in particular, just an example of what I'm talking about