Last week I started a series revisiting the 2013 draft for the Steelers. You can read about the first-round picks here.
It is impossible to properly assess a draft pick at the time they are drafted. Obviously teams have spent vast sums of money and many weeks and months following college players, watching their tape, and in some cases speaking with them to try to get a feeling for how a given player is going to turn out.
And yet they get it wrong quite often. Less so with the first round, but there is still a fairly substantial failure rate even for the first round. In fact, there are those (you know who you are) who have already declared the Baltimore Ravens’ first round pick Matt Elam a bust. I think it is too soon to say that, but since he is injured and out for the coming season he only has one year after that left on his rookie contract to persuade someone, even if not the Ravens, that he belongs.Continue reading “Battle of the AFC North: Assessing the 2013 2nd Round Draft Picks”
[ n.b. We assume without question that preseason training for players is absolutely essential to any hope for team success. Why not apply the same logic to fans? Parts One and Two of the series gives one person’s take on how fans can understand and enhance their appreciation of the game. Part Three will explain why there is never likely to be a perfect draft, and Part Four speaks to the dangers of ahistorical fandom.]
Allies
The cruel irony of our situation is that in the midst of an incredible abundance of informational possibilities our ability to benefit has become increasingly more limited. Whether you would place the blame on the failures of an educational system producing citizens that lack perspective and understanding of their social environment, the lack of ability to think in a critical fashion, or a television based culture that creates short attention spans and celebrates the superficial and the trivial (including an outsized emphasis on the importance of sports over other concerns), increasingly for many of us it is as though we sit at a full banquet table, starving because we lack hands and a mouth.
I always believed that three elements were necessary to make a good argument or to be a competent debater. You first had to possess a mastery of at least minimum amount of information and facts. Next, you need experience, first hand or not, with the subject matter. Call it wisdom if you like. And then, for lack of a better term, there is attitude; a flair, a measure of confidence or theatrics, such as humor for example, which has been marshaled in the service of making the case for your point of view. The problem for some is, their handle on the facts is limited at best. Worse still, and pretty amazing in a nauseating way, some don’t actually know the difference between a fact and an opinion. Ahistorical and with painfully short attention spans, experience is unavailable or ignored. What’s left?
Attitude
There is a word for attitude that exists in a vacuum separate from facts and experience. That would be bullshit. The greater reliance on attitude also explains, at least in part, the disrespectful and negative tone of much of our sports conversation. Lacking the proper grounding to effectively attack the other person’s arguments, what’s left? You attack the person with the thought that discrediting the individual invalidates the argument. If you are a ‘negative nelly’, ‘homer,’ ‘pollyanna’, ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’ then your thoughts and opinions can be simply dismissed.
Now if we were just speaking about some lower strata of the social order that would be one thing. But have you really been paying attention to what friends of mine contemptuously label as suburban sports talk radio? This is where fans go to learn be dumb. All attitude all the time. A mecca for the marginal.
Social media can be a culprit as well. Half-baked notions that would never resonate beyond the confines of the local tavern or barbershop now have a platform that is potentially global in reach, and anonymity provides inviting cover for ill-considered remarks, slander, trolling and bullying.
Going Deep: