ESPN latest draft grades fails to capture LA Rams past prowess

Draft grades moments or even days after the NFL Draft ends amount to something akin to judging cakes in a baking contest based upon a grocery shopping list.  You just cannot do it. Oh, there are plenty of rationalizations on how instant grades are necessary. But the truth of the matter is that rookie selections from the draft are just the raw ingredients.

It’s the coaching staff, training camp, and the team culture that eventually delivers a successful or unsuccessful NFL career. And yet, each year we subscribe to the theory that bad teams that draft the best players will flip their fortunes in the upcoming NFL season.

Sometimes bad teams simply remain bad teams.

Conversely, sometimes good teams remain good teams. They do so by outhustling, outthinking, and finding diamonds in the rough that have been discarded or overlooked by other NFL teams.

Grading draft classes from the same group that prepares mock drafts and Big Boards are doubled susceptible to bias because we tend to find agreement as truths, and disagreements as falsehoods. Critical thinking, the ability to objectively assess other perspectives pertaining to a topic, is waning.

So it comes as no surprise that teams that are expected to finish below-.500 this season are awarded great draft grades.   The two worst draft grades in this grade are the Tennessee Titans and the LA Rams.  But here’s where I struggle to follow along. What makes the Rams so poorly graded. Was it the location of their draft picks? Was it based on the players chosen with those picks? Was it based on how those selected rookies project as far as their NFL career?

The Rams do things a bit differently, that’s a given. But as I’ve said in the past, if the measuring stick used to judge NFL teams points to the LA Rams as one of the worst performers in the NFL, the defending Super Bowl Champions? Well, maybe someone is measuring the wrong thing.