How I Build My Big Board

Hello, hello!

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks downloading everything from my head and my notebook and getting it all into the Draft Guide - but I’m happy to report that every single player I laid eyes on between the Shrine Bowl and the Senior Bowl has been written up. All of my thoughts on every player at those games has been in the DieHard Draft Guide since last week. Once I wrapped that up, I got down to business on a handful of post-Senior Bowl projects that I had earmarked for this week. Let’s start there, but I am itching to give you a peek behind the curtain of my evaluation process as well, which I’ll cover below.

POST-SENIOR BOWL TO-DO LIST

From the moment the two major All-Star Games begin announcing their accepted invitations in November, most of my NFL Draft film study time goes towards watching those players. It’s a seemingly never-ending process, as I try to watch at least a couple of games of each player I study before I fully write him up. Players stack up fast, but that takes up a lot of my time that I allot for draft work during the fall. 

What that means is that there are a number of ‘projects’ that come up during that span of time that I know won’t hit my plate until after I return from that trip to Mobile. Sometimes the task is as simple (yet still daunting) as watching all of LB Arvell Reese’s snaps where he lines up on the defensive line so I can evaluate him as an edge rusher. Other times it may be a bit more expansive, such as watching a cluster of undersized pass rushers at the point of attack in the run game to help separate them from each other (I covered some of my findings there on this week’s podcast). Then, obviously, there are just the big name underclassmen that just slipped through the cracks of the football season that I hadn’t gotten to yet. This year, those names included Ohio State DT Kayden McDonald, Georgia T Monroe Freeling, Indiana CB D’Angelo Ponds, and a few others. You can find the complete versions of all these notes in the Draft Guide now, but some top-level bullet points from those three guys in particular:

I mentioned earlier that every player from the Shrine and Senior Bowls are all written up in the Draft Guide, so you can get a sense of how I felt each player performed solely during the week of the event from those capsules. While it’s certainly an important step of the process, some of the most valuable bits of information I get from these practices are being able to get eyes on these players up close. I talked about this in my last email, but being able to ‘body type’ each prospect, see how they’re put together and how they move is a huge part of the evaluation. 

There are many times where I see a player who I may have a starting-quality grade on, or close to it, but then when I see him in person I may feel a lot different. Does it mean that the player has no shot in the league? No, but a player’s physical attributes absolutely play a part in whether he’s able to reach the upper end of his range of outcomes as a finished product. These are the exposures that NFL scouts and evaluators get on campus visits, seeing the players in practice or on the field at games, and it’s just not the same as seeing them on TV or on tape. 

A couple of standouts in this area from this trip? One would be Cincinnati DT Dontay Corleone. Based on film study I thought he would be a player who could be a top-shelf run stuffing nose tackle in the NFL. I was pretty underwhelmed seeing him in person from a body type standpoint. He dropped down a few tiers in my DT stack as a result. 

Things can obviously work the other way as well. Texas Tech LB Jacob Rodriguez fits that bill. I had a high-end backup grade on the highly-decorated linebacker entering the Senior Bowl, but it was hard to walk away from that event feeling good about that eval. Just seeing a guy put together the way he is (he was bigger than I expected), moving the way that he does, and knowing all the intangibles that come with him, it didn’t sit well with me to have him graded that low. He got a bit of a bump from me after seeing him live. 

Then you have guys that I haven’t studied at all. One of the first things I wrote down about John Carroll WR Tyren Montgomery when he first walked onto the field at the Senior Bowl and went through warm ups was ‘he looks like he belongs’. It was my first exposure to Montgomery, who had a pretty good week in Mobile, but before I saw him take one rep in one-on-ones or catch one pass in 11-on-11 action, I thought he looked and moved like an NFL talent. The rest of the week only helped to confirm that initial takeaway.

Seeing players who are tied closely together on my board with similar skillsets can also be informative. I had pretty identical grades on Pitt LB Kyle Louis and LSU LB Harold Perkins going into the circuit, with Perkins having a slight edge. Coming out of it, there’s no way that could stick. Louis was lights out in Mobile. Perkins wasn’t bad in Frisco, but I thought there was a significant difference there between the two players watching them go through three days of work. 

You’ll see many other slight adjustments on many players from those two games littered throughout the guide.

I get asked often why I’m so slow to move guys up or down the board as the season and/or pre-draft process moves along. The answer is simple: I won’t move a guy based off of just watching a game on TV or the ‘vibes’ around a player. Everything is rooted in either film study or the live exposures during the pre-draft process. My grade and report on a player doesn’t have to be perfect on October 30th, December 8th, January 23rd or February 13th. I let the process play out, get as much information on as many players as I can, and trust the work that I put in. The cool part about making my Draft Guide available to you now, as opposed to the end of the spring? You can go on that journey with me!

And now to the big topic I wanted to hit on in this message: my Big Board. 

For those of you who were DieHards during the last draft cycle, you’ll have read an abridged version of this before, but I wanted to give some insight into my grading scale and how I stack players. It’s a process that has evolved a ton over the years, using both objective and subjective conclusions that come from film study and incorporate the work I do on the NFL throughout the calendar year as well. To do this, I wanted to go step-by-step through  my evaluation process. 

As of this writing, there are 387 players listed in the Draft Guide, with 231 full scouting reports. Those 231 players have all gone through this exact process that I’m about to lay out. I’ll start at the beginning:

1 - The Bio

The first thing I’ll always do before I watch a player is write up the necessary bio information. Where are they from? What is their athletic background? When were they born? Family notes. Injury notes. Some evaluators like doing the film BEFORE this step, but I like going in with as much objective information as possible to provide as much context as I can before I turn on the tape. So everything you see in ‘The Background’ section of the Draft Guide all gets filled out first. This will also include several statistics and metrics that I look at from various services on each player, and it changes position-by-position. I’ll pull all of those numbers before I get into the tape. 

2 - The Tape

This is self-explanatory. As I mentioned before, in my first initial run through studying a player, I try to at least watch two or three full games, no matter the position. Quarterbacks and defensive backs usually require at least four. I usually watch at least half a game before I even write anything down, then the notes start to flow. Once I finish the last game, I go back and re-read the notes and feel ready to write up the final report. All of the notes you see in my ‘Physical Tools’ or ‘Pass Game’ or ‘Run Game’ sections of the profile are the raw notes I take while I’m watching the player. For each position, I have a grading rubric that includes 20 areas where each prospect is rated on a 5-point scale (1 being the worst, 5 being the best). Those 20 scores are weight-adjusted (if I’m evaluating a cornerback, a grade of ‘4’ in ‘ballskills’ grade of ‘4’ counts more than a ‘4’ in ‘play strength’), and it spits out a number at the end. More on that number in an upcoming section..

3 - The Scouting Report

This is the paragraph at the very top of the report when you open up each player page. I start it off with a quick one-liner on the player’s playing experience and scheme exposure before noting his physical attributes. I typically hit on the high-level strengths and weaknesses and then provide a quick bite-sized projection of the player. Ideally, if I’ve done my job well enough, you should be able to read those handful of sentences and have a good sense of the player’s skillset and how I project him to the league, even without having watched a down of his play. 

4 - The Tiering

Now I get a bit weird, because this is where my board comes into play. If you’ve been following me for a while, you may know that I believe strongly in the use of the Horizontal Draft Board as opposed to the Vertical Board. Both have their place, but I think fans are not quite as accustomed to the process that goes into the Horizontal Board, where your X Axis is each position laid out horizontally, and  your Y Axis is each tier stacked vertically. Here is a look at what the top half of the board looks like on offense.

Now, you’ll notice how I have Tiers labeled, with dollar amounts separating one from the next. Admittedly, I do have different labels on them for my own personal use, but I find that many people get hung up on wording with things like ‘Solid Starter’ or ‘Impact Role Player’. You’ll see the great folks at NFL Media utilizing the numbers system, where a player may get a 6.7 or a 5.2 grade, and while they define it for you - I think this resonates a bit better for the average fan, especially because it is a key part of how my board gets laid out. Here’s what I mean. 

Throughout the year I am constantly building out my board for the upcoming NFL Draft, but that’s not the only board that I manage. I also keep a ‘Pro Board’, built exactly like the one you see above, but with nearly every active NFL player on it. How are the players laid out on the board? It’s simple and objective: how much do they get paid? Once a guy gets out of his rookie deal, his ‘AAV’ (Average Annual Value) dictates where he gets slotted on the board. If you make $12 million per year, you get slotted into Tier 5, no matter what position you play. If you get $25.3 million, you’re in Tier 3. $4.8 million per year and you’re in Tier 7. So on and so forth. I do include all of the players on rookie contracts - subjectively sliding them into the tier that I expect they’ll hit when their first deal is up. With basically every transaction that comes across the NFL wire every week, I update this board, and so at any given time I can tell you who the pass rushers are in the NFL that are making at least $8 million a year, or who the cornerbacks are that cleared $14 million, or which players in the entire league earn at least $40 million per season.

Within each of those buckets, there could be a LOT of players! There are 42 offensive linemen in my $10 Million bucket for Tackles/Guards. I’ve studied all of them over the course of their careers in both college and in the NFL, so I’m able to split them up by archetype. Is he a light-footed pass protecting tackle? Is he a brawling guard? Is he an athletic guard with tackle flexibility? Guys get split out into those sub-sections, and the sub-sections are uniform throughout the entire vertical stack. 

So let’s say I watch a nose tackle - for this example let’s go with Iowa State DT Dominique Orange. It’s pretty clear he’s a run-stuffing nose tackle as I’m finishing up my third game of film study. How much juice does he have as a rusher? How dominant is he in the run game? Do I think he’s a three-down player? I ask myself all of these questions as I’m in the home stretch. Once I come to my conclusion, I go to my Pro Board. Where does my vision of the player fit in with players at his specific archetype? 

Guys like Vita Vea and Dexter Lawrence are up in that Tier 4. Orange isn’t there. Hop down to Tier 5 and I see Grover Stewart, DJ Reader and Dalvin Tomlinson. We’re getting warmer, but I think I need to get a bit lower, I’m not sure that I’m quite there on Orange. So I go down to Tier 6. TJ Slaton is there. Shy Tuttle is there. We’re in the right ballpark for me now, but just to be safe let me check Tier 7. John Jenkins. Andrew Billings. Khyris Tonga. It’s close between 6 and 7, but I currently feel like he’s closer to the latter. Maybe I’ll feel different when I see him in person at an All-Star Game and/or the Combine. So ‘Big Citrus’ gets plugged into Tier 7 on my DT stack. 

I make sure that grade matches with how I wrote him up in the Scouting Report. It does! Now, when I look at my Tier 7 DT bucket, I see that there are other names already in there. Georgia’s Christen Miller and Texas Tech’s Lee Hunter got graded the same way. So how do they get sorted? By the number grade from that 20-point scale during the film study. So the subjective projection gets each player into a bucket, and then the objective number grade sorts them in there. By staying true to my process, I keep bias from creeping in. I keep groupthink out. I stay grounded to my evaluations and my projections (which obviously change throughout the process as I study more film and acquire more information about every prospect).

Now, to put together the vertical board, I basically just take all of the players in Tier 1, sorted by their number grades, and stack them first. Then I move to Tier 2, 3, 4, etc. So when you look at my Big Board, it is not representative of how I feel guys are going to get drafted in April. My Top 32 is not my prediction of the first 32 names to hear their names called (that’s what my Mock Draft is for)! Instead, the board is meant to stack how I feel these players will be valued in the league three, four or five years from now. 

This process naturally includes the ‘position value’ aspect into the projection, which is something I’ve discussed in previous emails. Check back a few to get my thoughts on that topic, which I explored in-depth several weeks back (if you can’t find it, respond to this email and I’ll copy/paste it to you directly).

I hope this explanation helped shed some light on my process and helped explain why my board may look different than other people’s. I’m pretty passionate about this subject overall, so if you have any thoughts or questions - do not hesitate to reach out!

One exercise that I go through throughout the course of the offseason is the ‘Consensus Mock Draft’, and I shared the first version this week. There are a lot of pieces of information you can take away from this piece, and I shared a bunch in the article. I did save one nugget for you here, however! So think of this as an exclusive piece of that article just for you. 

Who do the 13 analysts view as the LOCK first-round picks? How often do players show up in these pieces? In something that maybe only I find interesting, here is each player listed in the 13 mock drafts, with how many times they were listed:

Lock First-Round Pick (13-of-13): 

Almost Certain First-Round Pick (Between 10 and 12):

Good Shot At Being A First-Round Pick (Between 7 and 9):

Potential First-Round Pick (Between 4 and 6):

Long Shot First-Round Pick (Between 1 and 3):

In case you missed it - the NFL released the official invite list for players headed to Indianapolis. I wrote up my initial set of takeaways (which you don’t need to be a Die Hard to see), but here are a couple of notable things I wanted to hash out. 

In the brief gap in the action between the Senior Bowl and the Combine, what should the focus be on as a Draft Analyst? I’m joined by Jordan Reid to discuss that topic, several takeaways from the Allstar Circuit, expectations for the Combine, Arvell Reese’s ideal future and more on the ALL NFL Draft Podcast.

The Super Bowl is always bitter sweet, as it marks the end of football season. I’ve said it before in previous emails, but I thought both the NFL and College Football put out an awesome product this year. It was a really fun season with a TON of entertaining games on a weekly basis at both levels. 

One of my big takeaways from watching the Super Bowl? The amount of rookies playing huge roles in the game. Seattle leaned heavily into their rookie class throughout the year, and the Patriots had double digit first-year guys on their 53-man roster! 

If I were to have assigned ‘grades’ on all 32 teams last spring, Seattle would have gotten an ‘A’ from me, because they took a lot of players that I liked, including three picks in my Top 35!

I even went as far last spring to say that Grey Zabel was my favorite player in the entire class. I have a sickness. Congrats to the Seahawks. Can’t wait for next football season, but it’s Draft Season for everyone now.

Next week I’ll have a lot of preview content for the Combine, so be on the lookout for that!

Best,

Fran Duffy

PS — I’m going to start doing some team-specific content here in the Newsletter. If you want me to cover your team with some notes about the types of players that I think they could be adding based off their draft history, respond and let me know!