Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - Kevin Cole explains how to analytically grade a draft and talks Vikings QB future

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Matthew Coller is joined by analytics expert Kevin Cole of Unexpected Points, who talks about the process of judging a team's draft and discusses their supposed reaches in the middle rounds and the Vikings' best option at QB Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

🎵 Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here, along with Kevin Cole of Unexpected Points, returning to the show as we must cover every analytical way we can the NFL draft. What is going on, Kevin? You produced a lot of great content for the Unexpected Points newsletter. You've got podcasts, you've got charts, everything going on. So we're going to break it all down. What is up, man? Yeah, yeah. We've gotten through the draft and it's funny.

One of the more popular pieces that I had coming out of the draft, I did my own. I called them grades. They're more like ranking. I mean, this whole grade thing is kind of silly let's face it anyway some people are grading on a scale from b minus to a plus is basically the entire the entire scale and then um others you know are doing a little bit better job but we don't know what any of these things mean some people are including players that were traded for like three years ago now with late picks some people don't so i try to be very explicit about it but i also wrote a longer piece and this is you know something that's not going to endear me to everyone out there in the space but basically saying yeah draft grading is

bad generally and here's why it's bad because they're doing these things that don't really align with not only like logically how you should do it but empirically the evidence goes against a lot of what people are saying and the biggest thing is look at these steals this team got oh my god this was my fifth highest ranked guy and they got him at 10 so therefore they're the winning of the draft and i mean it makes sense these guys are like evaluators amateur evaluators who are then saying that but the reality is that may not align quite so well with what actually ends up happening when they're in the nfl yeah let's talk about that for just a second because the joke so in the media room the joke i kept making out loud all night on day two

was oh i had that guy higher on my board because my theory was that there are so many draft boards that people make and mocks that every single pick, someone could find someone's mock who is, quote, credible, whether it's, you know, Daniel Jeremiah or Dane Brugler or whoever, these people who put a ton of work all year long into the draft. But whoever you picked, one of those people is going to have your guy higher on the board than they were actually selected so i was seeing other fan bases and other reporters from other places saying like well you know this guy had him in the top 50 and he was taken at 75 so this must mean and i'm like i don't actually think that means anything uh but but you know the steals That conversation is kind of interesting though Like what actually qualifies as a reach?

What qualifies as a steal? Because if you're only calling something a reach Because mock drafters had this guy ranked 175 And you took him at 104 I'm not convinced But I am convinced if someone is ranked 37th By the mock drafters And you take them in the top 10 so i i

don't know how you balance that whole thing yeah yeah i mean another good thing is um these guys they have like 12 people in their first round grades but yet they're getting first rounders in like the third the third round somehow every single team so yeah all that's a lot of fun um okay so here's what i tried to do. I tried to say, let's put it on a scale where we can quantify everything. And then it's not as opaque also as when you're just, or, or, or, you know, it's, it's not as kind of nebulous as trying to just think this is good. This is bad. So I'm going to quantify everything. I'm going to look at this concept called surplus value, which is really what the draft is. The draft is cheap players. That's what

you're getting. You're getting a player who's on average going to produce a certain amount of value that you would pay a lot more for if you're extending a player or if you're on free agency and their contract is locked in stone and it is very cheap. You know, second round picks are making a couple million dollars a year. That is very, very cheap by NFL standards. So that's really it. So that's the currency that I'm looking at, whether it's trades, whether it's positional value, whether it's reaching or getting a steal, all those sorts of things. And so that's how I'm going to kind of quantify it is say, and like you said, if a player is being taken way earlier than you think they should be, well well there's a much bigger difference in your expected surplus value from the fourth overall pick versus the 32 overall pick than there

is if someone's taken on the fourth round rather than the seventh round or something like that so that's all i'm going to try to quantify but it is important i guess we'll get into some of this conceptual stuff is also looking at the research to say does it even like do you actually even get credit if you're drafting a player way after where they were on boards? And the real answer is not really at all. Yeah, and that's something that when we try to evaluate, and I guess we could say grade the draft.

And I know I prefaced my B grades for the Vikings by saying, I understand how boring that is and uninteresting, but I've always thought right after a draft and there have been many times where I've been right. There's been many times where I've been wrong. I thought they won the draft by getting Justin Jefferson. And there were other times where I thought Brian O'Neill, I thought like, what are you doing with this pick? Who's 270 pounds as a tackle? Are you serious serious and then the guy turns out to be a great player because he put on 30 pounds and he's really intelligent and all those things that you know who

could know that um going into the draft but i've always thought about it in terms of the process what positions you were trying to address how far you're looking down the road are you picking the right positions are you doing things that make sense so it's such a difference between Kwesi Adafo-Mentz's first draft and his second and he acknowledged this by the way after saying he felt way more prepared but when you take a safety guard and linebacker on a team that needed all the premium positions in 2022 it's like even if these guys work out, I don't really like that process. But then this year taking the wide receiver in the first round, loading up on mid round defensive backs,

some of them with some versatility that might fit into some roles. And then after that, I don't really care what you do after the fifth round, pick whoever you like. Same with UDFAs. I'm getting a lot of questions about this. What about these UDFAs? I don't know. No one ever knows. And one of them will make it, we don't know who. But the point is just

that I think we can judge on the logic by the individual team as a way, and I know you're trying to quantify it. To me, it's much more of a sense of what they actually should have been doing and whether they accomplished it. Yeah, no, I think, you know, it doesn't have to be as rigid as this is. And I would also, even in my own personal opinions, and I do this when I write things up and I say, well, you know what it says it's this number granted it could be, but there are these other reasons you have to think about. There are things that I'm questioning within. And again, like everything's a little bit more explicit. So you can, you can piece that all together and what you're doing. And I do think having like intuition based upon understanding of these concepts is very powerful.

I don't think you even need more than that to get 95% of the way there is just to have good intuition. Even if it's a subject matter I haven't studied. I think when, when I hear about something, if I hear a study with some result or, or a popular opinion in some way, I'm always like, if I hear a study with some result or, or a popular opinion in some way, I'm always like, eh, my radar goes up a little bit just because of intuition that's built off of trying to understand these concepts. So I think that's important, but I also get why people are so focused on the player picks because they are the most impactful thing.

You know, if you pick a good player or if you pick a bad player, that's going to make a big difference. Just what position you drafted is going to help skew the odds in your favor. And that's what I'm really measuring is how can we skew the odds in our favor? The actual picks are going to make the difference. The problem is that we have to be able to separate what's impactful from what we can predict. And it's not that these teams don't know what they're doing. And maybe this is also part of like the running back discussion of running backs don't matter it's not that running backs are all bad

it's that they're really really good there's lots of really really good running backs and all of these front offices are really really good at player evaluation they pour so much time and effort into it these poor gentlemen are just reacquainting themselves with their families right about right about now after this whole season so they're all really really good and you look back the teams that are really good at drafting the last few seasons whether it's the bucks or the saints or the colts in some way you go back to what they had done the prior three years and it's normally not so good so we don't even have evidence that the same guys could do well so like we want to make the right choices we We always want to make the right choices, but what we especially want to do

is what we can control. And that's skewing the odds in our favor. And that's where things like positional value trading down those other things help a lot is at least giving ourselves a better chance, but by no means does an a grade by my standard mean that's going to be the best draft where I think a lot of people, if they look at the prospects and the players they drafted, they're very confident. Like, Oh, they nailed this. They're going to be the best draft where I think a lot of people if they look at the prospects the players they drafted they're very confident like oh they nailed this they're going to be in the Super Bowl and I think that's it's really basically a coin flip at that point yeah no I totally agree and that's why I mean baked into the intuition of covering the team every day and things like that and just sort of understanding in depth what they need and what

they kind of should be doing if they're going to get to where they want to go uh baked in is positional value baked in is surplus value those things that i've learned from you and eric eager and many other people who study all of this uh at a great level is like kind of knowing what the miscues can be i think that's what i look for more than anything more than trying to say that I know this player is going to be this that or whatever because what I've learned also and I think it's totally fine if people scout these players and they spend a lot of time watching them and they have an opinion on them I'm not saying that they shouldn't but I asked Mike Zimmer this one time I was like how do you know Mike like how do you know on draft night whether you got somebody or not

or in that process? And he said, takes until the second or third week of training camp for me to know. On draft night, I think we got all great players and everything else. But by the third week of camp, when they've gone up against Everson Griffin for three straight weeks and like, what does that guy's face look like walking out? You know what I mean?

Or what is his body language? Like, what is it? How is he catching on to all the, I mean, Kellen Mond, there were legitimately people who had Kellen Mond with first round greats who believed that he could be a starting NFL quarterback. And the first week into training camp, it was like, nope, that ain't happening. It just was so, it was so, but the vikings loved him they compared him to teddy bridgewater they were like you know whatever else and so when they pick and and this

is where like you know mckay blackman was a reach by a lot of people's standards but i'm like i i just don't know i just don't know like they like them for some reason and and i don't know if he's going to be good or not makes sense to me to pick a corner. And that's the best I can do. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm going to, so shout out to you for those watching. My man, Sashi Brown behind me, RIP at the Browns. I remember he was being interviewed after his time with the Browns. And he didn't mention who the player was, but I think we know it was Corey Coleman that he was talking about because he said that they drafted a player in the first round and essentially um you know like four days into rookie camp the coaches are like nope

it's done we're done with them it's like what is going on here no i think some of that some of that is probably true maybe there's also a little bit of a bias where you kind of forget the guys you were excited about who end up being awful and you remember the guys who end up being good but there's definitely something to that but actually i want to hit on the steals concept a little bit more because i think it's like the most important concept for people to think about in the nfl draft because again it's very often the number one thing people are rating because even when people with teams reach i think evaluators sometimes are willing to like cut people more slack on the reaches, but when they grab the players who they love, that really gets them hot and bothered.

Okay. Like big time. Right. So, but so the reason, again, the evidence shows that if you compare a player where they went in the draft versus where their consensus, big board opinion, and that mostly aligns with what people are saying, like the people who love, you know, Nolan Smith going to the Eagles, it's because he was high on the consensus. Like it's not a single opinion that it's not just one opinion on that. So when you look at that, they perform those draft picks perform in line with their draft position. They don't perform any better than anyone else drafted any other position, but players who were taken earlier than their consensus, they do perform a little bit worse than their draft position. So there might be something there when it comes to reaching versus steals. And I think there's like a very strong logical argument here too, where you only need

one team to make a mistake. When you reach forward, they're the highest on that player. They could be a whole round higher than the entire rest of the NFL. We don't know, but when a player is a steal and if a player is going 20 picks later than where you think they should go, that means probably 19 different teams said, no, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you. So what's the probability? All of those 19 teams are wrong. And this one team was so right. And I think that makes perfect logical sense as to why, like, you have to give me a reason. If this player is such a great steal, why did all these other teams mess up on it? And it can't just be, they didn't see what you saw on the outside. I mean, I'm sure they're working pretty hard on the inside.

Yeah, no, that's a great point. And for me, I've always just said about guys that I love who end up getting drafted way lower than expected. Welp, I guess I was wrong. I guess what I saw was not what I was supposed to be seeing because they have, I mean, think about the number of people involved in each draft decision. And this doesn't mean they're right about everything, but one thing that they are consistently right is categorizing. These are your first round picks. These are second, these are third, these are fourth. Otherwise, the graph wouldn't go straight down, right, in terms of what those guys produced throughout their careers. But an example for this year was A.T. Perry.

I looked at his relative athletic score. I looked at his production in college, and I looked at some of his games. I mean, not a lot, but I was just like, oh, this guy's interesting. Maybe they'll draft him in the third round. Are you watching the Just Bombs highlights, or are you watching the the game of course i'm watching the highlights but i mean uh this this is the thing like i i would make no bones about this i it could not possibly grind film on 300 players if i claimed i did people should be concerned about that because there's no way that's possible uh so i'll go i'll go to the guy's youtube and usually you'll see like every

snap of a game so i'll watch two or three of those they take that's next level that's pretty good that qualifies i'll give you grinder status for that okay i give grinder status for that okay so i'm watching this guy he's making great catches he's tracking the ball well and i'm like all right that's my guy third round pick second round pick he ends up as a fifth i guess i wasn't seeing it or i guess they interviewed him or i guess they had him do recall stuff or i guess they tested him in some way that they knew better than me now it doesn't always hit stefan diggs and kj osborne are fifth round draft picks and the whole league passed a bunch of times but i think when we're talking about this discussion of grading a draft then i would say all right I really didn't know

that that that there was something other than what I was seeing for A.T. Perry for example so I think there's a lot of overconfidence that goes into this is the point and for me I've covered so many guys that have worked out and I've covered so many guys that bust where I just don't have that confidence I feel like having seen him go either way. I love certain draft picks for the Vikings. Wyatt Davis, what a great pick. Wyatt Davis, he's going to, he had a first round grade from some people and then he's horrendous and never steps on the field.

I just don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always say my new thing now is saying that the draft night is actually the NFL grading us. That's the NFL grading us. They're like, well, you got some bad grades on some of these guys. We're going to give you an F on these guys who fall multiple rounds versus what they have.

And the other logical piece of this reach versus steal argument is that the non-public information that we don't have, it could be overvalued by teams. I mean, that's a possibility um but at the same time most of it has a much of an like an asymmetry like it's skewed towards moving players down boards rather than moving players upwards but like medicals for instance um you're kind of box checking on the upside you're not like wow this guy's acl is awesome like i'm moving him up around because he has such good ACLs, but when a player like, actually I was gonna say what player doesn't have an ACL, but there was one drafts in the third round.

So maybe they're not moving down far enough this, this year. But when they have a medical problem, they're going to move down a lot. And we're not really going to know about that character issues, references, all that stuff. It can move them up somewhat.

It can really move them down. If a bunch of people are saying this guy, you know, doesn't love football, all that sort of stuff is a bad teammate that that can really, really move, move them down if a bunch of people are saying this guy doesn't love football, all that sort of stuff, is a bad teammate. That can really, really move players down. So I think that's also another very logical piece that we don't have, that we should be more humility in the fact that we don't have when players fall, that maybe there's a medical issue, maybe there's something else out there. I think Stephon Diggs, talking about medicals, he may have had a medical issue. He had a lot of problems in college. Now it didn't end up affecting him in the pros,

but that could have just been, you know, good luck for him too, that he didn't have those injury problems once he got to the NFL. Yeah. I think he had like a lacerated kidney or something at some point. That doesn't sound very good, but no.

And there are issues that it's amazing with some players that they just work around whatever their problem was. And Stefan Diggs was talked about as just being a slot receiver because he didn't have the biggest frame. And this is where I want to start discussing Jordan Addison here, because something that I tried to investigate, and I asked Mike Tannenbaum, who's a former GM, but he was a professional evaluator, about the undersized wide receiver. And when I looked it up historically, the results were not great. It was like, if you're under 180 pounds, it's going to be a pretty rough ride for you. If you're under five, whatever. And Kweisi

D'Affolmenta even said, we don't really know because there's never been a draft with this small of top wide receiver talents. So I wonder what you make of that, having studied every element of this, and you put out some wide receiver rankings, and Jordan Addison was up there, because I think that that could go either way. He could be a little too small to handle playing against physical corners, or Kevin O'Connell could just be great at scheming him to situations where he doesn't have to deal with that. But I tended to lean more toward, it doesn't matter that much, but I've also got some hesitation after meeting him and seeing how incredibly small he was.

Yeah, that's never a good, that's never a good sign. There's always like, you talk about training camps, seeing them. I have this phenomenon sometimes where you see a guy in their first NFL game. You're like, well, they look a lot bigger or smaller than I thought out there or a lot more or less physical than I thought. So that, that, that can be part of the assessment too. I think it's tough because we have limited data. This is another thing like being humility, even in uh i know our analytics people are

sometimes saying that we're uh we're too arrogant and smug i don't think so i think people don't like it like people are fine with former football players being arrogant and smug but people don't like it when we have a little bit too much confidence but i do think there are reasons to not be even confident in some of the models we're building because we're using older data so older data different defenses are being played, different schemes offensively, not only fewer wide receivers on the field at some point, but there were like much more of this dominant prototype target hog, like an Andre Johnson, a Calvin Johnson, those types of guys that that were really getting it. The NFL doesn't quite work as much anymore. There's more of a distribution of passes. And in that, that means guys who are lining up as a flanker

or guys who are lining up in the slot who don't have to engage as much, who are more about finding open spaces instead of winning down the field and contested catches are a bigger part of NFL offenses. So I agree. Historically, it doesn't look good. Like all else being equal,

you'd rather be big than not as big. But we're starting to see more success for those types of players just because of the way the NFL is schemed, the way defenses are playing, and the way they're... You really need almost three functional wide receivers now at this point to have a really great offense rather than one person you can just target to death down the field. Yeah. And I think that with what Kevin O'Connell wants to do is condensed splits, guys in the slot, everybody moving around before the snap. And even last year, they started to do it more and more as the year went along, as they got more comfortable with the offense.

And I feel like all this is advantageous. And this is another thing that goes into the steel versus the reach and all that. To me, I think fit is probably more important than steel or reach or just as important. And Jordan Addison, you just couldn't fit any better with this team.

He's not asking, he's not being asked to be a number one wide receiver. Like he's not asked to be Kelvin Johnson or Andre Johnson, where it's just, you got to beat a double teams all the time. Like that's not going to be his spot. So now they have three good wide receivers. They're all pretty young.

You could be part of a receiver group. This head coach just won 13 games. He could be here for a while. Like you can build all these things kind of together as you go forward. But, and then they pick somebody that at least from all of his reports, it's kind of together as you go forward but and and then they pick somebody that at least from all of his reports it's kind of uh like understands football really well played in multiple offenses and had success but what what are the kind of numbers say about Jordan Addison

beyond that beyond just hey this dude is short like he at Pitt he was incredible last year he was pretty good certainly scored a lot of touchdowns I think he had 25 touchdowns in two years I was amazed by him at Pitt and then I think he was good at USC but in comparison to the other receivers who were taken around that same area Quinton Johnson Zay Flowers how does he kind of stack up yeah I mean I had him rated going into the draft as a combination of using some modeling and then you, a little art and science as as the second best receiver behind Jackson Smith and Jigba. And I think how he compares is a little bit of a longer, more robust track record of production. I mean, they're all, all the top guys, other than Zay Flowers were early declares, which normally matters a bit more. Although teams have become much more hip to that

than they used to be in the past. Cause they're younger, they produce earlier. He had the great production a year before and not as great in his final season. We've seen that for some other guys. So I think that is, you can use that as a little bit of a red flag, but I think that has happened to some, some other guys in the past and the size is the problem but then again when i when i just compared him to different prospects i'm not going back too far i'm only going back to 2014 and a bunch of different advanced stats that pff has on this data he just happened to come up with not even using weight he happened to come up with davante Smith as one of his his top comps I mean I I think Smith is a little bit somehow just as small weight wise but maybe bigger frame wise than he is he could probably get off of the ball a little bit better but from a pure production standpoint when

we talk about things like how many yards per route how efficient they were with touchdowns how often they were going out of the slot it was both from about 50 50 so they can play inside and outside they were both kind of moderate as far as their depth of target, and they were both pretty good at avoiding some tackles and making some plays after the catch. I think he just kind of checks all the boxes. It's really going to be this question, and that was the downside for him is whether or not he can get off on press coverage. But if you know how to scheme around that, I think it can work. So one of the criticisms, and there weren't many, I thought that most Vikings fans were into this.

There were not a lot of Vikings fans that wanted Will Levis, and you talk about the league passing on him. I'm not saying that I trust Washington's front office necessarily, but there were probably, I mean, how many teams that could have used the quarterback that all scouted him, including the Minnesota Vikings, including their former quarterback coach? We could all be wrong and he could be a great player. That's happened before. Jalen Hurts was a second round pick and, you know, had his team in the Super Bowl. So it certainly happens. Tom Brady, sixth rounder. you wouldn't believe it. But most of the time, if a guy even gets past the middle of the first round,

your odds plummet of that guy being a franchise quarterback. So there was a lot of acceptance of not drafting Will Levis at that point. But on the defensive side, the Vikings had one of the worst defenses in the league. And if you look at their roster right now, it is very hard to make a case that that won't be true again um should they have looked at the defensive side the nolan smith the dionte banks the joey porter jr rather than going with what i guess could be categorized as a luxury pick i don't look at it that way but i i want your opinion on it um i think you could make a case in the direction but i don't think there's an obvious answer. I guess also one of the issues is, you know, knock on whatever you got in front of you,

you know, Justin Jefferson has not had any injury problems or this or that, but you know, that wide receiver group, not only was it thin, but it was extremely fragile when you look at the fact that if anything happens to Justin Jefferson, like where are you sitting at that point? So I, I just don't think the diminishing returns of adding to wide receiver or that high, honestly, right now. And maybe you can build around whether it's in free agency or some other places, some of the other positions you can kind of build through moderate depth a little bit more, even on defense. Sometimes the way things come together coaching makes a huge difference on the defensive side of the ball um so i'm okay with all those

things i do want to say one thing about will levis though and um maybe just about quarterbacks generally i do think and i agree that their chances of success you know go down a lot um i guess i think though that teams are probably too conservative when it comes to quarterbacks generally, because I don't think I'm wrong in saying that it's almost it's a fact that we just view quarterback picks in the first round so much differently than we view other picks. It's funny. I was contrasting the as a joke, like this, this draft room where they drafted Anthony Richardson. They were like, oh, you know, like and then they drafted Jameer Gibbs and Anthony Richardson, they were like, Oh, you know, like, and then they drafted Jameer Gibbs and Detroit, they're like, Oh, you know, they're just going crazy. And one of the things that people were saying is, well, you know, if,

if Richardson doesn't work out, they're all fired. And if Gibbs doesn't work out, no one will care. Now they is number four overall pick. So he's very high, but I think even so, if we were to say like, if the Titans would have like if the titans would have taken um if the titans would have taken levis at 11 where they were and then gibbs goes at 12 like hey number 11 pick the titans have been burning first round picks for like for years now with with complete bust and no one seems to care but if that lev but if levis would have failed

it would have been like the apocalypse or something I just think people have too much tied into the success or failure of these picks and if they go wrong it resetting it throwing off a franchise I saw someone making that argument the other day that if it goes wrong your franchise is dead and it's just like do we not see

the Eagles in the Super Bowl after Carson Wentz went down do we not see the Rams win the Super Bowl after Jared Goff was happening do we not see the San in the Super Bowl after Carson Wentz went down? Do we not see the Rams win the Super Bowl after Jared Goff was happening? Do we not see the San Francisco 49ers set on fire three first round picks? And there's still like, there's actually no evidence backing it up, but I still think that is something that holds down quarterbacks probably too much. Even if they only have like a 25% chance of being successful, that might be really worth like a first or mid first round pick. Yeah. I think that's sort of the theoretical versus how it actually works. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The media cycle, the press, you know, the, the focus on it, intense focus on it. It's hard. I agree.

You could say, well, all you have to do is block that out. And then all of a sudden the owner is like, you know, midway through the season, but yeah. Well, not only that, but if you draft Will Levison, he's horrible, then you lose a ton of games. So I think that's the other problem too. And then no matter how you built, Zach Wilson is proof of this, no matter how well you built the rest of your team, if you have a horrible quarterback, you're going to miss the playoffs. And so then your record says you missed the playoffs.

It doesn't say, well, listen, everybody, they had good logic and they did. It just says you missed the playoffs. But they survived too. That's actually another example of a team that's been able to survive a catastrophic early, early pick. And they're still alive and, you know, top, I don't know, six in Super Bowl odds this year. You're definitely speaking my language when it comes to first round picks but that's

that's why i think the odds are so much better if you're taken in the first half of the first round because that means the team has they've looked into everything you've ever done i mean they've gone back and watched your peewee film at this point and they have to be fully confident that they're going to draft you or dave gettleman can just watch one play at the senior bowl and pick daniel jones like yeah that's that's true dave gettleman he's been he's been uh he's been redeemed now um well the other thing that's funny about what levis is they said something about his toe and i was like this quarterback doesn't need his toe like what's supposed to be just a toe like it's just a toe like just bandage the thing up but anyway well i did i did know a kid uh who

only had three toes in high school wow my grandfather had four toes on one foot because he actually was born with six and they had to like the two of them were stuck together and they had to cut it off and uh that's horrifying we're really getting into that that might be horrifying i mean he's a baby you know he doesn't know what the hell's going on i'm chopping off toes though it's grotesque actually the guy who had three toes i didn't want to say it but since you said it he lost them i'm not kidding in a lawnmower accident so it was uh terrible well i can see that that that turned out to be you know a good basketball player and everything else anyway shout out to Matt Winter who played basketball with me when we were little kids um but Joe or something he's got to have a nickname yeah right I'm sure he didn't

expect to come up on this podcast but um anyway I like where do we go from there but the point about Will the point about Will Levis is there is a argument to say that he was not drafted that far away from the Vikings. And if you took a shot at 23, everyone would have loved it, by the way, like every draft analyst, everyone else, they would have said, wow, what a lucky break that this elite quarterback prospect dropped to the Minnesota Vikings. They got this huge steal. Here's their franchise quarterback. But at the same time you're also if they didn't believe in him asking your coach to take on a guy he doesn't believe in so it's what it's very I mean I'm like of two minds of it like would it have made sense to

take that guy sure it would have but how am I going to tell them to take someone they don't want even though theoretically it's a good idea? Yeah, I think it's tough outside of the first year of the GM coach cycle. I mean, for instance, I thought and maybe it was just the way that the board played out. But I thought the Lions were not going to take a quarterback because they were in year three now. And they are the favorite. Sorry, Vikings fans, you know, yell at the people in the desert, but they're the favorites to win the division this year.

So like resetting at quarterback. And again, golf is probably in that is like in the cousins ish sort of zone, you know, maybe not on the same level, but in that same sort of zone, like you, maybe you could upgrade over him, but you're definitely getting like a floor of performance that's competent with everything else around him. So that would have been risky. I mean, even the Raiders, you know, the Raiders are in a position where Garoppolo, can he

stay healthy or not? But even in year two, and once you've made investments like Devante Adams and other stuff, it's kind of hard to really say we're going to do a hard reset right here outside of the Jalen Hurts types of picks. And maybe this is why people wait to the second round where it's like, oh, look, we found something. Now we can get rid of Carson Wentz, that sort of situation, because not everyone's going to be like the Rams where Matthew Stafford is just going to like fall into your lap. And then you're getting rid of golf. When you draft

someone the first round, you're almost like preemptively saying we're going to move on from someone. And I guess the Chiefs did that to some degree with Alex Smith. So I'll give him credit there. I mean, it is remarkable the difference in how we view these things though because i mean hendon hooker is not talked about at all after the draft like wow who got handed it was like i don't know who got him like whatever man uh but had he been taken even with the 32nd pick by some or 31st i guess this year thanks dolphins but like in the first night it would have been this is the future quarterback they know they've got their guy and like you said that sounds irrational but it does matter and the pressure is ramped up uh when

you draft a quarterback in the first round that's like who you're forever tied to just like with christian ponder i went through this one time with Christian Ponder Christian Ponder didn't ruin the Vikings like it was frustrating to watch but then they got Bridgewater and then they built a great roster like just a couple years later but Rick Spielman was like forever tied to you blew that quarterback pick and that is it and so unfortunately like it's the world we live in i wonder what you think of though now with the vikings where they stand in the nfc universe because there are two worlds there is the afc and it's got like the playing of the harps from the heavens look at the afc and then this broke ass nfc here. That's just like dark shadows and so forth.

And I think that's the best argument to say that the Vikings could be a contender in the NFC, but where, where would you place them after kind of the dust has almost settled on the off season? Yeah. It's weird after last season being a little bit on the fraudulent argument. I mean the fraudulent argument. I mean, fraudulent meaning, again, everything is like relative, right? Like people don't seem to get like the overrated, underrated argument. People think someone is super underrated when they're like at their peak value.

Because they think it means good and bad. So like, yeah, the Vikings were more of a middling ish sort of team and they had a really great record now that doesn't mean that they are really really bad so if anything i think the vikings are probably like underrated going into this year as i mentioned and again we're going to look at i'm going to look here and use as my frame of reference some some of the betting markets here so the vikings are seventh in odds, which is, you know, not in the middle, but pretty close to the middle of the conference after the Saints, who probably just have a better means of getting the divisional title. So maybe that's part of it after the Seahawks.

And then, and the Lions are even more of a step up there before we get to the Cowboys, the 49ers and the Eagles. So like, I don't see that big of a difference between this team and the lions. I know the lions are like everyone's darling now coming off of last year. I don't think they're bad draft, which I think they had a bad draft. It's really going to affect them this season as much as maybe lowering some of their ceiling for the future years. But I guess that the relative difference between those teams, I don't see nearly as much. And to put them not on par with the bears,

but in some divisional odds, they're very close to the bears. And that really makes absolutely no sense to me, unless you're a bigger believer in Justin Fields than I am. Oh, I agree. And the Packers are the hardest one to figure out here. I think that also with the Vikings,

if you're comparing them to like the saints or something so you got basically the same quarterback i mean the spider-man meme with derrick carr um if if they play each other they might forget which quarterback belongs to which team um one time one time my wife was on fourth down on each side they'll just they had to go there it shows up on every show um one time my wife was calling a game where there was twins on a team. And I think there was some Jersey issue and they had to take a technical foul because they tried to sneak the one twin. The other one, I forget how that went,

but like that's Derek Carr and Kirk cousins. But anyway, the saints, because they didn't finish number one in their division, we'll probably have an easier schedule. And if you start looking at the schedule, then it's like, OK, wow, they're playing Mahomes. They're playing Burrow. They're playing the Eagles. They're playing the 49ers. All that stuff's going to be very difficult for them.

And I don't know how much a defensive coordinator who lost Patrick Peterson, Eric Hendricks, like might lose Daniel Hunter, might lose Zedaria Smith. I'm not sure how exactly they're going to keep up, which kind of brings us to the last thing I'd love your opinion on is now that they passed on Will Levis, they're in a very weird timeline with Kirk Cousins because he's saying like, I don't care if I become a free agent, this will be fun. I'll get paid again after I've already made $230 million in my career. But it's sort of like a now what, you know, we come out of the draft with a receiver, great choice. Wait, now what? And I want to know your opinion on the now what? Yeah. I mean, I think you have to

kind of got to roll with the waves, I guess, a little bit here and what's going to end up happening do you survive if you're this uh you know uh quasi and o'connell if the bottom falls out a little bit maybe if you do then you're in position to draft someone if you can although there might be a lot of competition to to do that if you don't get up in the into the top I don't know. It's really just a hard position because of the cap that's being spent in it, because of the expectations coming off of last year, because of the life cycle of a lot of the team now where we're still kind of coming down off of like the dominant strength of the defense for several years, but maybe not viewed as being 100% down already at this point and ready to

clean out before moving back up. I don't know. I think it's a very tough spot. It's a very, very tough spot. And if they felt like they had to figure something out with Cousins as far as extending it a bit further, I don't know. I mean, they've pushed a lot of the cap hits into void years so there's gonna be a band-aid rip at some point along the way so i think it's really just gonna be like what's your alternative again you could like give all this praise to the rams for saying they knew they had to upgrade from jared goff and they did it well it's like well matthew stafford also wanted to go there and they they got matthew stafford like that every team did not have that option sort of thing so i think it's one of those it's being proactive and optimistic for figuring out how we're gonna

how we're gonna solve this quarterback equation and for me it would be probably drafting next year you gotta draft somebody you gotta draft somebody i don't care if it's the first round or the second round maybe even the third round you You got to start drafting some quarterbacks or even looking at some guys who people may be moving on from now since there's been some dislocations in the quarterback market to see what you can figure out.

But I don't know. I think you just have to be proactive, optimistic, and not closing any doors at this point. And I don't know, even for Cousins, maybe let them test free agency a little bit. It is possible that the market value, if there's just, if the timing is bad and there's just not another team there, say, okay, I'll just take Jalen Hurts' deal, move a little money up front, and I'll take an extra few percent a year. Feedback is a way to put that for sure. Feedback. That's what it is. A lot of people are like, I'm going to do this. And you're like,

are you going to, are you going to get that in the, in the, in the, in the market? I don't know. I'll see. We'll see. Why don't we see a test that when the collusion case happens they will use feedback from the market that's what they're gonna say i mean okay i'm an anti-collusion person only because i looked at these um you know mike sando at the athletic he does these these tiering pieces they've never been high on lamar even after his MVP season I think it was something like 18 out of 50 evaluators had him as tier one he's never been higher than that so I don't know like I do think no one wants to give him the a guaranteed deal but at the same point in time the NFL has never been that high on Lamar Jackson now maybe that is more of a misdiagnosis of who he

is as a quarterback but I'm not sure it's as collusion-y as some others. But, you know, it could be. You never know. The counterpoint is that Deshaun Watson had 20-plus women accusing him of stuff, and they gave him the most money ever. So if you could play quarterback at all – I mean, Kirk Cousins was – I mean, his team was letting him go, and the Vikings gave him a fully guaranteed contract like

a lot of times if you're a quarterback especially an mvp one but you know neither here nor there for this point at least the ravens figured out his sleep schedule because the pan that was i saw something about that i haven't heard the story what's the problem he plays xbox all night long or something what's the deal i have no idea that was a thing that one of the mega reporters put out there was like you know there's some real concern in the league about his sleep schedules like oh come the man won the mvb of the whole league okay like please please be serious about catches up with you it does well especially uh as we get older uh but he's still a youthful gentleman so that'll be fine but um i think that you bring up some interesting points

just about how it is a hard position. And I think if they end up back with Kirk Cousins on an extension, that it won't be hard to get people into US Bank Stadium because it's great. It'll be hard for anyone in the fan base to buy into it, even people who like Cousins, to buy into like this is a good idea because it's just not. I mean, when we have is a good idea because it's just not i mean when we have five years of this it's just not enough uh so i i think that they have a plan to draft someone in 2024 but if they win 11 games who are you drafting and and once again you and i

are talking about a team that doesn't really know what it is and has been that way for too long so uh your work though through the draft kevin absolutely fantastic a must shows up in my inbox every day unexpected points podcasts analytical breakdowns go find it um just google it unexpected points uh it's always been a great name and i appreciate all of your contributions to the show we will definitely get together very soon, man. All right. Well, thanks for inviting me. I always enjoy our talks.