Our strategy of trading draft picks for veteran WR’s does not work for the Cowboys (See Galloway and Williams. Williams is especially bad since we gave a 1,3, and a 6 when the market value for better receivers is a 3). We need to go back to drafting these guys instead.

Peterman starts for the Lions so it seems to me that you would have to lean towards bust frankly.

Here’s what the prior article had:

“The criteria we apply for labeling someone as a bust is simple. If you become a consistent starter on your team, you’re a hit. If not, you’re a bust. We can argue till we’re blue in the face about about value or quality, but at the end of the day you have to remain a starter. For better or for worse, guys who looked promising but don’t start because of injuries are also listed as busts.”

By that definition Warrick, Gardner, Travis Taylor, Ashley Lelie, and Bryant Johnson were all starters for their respective teams for at least 4 years (which is about the average NFL career). It seems that the bust statistics for WR are being skewed because for WR there’s a production threshold included as well as starting threshold (i.e. if the players I mentioned were OL, they wouldn’t be counted as busts because they started for their teams).

IMO, the jury is still out on Gonzalez and less likely Troy Williamson (I mention him because he was having a great pre-season in Jacksonville before getting injured).

Okay, so the order of bust likelihood is: C, T, G, TE, RB, QB, WR. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed that roughly tracks the order of intelligence generally attributed to those positions. I don’t know if I’d call it strong, but there seems at least to be a significant correlation there.

I’d really like to see a metric that put draft position and wonderlic score against bust likelihood. Has anyone done something like this already?

Rex Grossman took his team to the Super Bowl, Robert Edwards had a great rookie season before suffering a Mike Sherrard-type injury, and Laurence Maroney averages about 800 yards a season in his three full seasons. Just nitpicking…nothing better to do this time of year.

is someone that never starts for any team., drafted in the first 4-5 rds. Anyone drafted after that should not be considered a bust no matter what happens because those rds are for projects and the like.

…the ability of a “Hit” player to impact a team’s fortunes is different by position. You certainly allude to this, but it seems a lot of the responses from readers abstract from this too much.

First, linemen may “seem” to have a lower bust rate, but even using your objective criteria, the fact that teams have more than twice as many starters at OL positions makes the “Not a Bust” goal easier to achieve, and “hiding” poorer players at, say, guard or right tackle in some cases may have less of an impact on a team than hiding a miserable player at wide receiver. (This isn’t the case with LT, of course, but even then the statistics are a lot tougher to measure)

But even then, the “Hit Rate” is pretty close between tackles and wide receivers. It’s just that WRs have a higher “Bust Rate.” To me this seems like more of the above issue than anything – you can’t really hide a bad receiver. If they aren’t producing stats, there’s only two starting spots and they’ll either get drowned on the depth chart or moved out. The depth chart preconditions the outcome we’re observing.

But even if it doesn’t, and tackles really have a higher floor, it becomes, as the original poster put it, a tossup between higher potential and that risk aversion. If the pick is Dez Bryant vs. a Markice Pouncey or second tier RT prospect, I’d say that a “hit” on Bryant is more likely to impact the team’s overall prospects.

Always an interesting discussion.

and he was hitting that powder right and left – and it was KNOWN.

To me it was clearly an EXCUSE for the Cowboy haters that were in the voitng clique in the 80’s and 90’s. The only cowboys that got in were ones like Manster that they did not dare say no to. Rayfield Wright should have been in at least 15 years earlier. Chuck Howley is STILL not in.

That was one good trade Jerry pulled off. The word was that Dallas had Quinn as the 7th best player in that draft. A lot of teams passed on him and it proved to be the right thing to do. Although he is still young and might be able to become a NFL QB, the chances are slim.

QB’s really suck to label as busts because most of the time highly rated QB’s go early to really bad teams. Very rarely do you get a QB who goes to a bad team and becomes a great QB.

i think your throwing in the towel a little early on some players: Smith, Leinart, and Quinn all still have the chance to start next season at QB, Maroney hasn’t been a complete bust and will never put up big yards in the Pats system having to share carries.

WR’s are really hard to label as busts. Some of them simply couldn’t play. but others were on teams that had bad QB’s or systems that just didn’t work for them. WR is a completely reliant position. If they have a inaccurate QB or their on a team that runs the ball a lot they might not put up flashy stats.