this topic got me thinking and searching....
https://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress ... -rankings/
this is an interesting read a study on the subject from 06-10
Equally Inaccurate: An Analysis of Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay’s Draft Rankings
As the chart above shows, Kiper and McShay have proven to be equally inefficient judges of talent over the past five years. Neither expert’s rankings were a particularly good predictor of how a player would perform compared to the rest of his class. In fact, the average errors listed above suggest that the gurus’ rankings are off by around 35 spots when compared to the player’s actual performance. In other words, a player Kiper or McShay ranked as the 15th-best player in the draft is most likely to actually have been the 40th-best based on CAV to this point in their careers. The root mean square errors (RMSE) imply that Kiper is very slightly less prone to extreme errors than his ESPN counterpart, but that difference is not significant. RMSE severely punishes large errors, so having a comparatively lower RMSE implies that one makes fewer huge errors. However, like the average errors, the RMSE for each scout is enormous.
Clearly, then, both “experts” have been both on-point and wildly off-base with their draft predictions over the past few years. On the whole, neither’s rankings are very accurate. If a player is listed in the Top 25 by either scout, that players will, on average, be in the top forty or sixty players from their draft class, but he is absolutely not guaranteed to be one of the very best players from his year. Furthermore, none of the differences between the average errors of Kiper and McShay are statistically significant: the differences between them are likely more due to luck than actual skill. In other words, you could take Kiper’s “Big Board” or McShay’s Top 25 and ask any random person to put them in any random order, and on average, that person’s rankings will be about as accurate as predicting future NFL success than any of ESPN’s two experts.
another piece on Kiper:
http://deadspin.com/infographic-youre-b ... -480958913
Of Kiper's 40 selections, only 12 ended up being in the top 20 of their draft class. 17 of the players ended up being average, and 11 were complete busts. Perhaps more importantly, Kiper missed more future superstars than he predicted.
Kiper and McShay are just two guys in a large group of people doing this...but the point I mean to make is that perceived value vs what actually pans out as real value are two completely different things. The former is highly subjective and the latter is mostly objective..
When grading a draft before anyone has played a down you can only go by perceived value which will vary drastically in a lot of cases....so I don't understand what is so difficult to accept varying 'grades' as a result. It all seems to be an illusion of sorts anyway. The value perception that really matters is the perception of the guy(s) making the actual picks.....and every team is certain that they got the best value they could for where they picked vs who was available. How could it be any other way?
I wouldn't grade their picks in the first two rounds as high as you suggested. I'd probably give them a B or B- for those two selections and again, that's not a knock on Waynes or Kendricks (or on Spielman, for that matter). I just don't see anything exceptional about those choices given where they were made. That's the level of player I expect a team picking 14th overall to get in rounds 1 and 2. Neither strikes me as a superb value for the spot in which they were chosen. Neither strikes me as a college superstar likely to become an NFL superstar. They're good, solid choices.