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The Shadow GM | An NFL Draft Project (2019-present)
Vision: To Out-Draft all 32 NFL Teams | Draft 1+ PB/AP Player at each Position Group
Rank: 3rd of 32 NFL Teams (Draft data on all NFL Teams below)

Quick Backstory:

Decades ago, I was sitting on the sofa and my father was in his chair and we were watching the first round of the NFL Draft. A player was being selected, and the panel was raving about the player. My father was in his pajamas. He had never seen the player play before. I could see him shaking his head from the corner of my eye and I asked him “What?” He said “No. Not him. Not in this league.” I said “What do you mean? Did you hear what they said about him?” The player’s highlights were running and the panel was raving, but my father said to me “Look at him, son. Look at his footwork. How the hell are you going to play football in the NFL with footwork like that?” I shrugged because I couldn’t see what my father saw at that moment. He was brilliant like that. But I made a point of it to watch that player’s career, and to really think about all the scouts and media people and what they saw in him. And to have the patience to let it be a long moment, to see who was right. Years later, that player was out of the league, having never earned PRO BOWL or ALL PRO honors. He was, like most players in the game, just another guy. But still, he was the game. In the end, my father, the guy sitting in his pajamas, was right. And all the scouts, all the media people, and the team that picked him, they were wrong.

The Shadow GM | An NFL Draft Project

In the decades that followed, I fell in love with football all over again. I dove headfirst into a talent I wasn’t sure I had. I began evaluating players. The difficult part, I think, of being a talent evaluator in this way, is knowing that you cannot know if you’re right until the players’ careers play out. You have no choice but patience. It took many years to discover how average I was. So many of the players I liked weren’t very good, while some of the players I didn’t believe in were studs. It’s an awful moment when you realize just how wrong you are, when the whole time you thought you were right.

In 2010, I decided that what I needed to do was reinvent myself. I wanted to find a new way to evaluate players that was more consistent with who I am, and my natural way of thinking and problem solving. It took me 4 years to find it. When I did, I knew I had found the accuracy I was looking for.

Somewhere along the way, I came across an interview with the late writer Charles Bukowski, who was a drunk, miserable s.o.b near the end. A journalist came to his house for a story. He asked Bukowski “Why did you start writing?”. And Bukowski told him that he loved to read, and that he was reading all the books that he was told were written by the best writers of his time. And he thought to himself, so much of it really wasn’t very good. He thought he could do better if he decided to write. So he did, and he became a celebrated writer. The wisdom I took away from that interview was to look at the room that exists, even among the experts. There is a lot of room for improvement, no matter the industry or business. NFL fans can see this easily each year. All you have to do is look at how poor some of the rosters are. I think what Bukowski was saying, or what I took away, was that you don’t have to wait for an invitation. No one is going to invite you. If you think you can do it better, you just have to decide to participate.

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Did I Beat The NFL? | The Shadow GM - An NFL Draft Project (2019-present)

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