Marc Ross. Not entirely a new thought...but sort of hit me clearly this morning.
When Jerry Reese was running the draft for Ernie Accorsi, we were putting together drafts like the 2007 draft. In the years prior, we had regularly plucked value out of late round picks. The 2nd round was a freaking gold mine. EA was pulling the trigger, but I always credited Reese with those drafts. So how do we explain these draft of late which are basically 1st round picks and a cloud of dust. The man didn't just forget how to evaluate talent. And he's still plucking the likes of JPP, Hakeem Nicks, Amukamura, and now Beckham out of the crowd. I consider all of those to be very strong picks (notwithstanding the leveling off from JPP after the initial flash or the injury/motivational stagnation from Nicks).
BUT...when Jerry isn't the guy intricately involved, i.e., outside of the top picks....it's been a shit show basically since he took over. In promoting him to GM, I think we have never replaced the value he brought to the draft process. So while Marc Ross is his guy and so Reese takes the blame for that ultimately, I think our issues haven't been that Reese can't judge talent as you may often see argued around here...but rather, he hasn't found a guy who judges talent anywhere as well as he did and so he is making poor decisions in the draft based on poor information.
Ultimately, I think this means for me that I won't be upset if he stays on as GM....but I do believe our scouting and personnel department needs a shakeup under him.
Link - ( New Window )
2007 was a freak year, plain and simple.....
Difficult to quantify, I suppose, but I recall some analysis being done that indicated Ross' work in Philly was similar in poor quality.
It is beyond depressing that ownership won't address the FO bungling of the draft and FA. How Reese continues to finesse this and dupe ownership into not making fundamental changes is where we are. As doomster or TTH said a few days ago, it was, what 15 or 17 years of lousy football before moves were made in the past putrid cycle.
I put the Giants' draftees as a % of team roster closer to 43%, right down there with TB, and that's without counting the question marks that hang over the 2014 and 2013 drafts.
That's a pretty significant chunk of the guys that would contribute to the 2 superbowl titles (and a few others who went to other teams and proved to be NFL level players).
2007 was an outlier in the sense that we got a historically unprecedented contribution from basically every player taken in year 1. It was not a-typical from the above drafts in the context of us getting quality pieces year in and year out when Reese was running the show.
That said, when he became the managing partner, he lost the ability to get into the level of detail on matters that we do and can't interact with the client with the same frequency. So he is a) dependent on us to bring important issues to his attention and b) dependent on us to do our jobs properly. If we fail on either of those fronts, the client is not properly served...despite the fact that my boss would never have let that happen if he were fully involved.
Same here. Ross can't scout players/become involved in the draft process in the same way he could when that was his entire job. He has delegated responsibility to Ross (or perhaps others in the organization...as mentioned in the other linked thread). Like my boss, he is dependent on Ross et al to do their jobs in order for him to succeed at doing his. The issue is the GM CAN'T spend his time doing that to the same level of detail. So the thought is he probably allocates most of his attention to earlier picks/players (where we happen to see better returns). He presumably relies on his staff to inform him more and more as the draft moves along. If they fail, he fails, despite the fact that he may be perfectly capable of doing a better job scouting and evaluating talent than them.