I'm looking forward to this year when we have the privilege of listening to Bill on the McAfee show in his run-up prior to the draft. Bill already said he'd be talking mostly about the QBs but also about the OTs and WRs. I'm interested in learning what Bill really thinks about all these prospects and who he thinks will draft whom. Interestingly, on Wednesday's McAfee show
Bill said a lot of the info leaked within 12 hours of the draft turns out to be far more accurate than stuff leaked previous month. Can't wait.
I've been trying to hold my horses until later in the process every year just to avoid having to retool everything based on late info which
was often dramatically different from the stuff that came out early in the year. Every step in the process, most importantly the games
themselves, but also the FCS playoffs, the all-star games, the combine and all the pro days & interviews refines the info so that January's first
rounder is a late 3rd and so forth. It all changes.
When Bill said that bit about the 12 hours I tried to recall anything like that off the top of my head and really couldn't, but I'm not doubting that he's right.
I think the process is changing every year.
As an example of how different drafting is now then when it was back in the dark ages there is a story from, I believe, the 60s where
the Pats scouts and staff were sitting around in the war room waiting for their turn in, say, the 10th round or something, and one
of them was looking through Street and Smith's College draft guide and pointed at a name and said he thought we should take
him, but somebody else threw some cold water on the idea by saying "Nope. We can't. That guy is dead". and he was
correct. The player had been killed in a car accident or something. We came pretty close to drafting a dead guy except one
guy in the room had heard about his unfortunate passing.
I can't recall the exact details now, but that story is supposedly legit.