Every spring, the draft-bust industry gets a fresh batch of twenty-two-year-olds to declare dead on arrival. Every spring, a few of them turn out to be the best players in the league. And somehow nobody ever has to cut a check for being spectacularly wrong.
The Josh Allen Case
In 2018, Rivers McCown of Football Outsiders made the case against Josh Allen in language with no wiggle room, as Buffalo Rumblings summarized. Allen, he wrote, “had the worst QBASE score of any quarterback in this draft class,” and his yards per attempt had fallen from 8.6 in 2016 to 6.7 in 2017. “Every piece of empirical evidence we have on Allen leads to him being a failure,” McCown wrote. He granted that the sky is the limit if Allen could be coached to play football well, then added: “But it is incredibly hard for me to believe that will happen.”
Josh Allen’s Yards per Attempt at Wyoming
Allen won the AP NFL MVP award for the 2024 season. Nobody owes that analyst a public flogging for this. Sports analytics gets plenty wrong in both directions, and the site was not alone. In April 2018, Sportsnaut writer Jesse Reed wrote that Allen was “destined to either become one of the biggest draft busts in NFL history” or “one of the league’s rare cases where a player who struggled in college became an exceptional pro.” That is less a prediction than a coin flip dressed up as analysis.
Nobody Has to Pay for It
The point is not that these writers were wrong. It is that the format does not ask anyone to account for how confidently they were wrong. A bust take gets a headline in May. A corrected take, if it comes at all, gets buried in a notes column nobody reads three years later.
When a Correction Actually Happens
Which makes it worth noticing when one does. In February 2018, former NFL executive Bill Polian told ESPN Radio’s Golic and Wingo that Lamar Jackson should switch to receiver, calling him an “exceptional athlete” but saying “the accuracy isn’t there” and “don’t wait to make that change,” according to CBS Sports. Jackson went on to win the MVP in 2019 and again in 2023.
In November 2019, Polian told USA Today Sports, as CBS Sports reported: “I was wrong, because I used the old, traditional quarterback standard.” He said Ravens coach John Harbaugh and general manager Ozzie Newsome had been “more prescient than I was,” and credited offensive coordinator Greg Roman with building a system around Jackson’s skills. CBS ran the story under the headline “Bill Polian finally admits he was wrong,” which tells you how rare the admission was.
Certainty Sells, Hedging Doesn’t
Polian’s reversal deserves credit, and it is also a single data point. The draft industry sells certainty it cannot back up, a model score, a pro day workout, three years of college tape, because hedging does not generate headlines or fill a May content calendar.
When the certainty turns out to be wrong, the incentive structure has already moved on to the next class of twenty-two-year-olds, who will be declared franchise saviors or finished products in the first weeks of their professional lives, by people who will rarely be asked to explain themselves either way.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep a running tab, because somebody should.
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Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
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