I think it very well could have mattered last year too. Henne looked good in the preseason and great against the Pats in the opener. He had a bad game against Houston but a decent one against Cleveland. I don't think we would have started 0-7 if he hadn't gotten hurt.
If we think beyond draft status, here are the players that easily outperformed their initial expectations: Wake, Bess, Starks, Pennington, McDaniel (and kudos for hanging onto Soliai) Most of it is on the defensive side of the ball
I don't see how it is hypocritcal. I have given him blame for those Parcells misses too. The point with Decosta is that we have no idea what decisions he would have made with those Ravens picks. Yes, he was (presumably) in the room when they were made but so were a lot of other people.
I personally don't see how Hartline or Bush haven't exceeded expectations. Yes, Hartline may have been a 4th rd pick, but most everyone here thought he was a big reach. Even Jake Long, #1 pick notwithstanding, has to be someone who exceeded expectations. He was far from the unanimous choice, and plenty of people (nationally and locally) questioned his ability to play LT in the NFL let alone at an elite level.
Tannehill is the first and only skill position player Ireland has used a 1st round pick on. He thinks he can find those positions later in the draft, hence undervalued.
None were draft choices , and Wake as I have mentioned doesn't fit into any definition of a find. Kudos ( once again ) for getting him to sign here , but like Long ( to a lesser degree ) it was expected he would be productive. He has been better than most expected , not so much on how others anticipated.
I don't see how that conclusion in drawn from anything that's been done or said. If that's the case, why did he trade 2 2nd rd picks for Marshall? Why would he ever budged off moving a 4th rd or later pick for a WR? Preferring certain players on the board over others doesn't mean one thinks certain positions can be found later. The only two positions (in general) I think I could argue that Ireland thinks could potentially be found later are DT and S. And for that I have to assume Langford, Merling, and Odrick are all DEs.
I doubt Pennington would have been that bad all season. Or as bad as Henne. The difference would have been pretty big.
As I have said Hartline has exceeded expectations for a 4th , but not boom goes the dynamite way . Bush was one of the best college players of the last decade and he signed for big dollars and imo his marquee value appealed to the owner , as it should to some degree. Do you think Jake Long has substantially out performed his draft slot?
Fineas what's your take on the Matt Ryan versus Jake Long choice, given that you're attributing all of the choices made during Ireland's tenure to Ireland and not someone else?
I'd criticize him more for not taking your advice and trading for Tony Gonzales (though still not sure a 2nd was/is worth it - of course I'd easily prefer him to Pat White). Gonzales and Fasano would've been quite a good tandem (even if their skills somewhat overlapped).
Fair enough , respect that you do , I don't though , he has played well of course but his impact hasn't translated , imo , to any more wins or diminished the number of losses. He also has started to raise worries re ongoing health , but how much greater has his impact been that what would and should be expected for a number one overall pick?
What would have happen, or could have happened, or should of happened, is the lament of losers. By your logic, the Dolphins would have been 0-16 last season, if Henne had remained the starter, since they were 0-7 with him as the starter. To bad that wasn't the case, because Andrew Luck would now be the QB of the Dolphins and the future would look a lot brighter.
Didn't it come out shortly after that draft that Bill Parcells' main target was actually Chris Long? IIRC, that was the case. Ireland got that Jake Long pick right compared to Chris Long. I certainly don't think Matt Ryan would've had the same success in Miami he's had in Atlanta. Atlanta had more weapons going into that draft - White, Turnery, and Gonzalez. They've also acquired some prime weapons since drafting him, namely Julio Jones.
Edit my last sentence to the following then: They've also acquired some prime weapons since drafting him, namely Tony Gonzalez and Julio Jones.
Would Greg Olsen help Miami? Will Egnew be better than him? Unlike Gonzalez who wanted to play for a winner , Olsen likely would have been ok with a trade back to his U location.
I stand corrected. It just seemed like Henne was the starter for the first seven games because they were all losses. You are absolutely right though, Henne was only the starting QB during the Dolphins 0-4 start last year.
Their skill sets are quite different. If a team wanted to run a steady diet of 2 TE base sets, they would have made a nice complimentary pair.
I enjoyed your well written article, but do not agree with labeling some of those 2011 early round picks as busts already. You need to look at the circumstances surrounding each player. To refer to them as busts is as shortsighted as if someone called Odrick a bust after his rookie season, based on just looking at games played and stat line.
How many of these threads do we need? Make up whatever stat you want, the results remain the same. 7-9, 7-9, 6-10 and a roster full of garbage.
Nice job and thanks for putting this all together, so please don't look at it like I am stealing your thunder... The other day I did some looking also and found out how BB and the Pats have done since 2008 referencing the 1st 3 rounds in the draft... also based that against BP and Ireland... I checked to see how many of those high round picks were still with the team since 2008... NE- 2008= 1 out of 4 are still with the team... NE- 2009= 2 out of 5 are still with the team... NE- 2010= 5 out of 5 are still with the team... NE- 2011= 5 out of 5 are still with the team... Total = 13 out of 19 are still with the team= 68%... MIA- 2008= 1 out of 4 are still with the team... MIA- 2009= 1 out of 4 are still with the team... MIA- 2010= 3 out of 3 still with the team... MIA- 2011= 2 out of 2 still with the team... Total = 7 out of 13 are still with the team= 54%... I think Fineas where Ireland takes a hit is mostly on FA, either signing them, not signing them or getting rid of them due to performance/injuries/character issues... The dreaded FA picks from 2008-2009 come to mind and then again you have to think of BP...
I dont care for Ireland as a personnel evaluator , I dont like very much about our current roster, and I really thought he and Sparano should have been shown the door together...but an excellent write up by the OP. Well done.
The metric I use at evaluating both players and management is wins, because wins fixes everything else. Perception, Attendance, lockerroom chemistry, any auxiliary issues: They are all cured with copious amounts of wins. Everything in this league is about wins. Without wins, everything in and around an organization goes under a microscope, and cracks can show, as we have all seen. As Irelands teams DO NOT WIN, it is hard to consider him anything but a failure.
It's ridiculous for you to write off(and not come up with actual reasoned critical objections) to someone else's work considering you've done nothing that even suggests you've thought medium-hard about the topic at hand. But you sure do insist on posting a lot.
And somehow, you're satisfied with the idea that your "metric" completely ignores the impact of coaching, conditioning, circumstances and the value of the actual decisions made, or any number of things that effect wins and losses that aren't actually a GM's responsibility.
The draft doesn't end after the first round. Even so, 20% of his first round picks have been skill position players, which is right about the % of the starting lineup that is made up of skill position players. How many skill position players have the Pats taken in the first round since 2008? Zero. How about the Packers? Zero. Steelers? One. Ravens? One. Eagles? One. So Ireland takes skill position players as often as the other "top" GMs.
To be fair , imo , a team doesn't have to take skill position players high if they have them already and if ones they have taken in later , late rounds perform markedly better than their draft slot.
At some point I'd really like to see someone who thinks Ireland is terrible just do some ****ing research. Any research. At this point I'd be happy if I knew some of these people even knew how to do research- even if it isn't on this topic. Like scan a middle school science project or something.
Wake was as much of a find as any good player. None of these guys are secrets. Every team and every GM knows about every one of them. Hell, most of us know about them sitting in our underwear in front of our laptops. There was hardly certainty that Wake would be great in the NFL. He signed here for peanuts -- 4 years for $4.9 million with just a $1 million signing bonus. Any team in the league could have offered him more and had him. Needless to say, if any of the other 31 teams thought he'd be half the player he is they would have happily paid him 5 times what we signed him for. They didn't. Ireland deserves at least as much credit for Wake as any GM does for any player that was drafted or that was even a priority UDFA.
Fair enough. It is too early to label any 2011 picks as busts and may be too early for some 2010s, depending on the circumstances. It was a poor choice of word in that context. What I was trying to say was that if the Dolphins had picked any of those guys and got the production from them that those teams got, the Ireland critics would surely be calling them failed draft picks.
No, he didn't. He made lazy, off-hand comment that you agree with. You're taking wins and losses for a GM's quality which is ignoring the pretty much indisputable fact that coaching(a long with a bunch of other factors) can either make a roster look much better or much worse than it actually is.
We should have a limit on the endless Ireland threads. That said, this thread is unlike ANY OTHER Ireland thread which, in my opinion, makes it very relevant.
