The Draft Game

For All They Spend on Analysis, Teams Aren't Sure What They'll Come Up With

In recent weeks, Joey Harrington's life has consisted of making daily trips to a gym in his home town of Portland, Ore. He is in NFL limbo, waiting for the Detroit Lions to trade or release him and hoping he can take advantage of the chance his next team gives him and demonstrate that he can be a successful quarterback in the league.

"It's funny," Harrington said last week of his odd existence of late. "People say, 'I wish I had the time to go work out.' Well, from 8 till noon or 9 till 1, that's my job. I'll be working out."

As next weekend's NFL draft nears, Harrington's uncertain status serves as a cautionary tale. Teams pour millions of dollars into their scouting budgets and pore over prospects' college game tapes. They put draft-eligible players through every test imaginable from running the 40-yard dash to zigzagging around cones to bench-pressing a 225-pound weight bar to answering questions on an intelligence test. The teams perform background checks on players and conduct face-to-face interviews. They fly scouts and coaches around the country to see the players and then fly the players around the country for another look. Executives, coaches and scouts huddle for countless hours to set and reset their teams' draft boards and plot draft-day strategy.

And yet, mistakes are made. Often. Big mistakes. Expensive mistakes. And, in some cases, seemingly unavoidable mistakes.

Just look at Harrington. There was no reason to believe when the Lions took him with the third overall pick in 2002 that he would be a bust. He had been wildly productive at Oregon, was big enough and athletic enough. He didn't have the world's strongest arm, but it seemed sufficient. He was bright. He appeared to have the proper mix of bravado and levelheadedness, and just about any team in the league would have loved to have gotten him. Now, four disappointing seasons and 62 interceptions later, the Lions are ready to trade him -- probably to the Miami Dolphins -- for a late-round draft choice.

For all the work that teams put into readying for the draft to try to eliminate the luck factor, the process remains a mix of good judgment and good fortune. At times, it seems to have all the skill of forecasting the outcome of a coin flip. The Washington Post studied the first three rounds of the last 10 NFL drafts, rating the success of selections by the number of games played by the draftees. Among the results was that the choices most fraught with peril are the 77th and 96th overall picks in the draft. Why? Just because. The 76th and 78th picks are fine, and so are the 95th and 97th. The St. Louis Rams, who have the 77th choice next weekend, and the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have the 96th, had better get to work finding teams that are unsuspecting trade partners.

When the Dallas Cowboys last month signed free agent wide receiver Terrell Owens, who was banished last season by the Philadelphia Eagles for his misbehavior, to a three-year, $25 million contract, the move was regarded as risky. But Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said when he signed Owens that he considered the maneuver less risky than drafting a player because in Owens's case, there at least was an NFL track record.

"You base some expectations, to some degree, on the last performance or the last game and then you project that out," Jones said. "It's about risk and it's about taking those risks. We've signed . . . other free agents here and we've got to assume that they're going to be at some level of where they've been in the past. You've got a little more dicey decision when you're drafting. But that's just life in this game. You take risks. This isn't buying bonds. This isn't an old maid's portfolio we're dealing with here. This is risky. The minute you think you've got every base covered, you're surprised sometimes."

The Steelers won the Super Bowl last season with a starting tailback, Willie Parker, who wasn't a starter in college at North Carolina and went undrafted two years ago.

"You think, with all the info we have, you can't find a diamond in the rough," New York Giants General Manager Ernie Accorsi said at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis in late February. "And then you see a Willie Parker. He didn't just make a roster. He was a star of the Super Bowl."

Said Washington Redskins Coach Joe Gibbs: "They are out there. We do a good job combing the country. But to be quite truthful . . . what we can't weigh and measure out here is your heart and character. Our real good football teams with the Redskins in the past, roughly half of them were [undrafted] free agents. That means that somebody else didn't think they were good enough. Or they weren't good enough to be drafted, we didn't feel like, and they end up being very, very good players for us."

Numbers vs. Instinct

NFL decision-makers must weigh what they see on game tapes with the results of this spring's testing at the combine and at players' campus workouts for scouts. When a player excels during the workouts, teams must try to figure out whether they're looking at the next Mike Mamula, a defensive end from Boston College who was a workout wonder turned bust after being selected by the Eagles with the seventh overall choice in 1995, or the next Brian Urlacher, the Chicago Bears' standout middle linebacker chosen out of New Mexico with the ninth overall pick in 2000 after a series of eye-catching pre-draft workouts.