"Marty Hurney is one of the best recognizers of college talent in the nation. Period." A deeper dive

[Ricky Spanish]

In Tepper's Press conference the other day he said the following:

"Marty Hurney is one of the best recognizers of college talent in the nation.  Period. I don't want to lose that."

Welp, Tepper is big on Analytics, so let's analyze this statement by the numbers.

I pulled every single drafted player from the past 10 years (2009-2019) and put them into a spreadsheet. I then Compared the list of all drafted players to each year's end of the year Superlatives/Accolades. These end of year awards include PFF All-Pro, AP All Pro, Pro Bowl, Football Writers All Pro, Sporting News All Pro, and Sports Writers All Pro recognition. I did not count each individual accolade, however I did count if any player received any one of the accolades previously mentioned at any point in the past 10 years. While this will not show if a prospect is a multi-year stud due to yearly awards, but it will show if the player was not a complete and total waste of space their entire career and was actually good for at least one season and recognized for it by some organization. Now this is not a 100% perfect way to evaluate the talent from the drafts, the best way to do that would be to look at every single pick individually and evaluate them, however this way is the quickest way that provides a concrete, black and white "yes" or "no" for a if a draft pick was halfway decent. I am by no means saying this method is an end all to be all way to evaluate draft success. This method will not show the value of a solid contributor to the team that does not earn individual awards, so guys like Star, Klein, Munnerlyn, or Lafell will not pop off as hits with this method, even though they were far from useless throughout their careers. This method will also not show future HOF level talent drafted like Cam or Luke.

In terms of Baseball, think of this as a way to measure On Base %/Batting Average rather than Home Runs and Slugging %. On to the numbers:

Below are the success rates of picks from 2009-2019. I have broken each area down by Overall, Hurney Era, and Gettleman Era

Overall we are 12% "Successful" at drafting "Good" players. 11th in the league. Not bad. Pretty good. With Gettleman at the helm: 14% succesful. 10th overall in his time as GM. Hurney at the helm: 11% succesful, 19th overall in his time as GM.

Fun Fact: John Elway is fuging terrible at drafting talent and Peyton Manning/Old FA's chasing a ring won them that super bowl.

Next we'll take a look at whether or not the guys drafted are "NFL Material". The average career for an NFL player is 3.3 years . To determine if a guy is NFL Material, I looked at who has had a career longer than 3 years. Anyone who lasted longer than 3 is considered a yes and anyone who lasted fewer than 3 is listed as no. Again, not a perfect metric to determine if a guy is good or not, but a good way to determine if he has any business on an NFL roster to begin with:

Overall, we're #1 with a 57% success rate. Hell yeah, go us, we draft guys that stay in the league. Hurney Era: 22nd, with a 53% success rate. Gettleman era #1 62% success rate with the next closest being a full 10% lower than us.

Next is average draft pick by round. Not the most accurate due to trades and whatnot, but still a good idea of where we are constantly picking each round. Higher number means better overall team, lower number means worse overall team:

Overall we pick around 17th. With Hurney we pick around 12th. With Gettleman we picked around 21st. 

Below you will see the Career AV average of all the players we have drafted in the past decade by round. This is a metric developed by PFR to determine a player's value throughout their career. I will be comparing all players drafted during each other's respective seasons as a GM to keep it fair with the competition around the league. Hurney is on the left and Gettleman is on the right. Let's start with round 1:

Round 1 goes to Hurney by a landslide. Round 1 has been and always will be Hurney's bread and butter. Dude knows how to draft a stud first rounder. Gettleman is right around league average at it. I'd let Hurney pick a first rounder 10 times out of 10. 

Round 2. Jesus Christ the numbers speak for themselves in round 2. Hurney is atrocious, Gettleman is slightly above average. Boy oh Boy it's ugly though...

Round 3 for Hurney is not much better. Gettleman is still above average.

More of the same in round 4. Hurney is dildos and Gettleman is above average. 

Round 5 it's a toss up with a slight edge to Hurney due to the Josh Norman Pick. However, that one pick greatly skews the data in his favor. Removing each GM's top draft pick for round 5 drops Hurney's average to 0.5 (Norman's overall CarAV is 37) and Gettleman's drops to 4.4 (AJ Klein's CarAV is 23). Credit where it's due, Hurney found Norman in the 5th, but other than that, the players he chooses in round 5 are hot garbage.

Hurney gets the edge here for finding both Hardy and Brad Nortman in the 6th. Gettleman never found anyone worth a damn in round 6. Point Hurney, no qualifications.

Round 7 is another toss up. Hurney gets points for finding Munnerlyn, Getts had two 7th round picks he used his entire tenure here and he drafted Beau Sandland and Harrison Butker. One is a damn good kicker, the other never made the team. 

Pick your poison here. 

Finally we come to overall CarAV of players drafted during each's tenure as GM of the Panthers:

I'm going to be honest I did not see this coming. I really thought Hurney would have the edge with the all world talent he drafted with Cam and Luke, but holy crap it really is feast or famine with Hurney. Gettleman... I don't even know? I didn't think his picks were that great, but somehow his CarAV of players jumps him to the top and I honestly don't know why. I'm sure Hurney's Average will go up with Moore moving forward, probably with Burns as well if history is any indicator, but this honestly surprises me.

Credit where it's due: Hurney hits some home runs in the first. No one can doubt that. Cam and Luke are studs and its early, but it looks like DJ Moore will be special too. Norman and Hardy weren't bad picks in the late rounds too. However, Dude is absolute trash at picking in rounds 2-4 where you get the best value on young talent. Gettleman, while not as solid in the first, actually found talent in the middle rounds, something Hurney always struggled to do. 

Conclusion:

Hurney is average at best at evaluating draftable talent. The highs are high and the lows are low. He hit a a few absolute bomb home runs in Cam and Luke, but other than that, it's been not great by any stretch of the imagination. In addition to this, the rosters that he has put together have lead to higher draft picks due to poor records. Gettleman, was not as good at drafting home runs as Hurney, but he also drafted substantially later in the draft on average due to the teams he fielded averaging a better overall record. His picks aren't world beaters, but they are solid contributors throughout the roster.

These methods are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they do provide some perspective on Hurney as a pure talent evaluator compared to the rest of the league. Also these methods aren't perfect because we drafted a guy named Andre smith in the 7th round one year and my vlookups picked him up as the all pro tackle drafted by the bengals, so the numbers aren't even 100% accurate so please take everything with a grain of salt and subtract the number of total successes by Hurney by 1 due to that. I'm not going back and changing those pivot tables. 

In summation to go back to the baseball reference from earlier: Hurney is a a HR hitter that will either go long, or strike out. Gettleman was a contact hitter that grounded out if he didn't get on base. Hurney is Adam Dunn, Gettleman is Scott Hatteberg. 

We need to find our Cal Ripken Jr.

 

[kungfoodude]

Check out Pro Football References CarAV metric. It's a pretty solid one stop shop for a numerical equivalent of all that data you crunched.

[Ricky Spanish]

5 minutes ago, kungfoodude said:

Check out Pro Football References CarAV metric. It's a pretty solid one stop shop for a numerical equivalent of all that data you crunched.

All the data was pulled from PFR, didn't even know CarAV was a thing.

Just looked into it, it's a cumulative score so I'd have to do some calculations to determine yearly average for the players. It's possible but I would need to pull the stats from all 32 teams individually I think, and I don't have time to do that. 

[LinvilleGorge]

I've always said in the perfect world you'd have Hurney focus on 1st round picks and play golf the rest of the year. Have a real GM that did everything else.

[kungfoodude]

If I was going to do another breakdown(and I might), it would probably be good to do a weighted metric. So, compare both average CarAV of the round and/or pick to our results and then determine the quality above/below the average. Also, most of Gettleman and Hurney's recent picks are going to be tougher to guage because so many are still active and those bars could move substantially. 

 

You could probably apply this to our offseason free agency moves, as well. Take a look at players we signed and use the season AV rating to see who had better success at signing impactful free agents.

 

[Mr. Scot]

2 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I've always said in the perfect world you'd have Hurney focus on 1st round picks and play golf the rest of the year. Have a real GM that did everything else.

And we may very well have something along those lines coming up.

[kungfoodude]

2 minutes ago, Cracka McNasty said:

All the data was pulled from PFR, didn't even know CarAV was a thing.

Yeah, check it out. Pretty nice metric.

[Mr. Scot]

Just now, kungfoodude said:

If I was going to do another breakdown(and I might), it would probably be good to do a weighted metric. So, compare both average CarAV of the round and/or pick to our results and then determine the quality above/below the average. Also, most of Gettleman and Hurney's recent picks are going to be tougher to guage because so many are still active and those bars could move substantially. 

You could probably apply this to our offseason free agency moves, as well. Take a look at players we signed and use the season AV rating to see who had better success at signing impactful free agents.

You trying to kill him? 

[bobowilson]

2 minutes ago, LinvilleGorge said:

I've always said in the perfect world you'd have Hurney focus on 1st round picks and play golf the rest of the year. Have a real GM that did everything else.

Ignorant

In the mid to late rounds

Marty Hurney acquired 2 Hall of Famers (Steve Smith, Olsen), 5 Pro Bowlers (Jenkins, Norman, Hardy, Kalil, Mathis), and another guy that was a borderline pro bowler in Charles Johnson

if anyone else had that record, I can't imagine their irrational fan base would be crying about he's terrible outside the 1st round;  you can keep repeating the names of Clausen, Edwards, Gaulden, but it doesn't change the fact his bust rate in the mid rounds is no higher than any other general manager

And in recent years, Dennis Daley, Donte Jackson, Ian Thomas, Christian Miller, and Haynes look very promising

He's one of the 3 best drafters in the entire NFL, and not only in the 1st round

The names speak for themselves

[Ricky Spanish]

1 minute ago, kungfoodude said:

If I was going to do another breakdown(and I might), it would probably be good to do a weighted metric. So, compare both average CarAV of the round and/or pick to our results and then determine the quality above/below the average. Also, most of Gettleman and Hurney's recent picks are going to be tougher to guage because so many are still active and those bars could move substantially. 

 

You could probably apply this to our offseason free agency moves, as well. Take a look at players we signed and use the season AV rating to see who had better success at signing impactful free agents.

 

I can save the base spreadsheet as a google doc if you want that info to mess with

[kungfoodude]

1 minute ago, Mr. Scot said:

You trying to kill him? 

Lol. It would be a little time consuming but you could simply remove the comparisons to the other NFL teams(although that would be super interesting) and just narrow it down to Hurney vs. Gettleman. If you include the rest of the league it would probably be beneficial to essentially make a program to crunch the data.

[kungfoodude]

2 minutes ago, Cracka McNasty said:

I can save the base spreadsheet as a google doc if you want that info to mess with

Yeah, maybe we can collaborate on a rating system for GM's. That could be pretty neat. 

[Mr. Scot]

Just now, kungfoodude said:

Lol. It would be a little time consuming but you could simply remove the comparisons to the other NFL teams(although that would be super interesting) and just narrow it down to Hurney vs. Gettleman. If you include the rest of the league it would probably be beneficial to essentially make a program to crunch the data.

Where'd KB Fan when you need her? 

[bobowilson]

This data set is incredibly flawed in that Hurney barely been a general manager the past decade, and the last two years he's been back, those guys are too young to have won any awards (for instance, DJ Moore is 4th in the NFL in receiving yards, and will be a Pro Bowler one day, but is only 22 years old)

So it's basically the past 2 drafts (which Hurney nailed, but they're to young to have gotten accolodates), and 2009-2010, which happen to be his two worst drafts of a very long career