The NFL Draft loves generational talents with moldable traits

The 2021 NFL Draft is loaded with intriguing quarterbacks, and Kellen Mond is one. Plus, traits can get you far this time of year.

In this week’s edition of Inside the Draft …

• A very special five-alarm emergency edition of The Skeptic’s Guide examines Texas A&M’s Kellen Mond, the quarterback prospect everyone is suddenly buzzing about.
• Everyone knows Florida’s Kyle Pitts is the best tight end in the 2021 draft class. But who’s after Pitts? Our top five breaks down a diverse (if not particularly deep) group of tight ends.

But first, let’s talk about some positionless defenders and mobile quarterbacks with moldable traits. Finally: something for fans of utter gibbersish!

Stop Saying Stupid Stuff: An Inside the Draft Challenge

There are no “generational talents” in the 2021 NFL draft class.

Trevor Lawrence is not a “generational talent.” Nor is Ja’Marr Chase, DaVonta Smith, Penei Sewell or Micah Parsons. There were no generational talents in last year’s draft class, either.

That’s because “generational talent” is a cliche, not an actual thing.

The thought leader who coined the term generational talent deserves the Pulitzer Prize in Meaningless Sportstalk Bibble-Babble. (He or she is probably the same person who coined the term “thought leader.”)

“Generational talent” is an empty-calorie word quesadilla that is so gratingly hyperbolic that it undermines its own assertion, making it a mindworm that burrows into the public consciousness and results in otherwise sane people saying things like “Najee Harris is a generational talent, just like Derrick Henry!”

To be fair, there may have been a few generational sports talents throughout history: Babe Ruth, Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Serena Williams. Steven Spielberg, William Shakespeare and Alexander the Great were also probably generational talents. If you want to call Jim Brown a generational talent, Inside the Draft won’t argue with you, though “all-time great” works just as well.

The trouble is few if any of these individuals looked like a generational talent until after they dominated a generation. Ruth was a Red Sox pitcher, Jordan was drafted after Sam Bowie, Serena was Venus’ sister, Shakespeare was weak tea Kit Marlowe, Spielberg a guy who made telemovies about evil trucks.

Tom Brady was never considered a generational talent. Nor was J.J. Watt. Or Jerry Rice. Even calling Patrick Mahomes one sounds a little silly right now: how much better is he, really, than Deshaun Watson or Josh Allen?

“Generational talent” works as a draft buzzword because it’s not falsifiable: maybe Kyle Pitts really will be the Michael Jordan of the tight ends! Draft chatter is always awash in cliches and buzzwords, because most draft conversations involve either:

• People who don’t know what they are talking about but are eager to fake it; or
• People who know so much of what they are talking about that they can’t be bothered dumbing down their jargon; or
• A delightful combination of one talking to the other.

We’re going to drown over the next seven weeks in television programs and podcasts overstuffed with meaningless phrases, misapplied terminology and overanalyzed minutiae.

With that in mind, Inside the Draft is challenging all draftniks to retire the following overused buzzwords once and for all so we can get back to the important business of producing television segments where one analysts obsesses about a quarterback’s pinkie placement while the other mock drafts him to the Jets because he’s a “proven winner:”

Generational Talent: I think we covered this one.

Positionless Defender: He’s a big safety/tiny linebacker who blitzes a lot and covers slot receivers, folks. Stop acting like he lines up on the moon and fires orbital lasers at the ball carrier or something.

It’s a good thing there was no Internet or #DraftTwitter back when tight ends started going in motion before the snap or lining up in the slot frequently about 30 years ago. Otherwise, we’d be calling them “Mobile Tactical Reception Platforms” instead of tight ends or something.

Moldable Traits: Seriously, what the hell does this even mean? Moldable? Do coaches now think they are Michelangelo now? The masterpiece was always within the marble; I merely freed it.

“Traits” usually means “he’s big and fast.” “Moldable” generally means “he kinda sucks now and will need a lot of coaching.” So moldable traits sounds like a more technical way of saying “high upside,” which was always a more generalized way of saying “big/fast guy who isn’t all that great.”

None of these terms convey any more information about the player than saying he is big and fast, but they do shift the attention toward the evaluator’s well-trained eye for spotting potential. That’s what makes these terms so popular.

FBI (Football Intelligence): Why can’t football players just be intelligent? Why the qualifier? “This individual may know all of the adjustments in the playbook and be able to immediately diagnose what the opponent is doing, but it’s not like he does differential calculus or reads Proust in his spare time or something!” Phew. Glad you cleared that up to the differential calculus-doing, Proust-reading general public.

There’s of course something problematic and yucky about speculating about a football player’s “intelligence” based on game tape, his diction in postgame interviews and whatever an anonymous scout thinks about his ability to cook his own dinner.

But if a player reads an opponent’s plays quickly (or slowly), we can always say “he reads the opponent’s plays quickly (or slowly).” If he was a two-time Academic All-American, we can say “two-time Academic All-American.” But all of these phrases require the speaker or writer to be well-informed, which is the core of the problem.

Note: players themselves often use FBI these days, which only goes to show how good prep and college football are at conditioning players to sell themselves short.

Quarterback Mobility: Mobility is an important trait in a quarterback, of course. But casual fans equate mobility with Lamar Jackson stuff, even though they’ve been harped on for years by everyone from color commentators to draft analysts to beat reporters that it’s not how NFL types use the term.

Meanwhile, folks trying to sound insider-y use “mobility” to mean the ability to slide around the pocket and scramble judiciously, even though they are well aware that most readers/viewers think they are talking about Lamar Jackson stuff. The result is inevitably one of those conversations of willful misunderstanding which make our nation the paradise it is today:

Draft Ultraexpert: Mac Jones is mobile.

Joe09789788686 on Twitter: LOL ur dumb. Mack Jones can’t scramble at all.

Draft Ultraexpert: Aha, but Jones is mobile in the way connoisseurs like myself use the term. I dunk upon thee and thine six pornbot followers!

Character Issues: COVID appears to have wiped out character issues season in the same way that it has wiped out flu season. After all, it’s hard to get into trouble when no one is allowed to leave the dorms!

Inside the Draft is guilty of using “character issues” plenty of times in the past, particularly on radio. If a player pled guilty to seven misdemeanor accounts of driving under the influence of smoked banana peels and shoplifting from a legal marijuana dispensary (welcome to the mid-21st century), all of which are in various stages of plea bargaining or resolution, it can be hard to summarize the situation precisely when speaking off the cuff, and saying something wrong could flat-out slander the player. Hence, “he has character issues.”

But that’s no excuse in print, or on television when a segment has been written and produced by a team of fact-checkers and editors. If a kid did something wrong, state what he did. If he didn’t, shut up.

“Character issues,” like most of the other phrases on this list, is a spackle word to cover for things the writer/speaker does not know. So if you know what you are talking about, it should be easy to avoid these terms. And if you don’t … why are you talking about the NFL draft in the first place?

The Skeptic’s Guide to Kellen Mond

Each week at Inside the Draft, The Skeptics Guide will choose one of the brightest stars in the 2021 draft class and explore the biggest weaknesses in his game and reasons why he might fail. Think of it as “devil’s advocate” reasoning or opposition research, and please don’t take it personally if he’s your favorite player ever.

Kellen Mond ceiling comparison: Dak Prescott
Kellen Mond floor comparison: Christian Ponder

Kellen Mond is the kind of quarterback prospect you talk yourself into when you decide to talk yourself into a quarterback prospect.

NBC Sports analyst Chris Simms, a former coworker of Inside the Draft at a past outlet, got draftnik circles buzzing when he ranked Texas A&M quarterback Mond fourth among quarterback prospects for the 2021 draft, behind BYU’s Zach Wilson, Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence and Alabama’s Mac Jones but ahead of Ohio State’s Justin Fields and North Dakota State’s Trey Lance.

Simms went into length on his podcast explaining his rankings and praising Mond for his “rocket arm,” decision-making, and more.

Inside the Draft isn’t here to rip Simms; we don’t intentionally rip anybody around here except Jack Easterby, folks. Simms played the quarterback position, knows the position and knows what he is looking at. Insightful, informed experts sometimes see things that even studious outsiders cannot see. They also make massive mistakes when evaluating quarterbacks all the time. (For evidence, see: NFL history).

Ranking Mond in the same category as this year’s top quarterbacks may not be a mistake, but to Inside the Draft it looks exactly like the type of error that skilled NFL evaluators often make when they lose sight of the forest to study the trees.

First, the positives on Mond. He was a four-year starter (splitting time as a freshman) for the Aggies. He played one of the toughest schedules in the nation each year. Wilson and Lance would probably look very different as prospects if they had to face Alabama and LSU multiple times in their careers. Mond led the Aggies to a 9-1 record. He gets great velocity on his short passes, is a deft runner and option threat, and he’ll fearlessly deliver the ball to his receiver in a collapsing pocket with a blitzer in his face.

Lots or big-program, big-game experience. Fine arm. Fine legs. Pocket toughness. So far, so good.

And now for the problems.

Mond’s deep passes sail on him. His fastballs over the middle are all over the strike zone. He rushes some throws and puts too much velocity on others. He often throws to blanketed receivers, which may be more the result of constantly facing the likes of Alabama than a decision-making deficiency, but it’s still a concern.

Mond is also a lean, somewhat lanky athlete, and he can get chased down from behind by quicker defensive backs; he could end up just mobile enough to scramble his way into trouble, and perhaps injuries, at the NFL level.

It’s easy to explain away the negatives in Mond’s game: the opposition was great, his supporting cast was so-so, the results show that he finds a way to do the job, and so forth. Simms blames Mond’s frequent throws to well-covered receivers on Jimbo Fisher’s predictable system, which may be true.

Explaining away negative results is a common evaluator error, and it’s also a great way to draft a toolsy, hard-working major program quarterback destined for a career as a middling backup. Frankly, a quarterback who ranks among Lawrence and Fields should elevate and transcend a system which, for all it’s predictability, was good enough to win a bunch of SEC games.

Many of Mond’s most productive plays were off-target deep passes that his receivers adjusted to, or coverage lapses, or catch-and-run plays where the defense stopped chasing a receiver that they thought stepped out of bounds (see the 2020 Alabama game for examples). Mond often threads tight-window throws past underneath zone defenders to well-covered receivers.

It’s easy to watch those plays in isolation and think you’re watching Patrick Mahomes magic. The problem is that every tight-window throw comes after four or five short sizzlers that were either slightly off target or thrown to someone wearing his defender like a sweater vest.

Mond reminds Inside the Draft of Christian Ponder, a pepperpot scrambler with a zippy-but-inaccurate arm who started for Florida State for three seasons before the Minnesota Vikings made him the 12th-overall pick in the 2011 Draft. Ponder had a short and mostly uneventful career.

Unfortunately, Inside the Draft hears a little bit of Clayton Thorson in Simms’ argument for Mond. Thorson started for several years at Northwestern before the Philadelphia Eagles made him a fifth-round pick in the 2019 Draft. He became one of the weakest quarterback prospects Inside the Draft ever watched struggle through a training camp, and we covered the Jets a few times.

Thorson’s college scouting report was mostly negative space: He battled hard in a big conference, is tough, decisive and pretty athletic. He doesn’t jump off the screen, but imagine what he would do in a better system with better weapons and better everything else …

If Simms loves Mond, you better believe some NFL evaluators love him, too. He won’t be drafted in the first round, but every executive wants to unearth a Russell Wilson or Dak Prescott in the middle rounds. Squint hard enough and you can see some Prescott in Mond: the tough schedule, scrappy style, spotty collegiate film and Senior Bowl accolades all match.

There’s a big difference between grabbing Mond as a developmental prospect and passing on someone like Fields or Lance to draft him, even if you have a hunch he might be better than the bigger names. There’s also a difference between posting rankings on the Internet for fun and profit and making actual front-office decisions with real consequences.

Simms and Inside the Draft can love or hate all the prospects we want. Mond could be a battle-tested sleeper. But overvaluing him would be the sort of mistake that gets a general manager fired.

Top Five Tight Ends Not Named Kyle Pitts

Florida’s Kyle Pitts is the best tight end prospect Inside the Draft has seen since Vernon Davis. At times, he looks like Shannon Sharpe. Pitts is the only can’t-miss, instant-upgrade tight end in the 2021 Draft. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no other talent or value at the position.

Here’s Inside the Draft’s Top Five rundown of tight ends who will be available after the top 15 picks.

Most of these prospects are likely to last until Day Two, or perhaps the start of Day Three. Some are high-upside developmental projects, while others could help right away as role players and then develop into something more.

5. Kylen Gransen, SMU

Gransen transferred from Rice to SMU and from wide receiver to tight end over a five-year NCAA career. He’s quick-footed, releases off the line of scrimmage like a wide receiver and appears to be a crafty route-runner. Gransen won’t thump many defenders as a run blocker but would look great in an offense where tight ends often line up in trips-bunches with receivers to set up screens and criss-crossing routes.

4. Hunter Long, Boston College

Long is a better blocker and more traditional in-line tight end than most of the others in this year’s class. He looks like Zach Ertz at times with his ability to gobble up lots of short passes in the flats and underneath zones. Like Ertz, Long also flashes YAC capability between long stretches of going to the ground immediately after the catch.

3. Kenny Yeboah, TE, Ole Miss

Yeboah, a fifth-year transfer from Temple, has the body of a pumped-up slot receiver and the game of a motion H-back. (Those are common traits among college tight ends these days). Ole Miss schemed to get him open by having him run routes from the fullback position, making him a potential fit in a Kyle Shanahan-type offense. Yeboah played well enough against Alabama last year to make him an intriguing multi-purpose NFL weapon.

2. Pat Freiermuth, TE, Penn State

Freiermuth blocks well enough to fold inside or set the edge on sweeps and has soft hands for hauling in short passes. He flashes some tackle-breaking capability when he turns upfield. Freiermuth is not sudden or shifty, and much of his production came on RPOs or plays designed to get the ball out quickly. But Freiermuth may be the best choice for a team seeking a traditional blocker and safety-valve receiver at tight end.

1. Brevin Jordan, TE, Miami

Another beefy slot receiver who can block a little. The Hurricanes schemed to get Jordan the ball in space last year, and he will be a shifty, tackle-breaking, hurdling YAC threat in the NFL. Jordan is NOT Travis Kelce, but he can do some Kelce-like things, like cause trouble for a slot cornerback in coverage or produce as both a receiver and blocker in a system with lots of tunnel-screen type concepts.

Next Week on Inside the Draft: Meet the French Canadian Richard Sherman and learn why drafting awesome Oregon left tackle Penei Sewell may not be such a swell idea.