Monday, May 01, 2006

Apparently Mel Kiper Jr. does not grade on a curve


Mel Kiper Jr, draft evaluator extraordinaire, handed out his draft grades for all the NFL teams today. He felt Houston, Baltimore, and San Francisco had the best drafts giving them all a B+ grade. I guess Kiper is very stingy with his A's or he is trying to reinvent the entire system of letter grades.

There was always something creepy about Mel Kiper Jr.'s TV persona and this grading debacle has cemented my negative feelings towards him. He seems like the kind of guy that would call a sports talk radio station drunk on a Sunday night claiming that the trading of a 4th starter contributed to the downfall of his local baseball team. He specializes only in the NFL draft and comes across as robotic and distant. I picture ESPN reassembling Kiper every April in the basement and subsequently linking him to a computer in order to download draft information. He reminds me of a pretentious history professor who was pleased with himself that students rarely received A's in his class. You really have to impress Kiper to receive a sacred A rating from him and I am sure this pleases him very much.

The point of the grading system is you have five separate letter representations that define performance. The first tier teams earn A's , the second tier B's, and so on and so forth. It is interesting to note that Kiper gave his favorite movie of all-time 3 stars (Cabin Boy), his favorite restaurant earned 4 stars (Da Brickshaw Hotel), and his favorite hotel he awarded 4 stars (The Spanish Main).

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Drafts are not held in an isolated bottle. Rather they are held EVERY YEAR. He could have compared teams drafting this year to other years. Thus, there might be A's in one year but not others. Cowboys in 1991 - A, but maybe no one received another A for awhile.

You my friend are just another sucker that is used to grade inflation.

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