Professor Charley Casserly: Destroying Your Draft 101

I can't speak for Redskins fans but as a Texans fan, I find it very difficult to listen to former Houston GM Charley Casserly act as a draft analyst. It strikes me a bit like getting parenting lessons from Britney Spears.

His latest gig is being a professor at George Mason University, teaching students on how to get a job and keep it. The advice is pretty sound--finding a job, paying your dues, impressing bosses, finding mentors, volunteering to do harder jobs. Of course, he missed one of his steps that the Houston media would probably point out right away--put blame on other people in case things don't work out.

For young job seekers, I would suggest it is also important to look older and more responsible than you are when you are looking for your first job. And just looking at Casserly, never ever get gray in your helmet hair as you get older and make sure Wikipedia doesn't know your age. Having non-stop BS skills is a plus, and always sound confident in what you are saying, even when you don't know what the hades you are talking about. "See, that's the way we do it in the NFL see....."

All GM's make mistakes on players. But you would hope that those GM's would learn from some of those mistakes. One of the biggest problems I had about Casserly is that he completely discounted the value of middle round picks in building a team in the modern salary cap era. The Texans are still paying for that mistake in the lack of depth on their team.

In 2005, he sent the Texans second and third round picks to Oakland in exchange for CB Phillip Buchanon. Casserly believed the deal was a no-brainer:

"Can you acquire a player as good as Phillip Buchanon in the second round of the draft? The answer is no. Now you're giving up a third-round pick. Your percentage of players drafted in the third round becoming starters is 30 percent or less. You're weighing that when you make this decision. When we finish the draft, we know we got a starter in the second round ... we know we got the best player drafted in the second round this year."

Ultimately, Buchanon was terrible as a Texan, and the team finished 2-14. Texans owner Bob McNair gave a rare public beatdown critical interview for the Houston Chronicle blaming the staff for not doing their homework on Buchanon. He lost trust in Casserly, and soon after hired Dan Reeves as a consultant.

The problem with devaluing third round picks as throw aways is that those teams who choose well in the middle and lower rounds tend to have success.

So does Casserly learn from the Buchanon experience? No, he trots out the same tired statistics last year for the contention that few lower round picks have meaning. Just because the 10 year success rate of third round picks is 30% or less, doesn't mean that your particular team is going to miss on those picks. It may be harder for a lower round pick to find a place on a team with established starters, but for a team like the Texans with many needs, your third round pick can be a key player.