NFL Draft 2024 live updates: Start time, where to stream, latest mock ...

The 2014 NFL Draft wouldn’t happen for months, but according to Steve Gera, at least one Cleveland Browns executive had his mind made up on one of its most polarizing prospects.

A special assistant to head coach Rob Chudzinski, Gera had been in the NFL for more than five years. The San Diego Chargers had hired the former Marine to “do analytics” in 2007. Gera’s qualifications included a recently obtained MBA from San Diego State and the fact that he’d read “Moneyball.” He scouted opponents and supplied data to coaches through easy-to-read narratives.

“I would just crack jokes and make fun of our offensive coaches but also include information,” Gera said recently. “Data is inherently boring and soulless. What you hear typically sounds like the first day on f—— Mars. I wanted to break it down shotgun style.”

The approach kept him around. Gera studied fourth-down attempts, timeout usage and draft strategies. Relationships made in that role helped him transition into becoming a coach.

That’s what led him to Cleveland, where, on a plane at the beginning of the 2013 season, he says he heard a Browns executive say, “The only person I’ve seen who competes harder than Johnny Manziel is Michael Jordan.”

“What makes you say that?” Gera asked.

“Tape,” the executive said. “Watch it long enough, and you’ll see it, too.”

Gera left the NFL a decade ago and has since worked in the NBA and European soccer, founded data science companies and taught. Experience in different sectors helped crystallize some of Gera’s beliefs about football, and the Manziel moment epitomizes what Gera believes is one of the most faulty decision-making processes in the NFL: draft strategy.

Compare a prospect to a legend from the outset, and you — or, say, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam, who drafted Manziel No. 22 overall and then watched as the quarterback’s career imploded suddenly and spectacularly — are likely to cling to that early comparison despite evidence to the contrary.

“The draft is an absolute petri dish for every cognitive bias underneath the sun,” Gera said.

Conversations with 14 general managers, coaches, analytics staffers, scouts and executives in other sports — some of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized by their current organizations to speak about the highly competitive process — unearthed a messy concoction of uncertainty, overconfidence, competing incentives, pressure and impatience.

“Human dynamics writ large,” said Hall of Fame NFL executive Bill Polian.

Even Nobel Prize-winning scholars have spent decades mulling whether there is a single best way to draft.

The answer, they’ve found, is a resounding yes. But only a few teams are curious enough to think differently, and even fewer are disciplined enough to act differently.

Continue reading.