As many of you might have heard, I WAS indeed targeting Defensive Tackle Kenny Clark with the 14th overall pick. Clark looks every bit of a top Defensive weapon to me, so to hear that he was a "good" player but NOT worth a first round pick, and certainly not something of a generational talent (ahem, Breck....) I was curious as to why he wasn't?
Lets look at his size... He is 6'2" and 314 pounds. I like to see my DTs at least hit 300 pounds or more, and depending on how much it slows them down, the bigger the better! So in my eyes, Kenny Clark fits my ideal DT nearly perfectly at 314 pounds. I wouldn't mind seeing at DT at 6'4" or taller, but that is alright, DTs are generally shorter than Defensive Ends, and 6’2” seems perfectly acceptable to me.
Maybe his age is a factor, but at 22 years old, he could not get much younger, so that seems fine to me as well. (And in hind-sight, only 1 of the 5 DTs being compared was 21 at the draft)
Maybe it is his stats? This is where it gets fun....
His stats look great, but I know that is my opinion, and I stated it previously…..so I started to look at the previous Defensive Tackles taken in the first rounds for comparison.
Including Kenny Clark, in the last 4 drafts, there have been 5 DTs selected in the first round. Interestingly though, the highest selection didn't even break the top 20 picks. So am I wrong? Selecting Clark at 14th overall would have been high, but what about 11th overall? 3 spots can make a big difference when you’re talking that high in the first round.
When I hit 5 total players for comparison, it seemed like a good number (especially if I hoped to complete this comparison before Draft Day 2 began), so lets see them side by side….
The Thought Process:
Because I want anyone reading this to understand what I was thinking, how I came up with my numbers, and to offer anything better if you got it, here were my thoughts...
I chose the stats that I felt were most important for a Defensive Tackle. The bolded attributes are a given, but I also included their Speed, and then also their Stamina, Injury, and Toughness.
Speed being un-bolded, isn’t as valuable as a bolded attribute, but it’s definitely a bigger factor than their STA, INJ, and TGH. (In my final comparison, I weighted it between the bolded and other un-bolded for a fair comparison.)
As Toughness has been explained to me, it MIGHT (who knows anymore...) work in a way that allows a player to recover from an injury faster, so to me these 3 seemingly insignificant stats allow a player to stay effective while on the field or within a game, or to recover to get back on the field after an injury. They are not as important as someone’s physical abilities, but if you can’t play, your attributes aren’t “worth a velvet painting of a whale and a dolphin gettin’ it on”.
The Comparison Process:
I initially laid everything out in an excel doc, and ranked everything from 1st - 5th, and was going to do a reverse valuation of 5 - 1, and total everything up, but after adding their stats, sometimes the difference between 1st and 5th was a few points, and sometimes it was significantly more, or a single stat from a player drastically dropped, and the difference between getting 1 or 5 points didn’t seem accurate enough. So I changed it up….
For the second draft, I instead wanted their bolded attributes to compare directly against one another, but even that wasn’t quite good enough, because some stats are just flat-out more important.
So I halved the speed stat so that any differences only carried half the weight of the difference instead of the full difference. And as for the stamina, injury, and toughness, I went with a ratio of a tenth, so that they really only acted as tie-breakers, instead of deciding factors. So here’s my final comparison…
The Equation:
(SPD*.5) + STR + AWR + AGI + ACC + TAK + (STA*.1) + (INJ*.1) + (TGH*0.1) = Score
The Results:
Kenny Clark: 1st (Score = 449.9)
As you can see, Kenny Clark doesn’t place 5th in any single stat, and even places first in 3 stats, STR, AWR, and AGI, which are all bolded attributes…hmmm interesting.
Carl Davis: 4th (Score = 425.1)
Carl doesn’t take first in any stat category, and places 5th twice. Certainly not the worst, but he does rank next to the worst. He has great size, but without any blatantly obvious outstanding stats, maybe even at 25th overall, Carl Davis was a bit of a stretch? Plus he’s old, practically retirement age.
Aaron Donald: 2nd (Score = 439.8 )
The closest to Kenny Clark, Aaron Donald looks like he could have been the top ranked DT on this list, but his 58 SPD cost him 4.5 points, and he’s really not very agile. He has the straight line burst, but don’t ask him to turn or shuffle, and certainly don’t ask him to take more than, say, 6 steps. Good luck getting those tackles for a loss.
Daniel McCullers: 5th (Score = 420.2)
Pulling up the rear, Daniel McCullers only placed 1st in stamina, so he might be able to play at his best ability longer, but when you place 5th in 3 VERY important stats (AGI, ACC, and TAK), are you really even effective? At 6’6” and 365 pound, he’s also the size of (insert mom joke here), but like I said before, the bigger the better, until it slows them down.
Johnathan Hankins: 3rd (Score = 435.7)
Hankins only placed 3rd, but only just barely. He looks far more well rounded than Donald, and I can see a lot of similarities between him and Clark, similar height and weight, but Clark places first on STR and AWR, where Hankins really suffers. Let this sink in, Clark has the highest SPD in this comparison, and after a quick glance at stats, also boasts a significant lead over the others in combined TFL and SCK yearly average. (NA, 7, 8, 7.5, 13.3 - respectively) SPD doesn't seem so insignificant for a DT anymore...
I tried very hard not to think about the numbers, or read into the data too much before I started my comparison, because I wanted the process to be fair and honest. I didn’t want to have any preconceived biases reflected in the results, and with that I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Kenny Clark (based upon his Private Workout), does indeed look like a generational talent at Defensive Tackle. I’m looking forward to seeing his real numbers, and to see if his position on top remains.
*If anyone has a DT they would like me to add in to this comparison when I update it post-draft, let me know.
