What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Jacksonville Jaguars’ NFL Draft
Posted on April 28th, 2010 in Small Business | No Comments »
Much to the vexation of our college roommates, we've always enjoyed watching the NFL Draft from wire to wire. The whole ordeal fascinates us because, as far as we know, football is the only industry where the hiring of entry-level workers attracts that level of scrutiny, drama, and knee-jerk reactions (can you imagine if it was that way in other industries? We'd love to see Mel Kiper wig out on some struggling airline for reaching on a Business Analyst). One of the big stories of this year's draft is the alleged blunder that the Jacksonville Jaguars made of their first round selection. So what can an entrepreneur learn from the Jaguars' mistake? Put simply it's this: when there's free information available, use it (but don't be afraid to buck conventional wisdom).
Due to the insane amount of media coverage surrounding the NFL draft, "Mock Drafts" (in which a person attempts to predict where players will be drafted) have become something of a cottage industry. While the wisdom of any particular mock draft is questionable (only a small handful of these draft "experts" have any actual expertise when it comes to scouting football players) a savvy team could leverage the wisdom of the crowd to gain some rough idea of how long they could wait before drafting a particular player (for example, if 95% of mock drafts have a player falling to the late 1st or early second round, that player will, more often than not, fall that far). Enter the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Jacksonville Jaguars are, from a fiscal standpoint, one of the worst teams in the National Football League. Attendance at home games has been so dreadfully low that the team is on the verge of moving. After a poor season that saw the team drafting 10th, the Jaguars were in desperate need of a strong draft that would both (1) win games for the team and (2) put butts in the stands. When it came time to make their first pick the Jaguars, however, ignored the wealth of free information available to them and drafted defensive tackle Tyson Alualu, a player virtually every draft "expert" had graded out as, at best, a very late first round pick. The results of this pick are disastrous for the Jaguars. By picking Alualu with such a high pick, the Jaguars alienated fans (who were told by every expert on TV that the pick was a terrible pick) and, in all likelihood, almost certainly harmed their ticket sales and their bottom line.Don't get us wrong–there's a chance that Tyson Alualu was by far and away the best player available for the Jaguars to draft. But, given the team needs of the next three teams drafting, it was a virtual certainty that Alualu would have still been available 3 picks later the 13th pick. Why, then, did the Jaguars not offer to swap picks with San Fransisco (who traded the 13th pick and a 4th rounder to Denver for the 11th overall pick)? Had they done so, the Jaguars could have generated the opposite reaction from picking the same player. Instead of being perceived as foolish, the team would be viewed as savvy for getting as much as they could out of the value that their pick represented. At the same time, it's important to understand that the Jaguars did something that everyone would do well to emulate: they didn't let conventional wisdom dictate the direction of their organization. It was foolish of the Jaguars to ignore free information that could have given them insight into what other teams were likely to do (insight that they could have used to draft the same player at a later pick). But it would be equally foolish for the Jaguars to let that wisdom dictate their ultimate decision. In any industry, businesses thrive not by being the same, but by being different. A business that trusts conventional wisdom over its own vision is never going to be a leader.
