OAKLAND – As the Oakland Raiders perform their final preparations for Thursday night’s NFL draft, the team will strictly adhere to a”worst player available” philosophy for the tenth straight season, it was reported earlier today.
“Well, you’ve got to be consistent,” said GM Reggie McKenzie. “Our WPA style of drafting hasn’t yielded the results we would have liked to this point, it’s true, but we made a commitment to drafting the worst available players years ago, and we’re willing to be patient. Our feeling is, if we can consistently draft the lowest quality players on the board year in and year out, regardless of need, then eventually all those bad players will add up to a great team. It has something to do with lots of double negatives equalling a positive. I’m told the mathematics of it makes sense, somehow.”
Raider drafts over the past decade have included such notable WPA’s as OL Robert Gallery, WR Darrius Heyward-Bay, LB Rolando McClain, and QB JaMarcus Russell.
“JaMarcus was a perfect fit for our system,” said Mark Davis, majority owner of the team and son of legendary Raider Al Davis. “He had the highest single WPA rating we’d ever seen on a player coming out of college.”
With the 3rd overall pick in Thursday’s draft, McKenzie said that the team is still considering multiple options.
“This is rated as one of the poorer draft classes in many years, so the pool of bad players will be deep, especially during the middle and later rounds. We would be open to trading down in order to stockpile lower picks where we could scoop up multiple WPA’s But we’d also be happy to stay put at #3 and grab the best worst player available. Or maybe that’s the worst best player. Regardless of the semantics, we should have our choice of several ‘blue chip bums’ throughout this draft, so we’re all very excited.”
