Thinking about Jordan Morgan and positional value

Jordan Morgan is having something of an odd training camp on both an individual and a contextual level.

Individually, it’s a little strange that Morgan, a rookie first-round pick, has barely gotten a look at tackle, his primary position. Morgan is an elite athlete and has been a fixture at tackle for every team he’s been a part of dating back to high school. But in Green Bay, he’s a guard.

Contextually, Morgan’s situation is less odd than it is funny. Morgan is playing guard, sure, but there’s more to it than that. He’s playing guard after a competition with Sean Rhyan, a former third-round pick himself, who can’t seem to get his career on track. And he’s only playing guard because the Packers are all set at tackle in the short term, having both spots manned quite capably by former seventh-round pick Rasheed Walker and former fourth-round pick Zach Tom — two picks from the third day of the draft.

But here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about: none of this matters if Jordan Morgan just turns out to be good.

One of the biggest changes in my football thinking over the past couple of years is neatly encapsulated by Morgan’s situation. Why? Because guards are less important than tackles. In theory, at least.

We’re told — and I think it’s true, for whatever it’s worth — that tackle is a more valuable position than guard, and thus you should spend your resources on trying to get the best tackles you can before you spend on improving your guards. As far as the NFL Draft goes, that means it’s pretty silly to draft a guy who’s going to play guard as highly as the Packers drafted Jordan Morgan.

And I think that’s actually a fine way of thinking about the Draft in a vacuum, but it’s a terrible way to think about building a football team for the very simple fact that you have to play both guards and tackles on the field at the same time. And centers, too. And a quarterback, and some combination of running backs, tight ends, and wide receivers.

Once you’re actually putting your team on the field, positional value matters a whole lot less than putting the best 11 guys on the field that you can. Positional value would have the Packers playing Morgan at tackle or going in a different direction in the draft altogether, but what good is that value if the Packers find themselves with a gaping hole at guard this year, one that Morgan could have filled? All that matters then is the weak link in the Packers’ offensive chain.

I’ve often said on Blue 58 that offensive line is a weak link proposition; that is, your offensive line is really only as good as the weakest player. As my thinking has changed on positional value, I think that might be true of a football team as a whole. Paul Noonan of Acme Packing Company had a good take on this sort of issue when he broke down why baseball’s WAR metric will never work in football: value doesn’t exist in the same way. 

He points out (extremely correctly) that having good players on defense is great, but opposing offenses don’t attack your good players. They go after your bad ones, and therefore your least “valuable” player is actually your most important one.

But even beyond that, positional value is kind of bunk because — and I’m including myself in this — the football world is largely terrible at identifying talent. The hit rate in the NFL Draft is astonishingly low. 

Look at the top 10 picks in any given draft class and you will see more misses than hits almost every single time. Look at the quarterbacks taken at the top of the draft and you’ll see, at best, a 50% hit rate. This is the position we all agree is the most important, and NFL teams routinely pick the wrong guy when they have literally every option available to them!

What makes us honestly think we can nail the “picking the right player” question simultaneously with the “value that player’s position correctly versus every other position” question? It’s almost beyond belief. It seems improbable, at best.

To be sure, there are limits to the “just pick good players” philosophy. It would be weird for the Packers to draft, say, a punter in the first round just because they think he’s the best punter out there, just for a completely ridiculous example. But the more “practical” examples aren’t much better, and that brings me back to my original point.

It’s fine that Jordan Morgan is playing guard right now, because if he’s good, that’s all that matters. If he’s the Packers’ starting right guard for the next decade, that’s amazing! That’s a near-optimal outcome for any draft pick!

So I’ll say this as much as a reminder to myself as anyone: don’t get hung up on Morgan’s position. Let’s just see if he’s good or not.