I understand this thought process but don’t agree with it. At some point, even very different prospects are not easily differentiated in terms of future success.
Chase, Smith, and Waddle are probably all going to be very good NFL players. They are also all very different. All have strengths that may carry them to greatness and weaknesses that may render them average. Realistically, I don’t think any scouting department in the league can tell you with any degree of confidence which will turn out best, and most scouting departments probably aren’t unanimous in their own internal evaluation of the ordering of those three. Nobody’s got a crystal ball.
So if you’ve got three guys with roughly equivalent odds of success on the board, and you can either throw a dart with all three on the board or move back, add an asset, and take whichever one falls to you, I’m firmly in the “add an asset and take whichever one falls to you” camp.
Now, if your eval sucks and they’re not all roughly equivalent and the two guys who go before your guy end up much better players, then that’s a scouting issue. But in terms of methodology, I don’t see any problem with having an essentially equivalent score on three different guys. For example, I bet the Bills had roughly equivalent scores on Mayfield, Darnold, and Allen (and maybe even Rosen) in 2018. They didn’t move up and make their own destiny—they took the one who fell to them, saved their assets, and it worked out. That’s good scouting.
