Draft Day: A Movie Analysis

Since way before starting this blog, my dream in life has been to be handed the keys to a Major League Baseball team and be their General Manager, trading and signing my way to a championship. As far-fetched as that goal may seem, it has made me constantly intrigued not only by player evaluations and statistics, but also in the business of sports itself, as well as the art of the deal, and methods of valuing players for signing amounts and trades. Moneyball, while it is my main inspiration and my favorite movie, it focuses a lot more on the statistical methods of Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta. It did have a few scenes involving trades, but it was more for either lighthearted humor, or highlighting how good Beane was at trading than anything else. The movie Draft Day, decided to focus more on the people working for teams, and how communication between co-workers or from team to team works. It looked at sports organizations in a very interesting way. Before I get into my movie review, I want to give everyone reading this an opportunity to watch Draft Day if you haven't already. Overall, it was a really well done movie and I would strongly recommend it to anyone remotely as interested in sports as I am, so go watch the movie before I spoil it all below.

Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner were the main roles of this movie; Costner played the GM of the Cleveland Browns, Sonny Weaver Jr, and Garner was a salary cap analyst for the team, also serving as Sonny's love interest, Ali. Sonny, an unpopular GM for the Browns in this fictional world, uses the final 12 hours before the NFL Draft to prepare his team. Cleveland's owner, coaches, scouts, and fans, all question Sonny in his decision making, and basically call for his head whenever he makes a bold move. The movie displays Sonny on the phone with both NFL GMs making potential draft day trades, and with college prospects making a case for themselves and why Sonny should pick them. The three names thrown around most are Bo Callaghan, a superstar quarterback viewed as the obvious number one pick with no flaws whatsoever, Vontae Mack, a mid to late first round linebacker, and Ray Jennings, a running back whose father played for the Cleveland Browns and was a hall of famer.

To me, a key theme of the movie was the battle between emotion versus reason. The entire movie, Sonny wanted to take Mack with the 7th overall pick. Meanwhile, his head coach is high on Jennings at number 7. The owner ends up convincing Sonny to make a splash and trade three first round picks away for the number one overall pick, in order to take Callaghan. Sonny despises this move, since he thinks their current quarterback (Brian Drew) will suffice. The fans and the owner love this trade-up decision, since the fans get the big name player and the owner gets the money that comes with it. The actual room of scouts and coaches are split on the decision. Ultimately, there is a lot of emotion at play here, between wanting to satisfy the fans, and the greed of the owner, but as a GM, you have to trust yourself and your stats. Callaghan might've been a big time prospect with seemingly little to no flaws, but so was Ryan Leaf, who ended up being a bust. You should never draft based on what the fans want, only what you think is best for the team. No decision will ever please absolutely everyone. Whether it be the owner, the coaches, the players, or the fans, someone is always going to be angry at the decision. Therefore, it is impossible to cater towards pleasing others, and a as GM you ultimately should focus on what you think is right. Sonny did end up correcting himself and drafted Mack instead of Callaghan at 1st overall. More on that later.

Additionally, we got a bit of a glimpse into the emotional appeal of certain players. Mack gave Sonny a call in the build up to the draft, talking about his sister who passed away, and how he really needs the money that accompanies a high single digit pick for his family. Obviously, GMs shouldn't play into that stuff as well. In the world of business, emotion tends to have little to no place. You have to do what's best for the team.

However, I actually read a book called Intangibles, written by Joan Ryan, which explores the science behind team chemistry in baseball. While Michael Lewis spent a lot of Moneyball proclaiming that team chemistry doesn't exist, Ryan explains that with humans, statistics can never prove everything. They certainly have a main role in player evaluation, but there will be limits. Some of the unexplained outcomes of sports can actually be chalked up to human unpredictability, which in turn is chalked up to team chemistry and emotion. So emotion definitely has some semblance of a place when it comes to team building. It's less about shutting out emotion entirely, and more about listening to it without letting it control and impair your decision making as a GM. Especially with the advent of social media, teams need to be really good at figuring out what types of emotion can help them, and what can hurt them, and filter outside influences with all that in mind.

On another note, the General Manager's position shouldn't function like a dictatorship. At times, there were scenes during the draft where Sonny was wheeling and dealing, which is fine. Such is the nature of a draft where you only get 10 minutes to either make a trade or make your pick. You need a swift and decisive leader for the actual draft night. However, before the draft, Sonny pulls the trigger on trades without consulting any coaches or statisticians who might have other perspectives or knowledge to offer. The collective opinion of a team tends to be more well thought out than the opinion of one individual, no matter how strategic he might be in the art of the deal. Furthermore, Sonny didn't pick Mack because of some eye-popping stat being undervalued, he picked him based on a gut feeling, another no-no in the GM world. Logic and reason tend to be your best friends. Trust your gut, but verify it with real information rather than trusting it blindly.

The actual trade scenarios, while providing awesome and entertaining scenes pertaining to the plot, were unrealistic. Sonny traded away two future first round picks and the current 7th overall pick to move up from 7th to 1st overall, then he acquired the 6th overall pick for 3 second rounders, and then moved back from 6 to 7 and got back the two first round picks he gave away initially for number one. The deal making here, especially in that final trade, seemed unrealistic. This isn't really a fault to the movie; it's kind of Hollywood's job to have unrealistic but entertaining moments in every movie. Regardless, it should definitely be pointed out. On the other hand, some trade tactics used by Sonny were actually quite strategic. He made the move to get pick number 6 with the Jacksonville Jaguars, a team run by a rookie GM who was panicking due to the unexpected circumstances of the draft, so Sonny actually took advantage of someone who was overcome with emotion. Additionally, when he got that massive haul of picks back by trading down from 6th to 7th, he catered to the team he traded with (the Seattle Seahawks) because he knew the Seahawks desperately wanted Callaghan. He bluffed and told Seattle he would pick Callaghan at number 6 if they didn't make a deal that instant. So in both instances, Sonny took advantage of other GMs' panic and desperation, and fleeced them both.

This brings back the whole point that emotion can easily take over someone and their decision making/reasoning. It is important to understand this concept, and how to use emotion to your advantage, rather than let it disadvantage you, especially in the context of a GM who hears millions of voices on a daily basis. Being a GM is truly about being stoic while faced with millions of people from near and far who want your head rolling.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this movie. I'm sure in my non-expert opinion of how a real front office works that some of the scenes were unrealistic, but I thought most of what I watched was pretty close to the real thing. As someone who wants to work for an MLB team in the future, I think it was great for me to get familiar with the concepts of what goes on inside an organization. While football is slightly lower on the totem pole than baseball in terms of sports I watch, I'm still a pretty big football fan so I'm glad I took the time to watch this movie. And assuming it is mostly realistic, I would imagine the premise of Draft Day can also apply to MLB, like the trade deadline, for instance. The Browns' decision to draft Mack was definitely my favorite part, it shocked the world completely and reminded me of the beginning of the Moneyball book when Billy Beane drafted projected 20-30th round Jeremy Brown in the back end of the 1st round. Draft Day was a very enjoyable movie for me, and again, I'm definitely glad I watched it and retained some valuable themes and lessons from it. And in that same vein, I'm glad I took a bit of a different approach to my article-writing today, and analyzed something out of the ordinary.