Analyzing the Lewis Cine Disaster
One of the big questions of the Vikings’ 2024 offseason was whether or not 2022 first-round pick Lewis Cine would make the 53-man roster. On August 27th, that question was answered with a resounding “no,” and Cine departed Minnesota, eventually signing with the Bills practice squad.
For many, Cine’s failure on the Vikings illustrates an inability of the Vikings’ front office to identify talent in the NFL Draft. Cine was general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah’s first draft pick after he took the reins of the organization in January 2022, and it’s safe to say that this was not the first impression Kwesi was hoping for.
Nonetheless, there are reasons to temper our criticism of both Cine and Adofo-Mensah. Cine was brought in to play a role in the Ed Donatell defense, suffered a terrible season-ending injury, and subsequently had to learn an entirely new scheme under new defensive coordinator Brian Flores.
In principle, Cine was meant to be a 1-for-1 replacement for all-pro safety Harrison Smith, who was likely to either leave or retire. Instead, Smith has taken pay cuts in consecutive offseasons to remain in purple, and in the meantime, Cam Bynum and Josh Metellus have emerged as quality safeties in their own right.
A recent ESPN article named the Vikings’ safety room the 3rd best of any team in the NFL — by far the highest ranking of any position group on the Vikings’ roster. In short, Cine has faced far more adversity — and roster pressure — than anyone could have predicted when he was drafted.
In hindsight, Cine was a bad draft pick. However, general managers don’t have the benefit of hindsight, and even the best make mistakes in the NFL draft. Fans tend to think that the better your draft slot is, the better your player will be, and in the long-term average, this is true.
But in a given draft, there is a huge amount of variance in which draft slots will produce the best players. This plot shows the weighted Approximate Value (wAV) for all draft picks in the first two rounds of the 2001 NFL draft:
To the naked eye, it’s hard to spot any advantage in an earlier draft pick vs. a later one. In general, only about 10% of the variance in the value of a top 64 draft pick can be explained by their draft position — the rest is good luck.
As a result, bad picks are bound to happen. NFL history since 2000 suggests that, on average, a 32 overall pick like Cine will end his career with a wAV of 5 or below (which is dreadful) about 8% of the time, and he will end with a wAV of 20 or below about 30% of the time. (For comparison, Christian Ponder—widely considered to be one of the Vikings’ all-time worst draft busts—has a wAV of 22.)
The plot below shows the approximate “failure rate” of a draft pick taken in the first two rounds, where here “failure rate” is defined as a wAV of 20 or less:
Here, the blue dots represent data, and the red curve represents the best-fit approximation to the data. The main point here is that failure happens a lot, even in the first round of the NFL draft. We Vikings fans often lament failed draft picks like Ponder, Trae Waynes, Mike Hughes, and Cine, but the reality is that these failures happen to every team more often than they’d like.
Kwesi’s first two draft picks — Cine and Andrew Booth, Jr. — were bad decisions in hindsight. But two is a very small sample size, and in the time since then, Kwesi and his scouting department have demonstrated the ability to identify and bring in talented players from a variety of sources, including Jordan Addison, T.J. Hockenson, and Ivan Pace, Jr.
Ultimately, we need more time — and hence more data — to judge Kwesi’s success as a general manager. The true measure of success will not be the performance of an isolated draft pick or two but rather the ability of the team to contend for a championship consistently.
We should all be willing to forgive Kwesi for a couple of bad draft picks he made three months into the job. But at the same time, Kwesi has preached the importance of a “championship standard,” and the clock is ticking for him and the Vikings to show that they can deliver on that mantra.
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