NFL Draft Party 2009: Gumbo, Mambo, Jumbo

On your mark. Get Ready. Set. Go to your NFL draft party. 

In my case, I am setting up my speakers on my laptop, going to the website to track and watch the draft.

I've got all of my ingredients for a gumbo.  I wish I had the music to do the mambo.  I am geared up with all kinds of math and statistics to analyze the jumbo amount of data that will come out of this great adventure.

My focus will be to compare and predict who will be the next player as good as, say, Ernie Holmes, Homer Jones, Otis Taylor and Warren Wells.  Three of these guys came from Texas Southern University (TSU) and not one TSU guy is in the wide receiver lineup in the NFL 2009 draft. Otis Taylor attended Prairie View University.

In my draft party I am going to be looking at each new guy like Goldilocks.  Here is a definition of the Goldilocks principle:  "After testing each of the three (attributes), Goldilocks determined that one was always too much in one extreme, one was too much in the opposite extreme, and one was just right."

A comparison with a select group of guys I knew and who were in my collegiate environment will be analyzed out of the jumbo of data available to me, and then some conclusions and forecasts will be made.

My core group of senior players will be Ernie Holmes, Homer Jones, Otis Taylor and Warren Wells.  The initial core group of new NFL players will be Michael Crabtree, Quan Cosby, Tyson Jackson, and Jarett Dillard.

One of the research questions will be:  "Is there a correlation between round and draft pick with performance in a selected category?"  Will round and draft pick be a predictor for outstanding performance on the playing field?"

Let's look at the historical data on Jones, Taylor, Holmes and Wells.

Jones  TSU   1963   Round 20   Pick 278

Taylor  PV    1965   Round 5     Pick 5

Holmes TSU  1971   Round 8     Pick 203

Wells    TSU  1964  Round 12    Pick 160

Looking at the data would you have predicted that Warren Wells will be remembered as the greatest deep threat?  Would you have predicted that Taylor, Jones and Holmes would have such an impressive database attached to each of their names?

Well, select your favorite players and join me in watching the action today at the NFL draft party, keep up with the performance data of your guys and let's talk later and see how it all works out.

Ok, I've got to go now and start preparing my gumbo, doing my mambo, and analyzing the jumbo of data to characterize the performance of this new generation of NFL stars.

By the way, imagine the aroma of my gumbo, the rhythm of a mambo, and the impact of my analysis of the jumbo of NFL data!