If there’s one thing I think the sport has lacked, it’s an affinity group, a trade organization, a body for those in personnel. I’m not talking about some kind of fan-based organization, but a real society for people in the business akin to the Pro Football Writers of America, the Sports Lawyers Association or the AFCA.

I was discussing this on Wednesday at the Senior Bowl with a longtime friend, Shawn Zobel of Zobel Sports Consulting, and we decided we should do something about it. We’re working on ideas and trying to decide how to approach it. Along the way, we got to talking about what team had the best draft in 2017, and we came up with these five teams. I’ll list them alphabetically and try to state each team’s best case.

Bears: I think there was some thought the Bears might make big changes in their front office around this time of year going into the ’17 season, but you have to hand it to GM Ryan Pace. He had the courage to stand up to the naysayers and draft one-year wonder QB Mitch Trubisky, and based on one season, it looks like a great move.  But it wasn’t the only one. The Bears landed two big players in the fourth round in FS Eddie Jackson and OH/KR Tarik Cohen.

Jaguars: The Jags got instant starters out of their first-rounder (OH Leonard Fournette) and second-rounder (OT Cam Robinson), plus promising rotational pieces in the third round (DE D.J. Smoot) and fourth round (WO DeDe Westbrook). Oh, by the way, they went from 3-13 and last in the AFC South to the AFC Championship game this season.

Saints: Marshon Lattimore. Alvin Kamara. We maybe needn’t go on, but we will. The team also drafted starters OT Ryan Ramczyk and FS Marcus Williams, as well as key contributor DE Trey Hendrickson in turning a franchise that had gone 7-9 three straight seasons — with Drew Brees — into one answered prayer away from the NFC Championship Game. You could argue that the ’17 draft even saved the team from having to draft a starting QB in 2018.

Texans: It wouldn’t be a discussion of the draft if it didn’t involve some projection, right? Think about what happens if QB Deshaun Watson doesn’t go down after six starts. If the Texans only had that one pick, after rolling the dice to trade up, you could argue they had the best draft, especially if he continued his brilliance over a complete season. However, the team also hit on IB Zach Cunningham in the second round, as well as OH D’onta Foreman (another injury casualty) and several other picks. Houston’s won-loss record masks a tremendous draft class.

Vikings: If you read this blog regularly, you know that we hold Minnesota’s front office in pretty high regard, and the ’17 draft class was another good one, though, again, it requires projection. Would KC’s Kareem Hunt and Kamara have stolen all the rookie rusher glory if Dalvin Cook, whom the team got in the second round, doesn’t go down in Week 4? And that’s to say nothing of rookie OC Pat Elflein, who stepped right in and helped make the Vikes’ OL a strength throughout the season? They also drafted a starter at weak side LB, Ben Gedeon, in the fourth round.

Shawn and I will be putting these contenders to a vote with our friends in the scouting community as well as in college personnel departments across the land, and we’ll announce the results at the NFL combine in about a month.

In the meantime, who do you like? Who did we leave out? Let us know in the comments, hit me up on Twitter, and/or listen in today as Sirius XM Radio’s Orlando Alzugaray and I give our votes on Mad Dog Radio (channel 82) at 5:30 p.m. ET today. You can also vote in our poll.

This week, a tweet about the vapidness of NFL draft hype got me thinking about how we all spend January through April. Ironically, it came from a draft pundit. You might be surprised to learn that I find the NFL draft a little painful. Well, not the draft itself, but its coverage.

It’s troublesome to me that every year, for 4-5 months, football fandom buys into the incessant praise of players who haven’t even set foot on an NFL field yet. What’s truly irksome, however, is the parade of draft pundits who make pronouncements on players or teams with no accountability. How do people become famous by making a serious of statements that include ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if’ or ‘it’s possible that’ or ‘it’s likely that,’ etc.?  It got me thinking about how we got here.

Thirty years ago or so, a few teams started trying to bring scouting into the 20th century, so they agreed to get together and have players work out at a central location. It was around this time that ESPN, which didn’t have a lot of live sports coverage (outside of tractor pulls and Australian Rules Football), decided to broadcast the draft. They tried several people as pundits (Joel Buchsbaum was lousy on camera, while Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman got into an on-air fight with a fellow broadcaster) before settling on little-known Mel Kiper Jr. This was long before draft news was anything anyone cared about.

Brick by brick, the game of football grew in popularity, and the combine progressed as well. Then the Internet was invented, and soon, every fan could find someone with news, opinion, or both on the draft. Those fans could also express their own opinions, first through blogs and newsgroups, and then by Twitter and other social media platforms. These days, we have not one but two major networks (ESPN and the NFL Network) going pick by pick through the draft, and we have play-by-play dissection of practices at the major all-star games, as well as up-close coverage during the combine. I guess, to some degree, NFL draft coverage has been the perfect marriage of technology and the nation’s obsession with pro football, and that’s great. But something about the way it’s packaged and over-produced drives me crazy.

I know my aggravation with all of this puts me in the minority. I guess, at the end of the day, I don’t see this as entertainment, and don’t think it should be treated that way. You always read these stories about how ‘football is just a game’ and ‘when (some crazy illness or death) happens, it really puts football in perspective,’ but really, that’s not true.

For the fan, the NFL is just a game, a way to put aside the world and escape. But tell that to the player from a poor background trying to reset the course of his family’s life. Tell that to the scouts that have never done anything else in their professional lives, then get fired due to a GM change or belt-tightening. Tell that to the coaches who get their lives torn apart on social media because their teams didn’t win enough games to satisfy fans’ bloodlust.

There’s a lot of money in football, but that doesn’t mean everyone in it spends all their time rolling around in cash. In fact, most of them spend 10-12 hours working hard to keep their jobs, and the other half of the day worrying about what happens if they don’t. This game is fun, but it’s also deadly serious.

You get a lot of media narratives when it comes to the NFL draft. Some are true, some aren’t. One storyline that’s gotten a lot of traction is that Jimmy Johnson, during his time running the Cowboys in the 80s and 90s, he developed a value points system for every pick in the draft, and he used it to weigh the draft-day offers he’d get, as well as the offers he’d make.

One year, I was part of the draft broadcast team for a major radio network, and one of my counterparts was a guy who had spent a little time in an NFL front office and used it to market himself as a personnel guru. At one point, the host asked about the value points system, and I kind of brushed it off, explaining that teams wouldn’t lock themselves into something so one-dimensional. He overruled me, countering that all teams used it and it was a routine part of every team’s war room.

I’ve always wondered which one of us was right, so I asked several of my friends in scouting (seven, to be exact) about it. The responses I got fit into three categories.

• “We don’t use it:” I only got this response from one team, but it’s one of the better franchises in the NFL. The scout said that, instead, the team compares the offer against similar previous offers and uses draft histories to evaluate each trade.
• “We use it as part of our evaluation system:” One scout said his team uses 11 different charts to measure draft trades, and Johnson’s chart is one of them. One told me everyone uses it to some degree, and estimated that there are 3-4 other charts out there that teams use.
• “We do our own charts:” One scout said his team uses its analytics people to develop its own value system for picks. Another scout said his team uses a chart that is very similar, but that his team does not use Johnson’s chart. Another scout said his team is always evaluating its charts and they change every year. Things can get pretty complicated: variables include the relative value of a position, which changes from year to year, the performances of players at differing places in the draft, etc. “It’s a very fluid chart,” one scout said, calling it “football’s version of the slide rule.”

In the end, I guess every team has its own way of doing things, but the idea of a chart, and assigning value to picks, is valid. I guess the main takeaway is that teams are always looking for ways to look at data and break the code for success.

Next week is a big week for the 2017 draft. I know that sounds odd, but it’s true. The week after Memorial Day is traditionally when BLESTO and National Football Scouting (NFS) introduce their subscribing teams to the next draft class.

If you read this blog, you probably already know what I’m talking about, but if not, here’s a quick primer. About two-thirds of NFL teams subscribe to one of two scouting services, NFS and BLESTO. BLESTO is the older of the services (and based in Jacksonville, Fla.), but National (based in Indianapolis) probably has a slightly better reputation among teams (and a few more subscribing teams). Both services command six-figure sums to provide teams with a detailed but preliminary look at the top rising seniors. Their lists usually number in the 800- to 1,000-player range, and players are given a grade (each service has its own proprietary grading system).

On one hand, these services give subscribing teams a big hand up on evaluation. Based on what these ‘combines’ tell teams, most scouting coordinators put together travel schedules for their scouts. Players with high scores achieve tremendous status going into their senior seasons, and automatically head to the top of the draft list, at least in the early stages of the season.

On the other hand, these services are far from infallible. Subscribing teams have to provide a scout to pitch in his services, and usually these scouts are either new to the business, quite young, or both. In fact, the combine scout role has become the intermediary step between scouting assistant and full-fledged road scout. Therefore, lots of the people putting these grades together are cutting their teeth in the business. In fact, a tremendous amount of their jobs is not a lot different from your garden variety draft fan — combing through hundreds of college rosters to find players that fit certain parameters, calling coaches and asking for recommendations, and even Googling to find top players in out-of-the-way conferences.

Next week will also serve as a kickoff for agents to start looking for these lists. Though they’re proprietary, and very hard to find, and far from perfect, these are seen as the best tool for kicking off recruiting. In fact, to some degree, NFS/BLESTO week kicks off recruiting for most agencies. Getting a copy of the list is almost seen as a measure of status for agents (especially young ones). When you’ve gotten your hands on one of the lists, it means you’ve arrived as an agent. You’ve got juice. You’re wired. You have connections.

The one caveat to the lists is that only seniors are evaluated. It’s one way the NFL has built detente with several schools that would rather not have their players’ heads filled with pro football dreams. As we’ve seen, especially the last few years, the truly elite players rarely make it to their senior seasons. One day soon, the combines will have to address this, or someone else will fill that market space. It’s just one more possible niche you can fill if you’re trying to figure out how to crack the league.

Anyway, as you maybe take a post-draft break from the gridiron and enjoy burgers and dogs by the pool this weekend, understand that NFL scouts are digging in and getting ready for what’s in store in about 11 months.