There comes that time in the year when 12+ months of work comes down to the simple process of hitting the enter/return/send button.
That's the culmination of The Harris 100 every year. Now, I don't technically do all the fancy things that make this such a tremendous asset for our website. For me, it happens when I send my initial Google Sheets as a shared document to Amanda and Aynav and tell them "I'm not changing this...work your magic". Now, I say it way nicer than that, but you get the point. Upon hitting that send button, I then have immense panic that I've forgotten someone, called someone a quarterback when he was a running back or spelled Osa Odighizuwa incorrectly, even though I've Googled his name about a hundred times in the last six to eight months. And, yes, it's spelled correctly.
The easy part is just watching the game tape, honestly. Going to the Senior Bowl? That's a huge part of this process and something I've done forever. The hard part is to formulate the overall reports to make it readable for all the readers out there. Those take hundreds of hours, even if I know a guy is a bona fide future star within three plays.
This Harris 100 is the first edition and there will be revisions but really only as I research and study a few more names that came on my radar screen late in the process. Since I sent it in, I have a few players that I know should be in consideration and that should show itself in version 2.0 or even 3.0 as we prepare for the Draft in late April. But, the revisions shouldn't be grand in scale due to the fact that the lack of a Combine/universal times/measurements will force me (and all 32 teams) to trust the game film/live Senior Bowl viewing more than ever.
In essence, every year, I try to attack The Harris 100 from an angle of "if I had no players at all and had to start this team from scratch, how would I do it?" The key word here is try. Some years I can't help but channel the Texans' needs through my rankings as I focus a bit more on those players than others. Either way, there's no real mathematical formula to follow on a prospect, which is seemingly antithetical to my history as a former math teacher. The pythagorean theorem isn't going to help find a prospect as there's more of an art to finding the right prospect for an NFL team. Sometimes the numbers are just perfect on a player but he's not a success due to a minor liability that turned into a major liability upon reaching the NFL. Sometimes it's the complete opposite, you know, the Wes Welkers of the world. No matter how it's done, though, the goal remains to find prospects that become successful pros for a long time.
I hope you enjoy reading in preparation for the 2021 NFL Draft later next month. Thanks for the support!
