Every year the brilliant guys from Football Outsiders put out a phonebook-sized almanac packed cover-to-cover with nuggets of solid gold information. Bill Barnwell, managing editor of the book, joins us today to answer some draft-related questions.

Given how popular the scheme has become in college, is there a sound analytical way to evaluate a spread quarterback's future success in the NFL?

You know, at this point, I don't think there is a way to do so strictly with statistics. I really believe that the scouting element needs to be mixed in healthily when you're judging college players, especially with players in those sort of situations and schemes that they're not likely to play in at the pro level.

What's also interesting is that some of the preconceived notions that people had about what does and doesn't work at the pro level are being challenged now. Very few people would've suggested that the Wildcat would have worked in the NFL, let alone enjoyed the amount of success that it has. I don't know if any team would move to a spread offense for a variety of reasons, but hey, if the Chiefs were willing to implement the Pistol, the spread could be next.

How much does the spread skew the Lewin Career Forecast due to generally high completion percentages the scheme produces? (The LCF is used by FO to associate college-to-pro success.)

At this point, not that much; the reason why is because the Lewin Career Forecast only applies to quarterbacks taken in the first two rounds, and there haven't been very many spread quarterbacks with a grade of that caliber. Pat White, I suppose, would be the first example.

The case of Tim Tebow will end up being very interesting; he has great numbers heading into 2009, and if he stays towards the top of the draft and plays a full season, he would be projected to be an elite quarterback. I think he'll end up being the test case for how the spread affects the LCF.

From the Outsiders perspective, which teams have the most and least successful drafting teams and how do you come to that conclusion?

We're still working on refining our metrics for draft success. The tricky thing is that it's hard to define a "successful" draft, because there's no quick-and-dirty way to call a offensive lineman or a linebacker "successful". The metric of choice so far has been games started, but even that's subject to the nature of the teams involved and what holes they have filled.

The metric I play around with is GSAA (Games Started Above Average), which is still a work in progress; the idea is to compare the games started for a player over the course of his career, relative to how many games he was eligible to start, to those of all the players who were taken within 10 picks of him.

A good example would be Tom Brady, who rates out as one of the best draft picks ever by this methodology (realistically, it would be hard to argue that he wasn't the best). GSAA would take Brady, the 199th pick in the 2001 draft, and compare him to every other quarterback that was taken from picks 189 through 209. The pickings are, as you might expect, extremely slim; the only player who really had much of a career after being taken over the same timeframe was Gus Frerotte. So the system would measure how many games Brady started per season, compare it to the average quarterback from that subset of players, and then measure how many games started Brady has above the league average over the course of his career.

We haven't updated GSAA for the '08 season yet (since it doesn't appear in the book and we've spent our time focusing on the content that appears in FOA 09), but since 2001, the best drafting teams in the league were the Ravens, Colts, Bills, Jets and Texans; I think the Texans are a little bit of a reach, because they're an expansion team and have had more holes up and down the lineup to fill with the draft than any other team.

On the flip side, we see the worst drafting teams in the league as the Broncos, Steelers, Lions, Vikings, and Seahawks. I really can't defend a draft metric that suggests that the Steelers are poor drafters, which is one of the many reasons why it's still under development.

Along the same line, is there a college program that has produced the best NFL talent?

Using that same metric, and looking strictly at schools that had 15 or more players drafted from 1995 through 2007, the schools that produced the best talent, pick-for-pick, above league average were Purdue, Hawaii, Cincinnati, Illinois, and Syracuse. A strange group, to say the least. The five worst schools were (in descending order of disappointment) Clemson, USC, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Northwestern.

Is Matthew Stafford being set up for failure in Detroit based on his poor Lewin Career Forecast numbers and the general expectation that comes with being the No. 1?

I think so. It's very interesting that baseball is past the point where a guy can be a high draft pick strictly by having a big arm, but in football, we're not there yet. There's been a pretty clear history of quarterbacks with a huge arm but limited accuracy struggling as pro quarterbacks, and the Lewin Career Forecast sees Stafford being the next in the line of Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith, and JaMarcus Russell.

The anecdotal argument I've made relates to David Greene, who preceded Stafford in college (short one year of D.J. Shockley) while playing for the same coach in the same scheme. Greene put up superior numbers to Stafford, even after you take out Greene's senior year (which would have presumably been Stafford's best), and washed out of the pro ranks without making any sort of impact. Now, college statistics aren't foolproof or anything close to it, but if you were going to give Matthew Stafford $40+ million in guaranteed money and devote the first overall pick to him, wouldn't you want him to have outperformed David Greene at the college level? I would.

Who are some of your top players for the 2010 NFL Draft and what makes you think so highly of those players?

Ah, see, I can't do that. There's just too much that happens in a year that can dramatically impact a guy's expectations. Think about Quentin Moses or Brian Brohm; or, on the other side, JaMarcus Russell. Projecting player performance is hard enough once you've got their full body of college film available, let alone 60 percent.

I will say that last year, I predicted in September that the Chiefs would take Matthew Stafford with the first overall pick. So I had the right idea. This year, I can't make the same guess. I know who I expect to have the first overall pick at the end of the season -- the Seahawks, who will be drafting first after the Broncos put up the worst record in football. They obviously wouldn't be taking a quarterback, though, so that leaves their pick up in the air.

Thanks to Bill Barnwell of Football Outsiders for answering these questions. Make sure to check out the Football Outsiders Almanac this year. In it you'll find a huge NFL preview, great college football knowledge and some draft-related discussion. And, of course, the FO statistical analysis that made them so well-known.