Draft Time

[Delandis]

So finally got home to see my draft and I don't know.

Drafting against you guys seems like an exercise in futility. My scouting team can spot overrated players (Bruce) but missed both guys that they called very underrated (Blair and Taylor) while some vets continue to hit on practically every player drafted. IF I get some time, I'm going to try and consolidate some of the info on FOF and move it here to try and level the playing field a bit. Iwanted to play without the "Secret of the Spreadsheets" but it doesn't seem like approaching the game as just a model of football is going to work if newbies want to compete long term.

[Aston]

I think my draft this season was better than the debacle last year. I think it's gotten to be a feel thing. It *used* to be looking up charts. So you have a few things ...

- Player grade
- Development
- Combine / NC
- Skill bars
- Static bars

And you have a desired end result:

- Good bars

So you look at these things and ask yourself, basically, do you have reason to suspect this player will hold the bars you see? Are there stronger reasons to suggest he won't? If you need him to boom to pan out as a pick, why on earth do you think he will?

And your staff's scouting abilities might cast more doubt on the picture. In the end, to what degree is this a risk, a safe pick, a moonshot, etc, and does that make sense for how you want to use the draft asset?

If you can narrow the pool a little this way, you're more likely to make good decisions. But more likely is all, I think. We can shoot the breeze on various "reasons to like/dislike" we see, that might be a fun exercise.

For example, when I see a strong static bench press on a lineman with really low bench, it makes me more likely to excuse bad combine scores (i.e, my 3rd round center), but if he had a whole set of bad combines, and all his skill bars were much lower, I probably would've been closer to saying "forget it." As it was, he seemed like a decent shot at a really good player.

Similarly, for this WR Bonnette, he had some really solid bars and nothing was zero. His static (BPR) was also in a solid range. But his combine and grade were both really bad, and I was clearly rather indifferent about taking him. If I had truly seen something in him, I would've picked him at the top of the 7th. As it was, I was just trying to pick a position I wanted to take a shot at, and a player from my remaining targets that I suspected was most likely to draw UDFA attention. I had no idea if his GD bar would show up 15/65 or 60/80, but both seemed plausible. I wouldn't have been surprised a bit had he turned out as forgettable as my 7.4 corner, who I don't even think made it to TC.

[Guest]

Oof, lucky break :-)

You can always type the player's name (have to start with the first name) into Quick Add in the priority queue. It'll autocomplete but does exact matching only.

I think I may have been more sure of his chances, but I had a recent experience with a guy with nearly identical bars in a SP game, so I had something to go on I guess. This 39 version of the game seems equally likely to have a player like that be nothing special, but he did have higher bars than anyone around him in the lower part of the class and that made me suspect he was something more than just roster filler.

[Guest]

So finally got home to see my draft and I don't know.

Drafting against you guys seems like an exercise in futility. My scouting team can spot overrated players (Bruce) but missed both guys that they called very underrated (Blair and Taylor) while some vets continue to hit on practically every player drafted. IF I get some time, I'm going to try and consolidate some of the info on FOF and move it here to try and level the playing field a bit. Iwanted to play without the "Secret of the Spreadsheets" but it doesn't seem like approaching the game as just a model of football is going to work if newbies want to compete long term.

Bars are king now. Chances are if you see a guy with good bars, he will be better than a guy with bad bars. He may go from a 24/65 to a 30/56, but that still means he is a mid 50's level player, which is better than whiffing on a 38 ovr guy you thought might boom.

So I start with those. You can still have bad drafts this way, as I have done recently in the Red Zone Blitz league. Sometimes those bars are still a mirage, sometimes the guys you really want are gone and you talk yourself into a guy that you're unsure of because he fits a need.. But for the most part, if you place your foundation there (in the bars) and then use things like "static bars" (big play receiving, punishing hitter, strength bars like blocking strength and pass rush strength) to help you find the more hard to locate gems, you'll eventually start seeing patterns in the data. You'll remember guys you pick that pan out and when you see their bar signature in a potential draftee, you'll be encouraged. It works much in the same way as the real world, where players with comparable skill sets typically end up having similar career arcs. There are still duds in both, but once you can identify the successful types from experience, your personal scouting of future talent becomes more accurate.

I have not gotten very good yet at finding boomers, but I have gotten pretty good at locating the guys who will come into camp and finish rated 40+. OL has become a draft strength for me and I think that is mostly because there are less signs to look for and less chances to get confused or misled. I can't draft a QB outside the top 2 for shit though. Haven't been able to since FOF 2k7. That's why my Aces struggle year after year.

[macroguru20]

Well, new year, new coaches and scouts. I feel lucky my 2nd rounder fell to me. I think my Kicker got hit with the VSOD

1st - RB Wesley Briggs - 46/57
2nd - WLB Andre Osborne - 53/66
4th - QB Maxwell Barber - 23/43
5th - K Arturo Frazer - 24/29
6th - CUT
7th - DE Kendall Goodwin - 20/25

I will probably end up cutting the kicker and DE, leaving me with only 3 out of the 6 picks. BUT in my defense, I had BPA by position set from 5th, 6th and 7th. So when I picked, I did well, when I went BPA, I got my ass kicked.

[Guest]

My scouting team can spot overrated players (Bruce) but missed both guys that they called very underrated (Blair and Taylor) while some vets continue to hit on practically every player drafted.

Just by looking at their bars what is the average rating of your staff member's interview bars?

If it is >75 then I suspect that the interview impressions your scouts are giving you are worthless. I think more than ever that the scouting and interview bars on staff are extremly important.

[Delandis]

I think more than ever that the scouting and interview bars on staff are extremely important.

As it should be.

It is just sour grapes here.

You guys know the game very well and while I've had some success, I won't be able to sustain it until I get all of the "static bars" and combine threshold stuff memorized (or at least easily accessible).

It is what it is.

[Guest]

As it should be.

It is just sour grapes here.

You guys know the game very well and while I've had some success, I won't be able to sustain it until I get all of the "static bars" and combine threshold stuff memorized (or at least easily accessible).

It is what it is.

I am an average FOF7 drafter IMO. Guys like Chuck, Aston & Julio are much better. My team was mostly built with draft picks from the previous version of the game and through free agency.

I have never used combine thresholds, but I do think static bars are important. You can easily see them in Draft Analyzer if you use it.

[Aston]

I think I may have been more sure of his chances, but I had a recent experience with a guy with nearly identical bars in a SP game, so I had something to go on I guess. This 39 version of the game seems equally likely to have a player like that be nothing special, but he did have higher bars than anyone around him in the lower part of the class and that made me suspect he was something more than just roster filler.

Yeah, after seeing what he did I'm inclined to view a similar prospect more confidently in the future. There was nothing to go on but with him being NC, there's reason enough to believe it was a really good GD bar, and given that he had some decent other bars, reason to believe that if his GD was true, he'd be a useful player and not some 25/25 guy with one 60 bar.

As it is, I do think he's rather on the borderline of useful, though. But hey, 35-40 can be pretty useful, and he's developed enough to play right away if need be.

I agree that chasing boomers is more of a fool's errand. Sure, they still exist, here and there, but you better have some good reasons to believe it isn't a mere indulgence in fantasy. The gold rush ended in '49.

[Aston]

My scouting team can spot overrated players (Bruce) but missed both guys that they called very underrated (Blair and Taylor) while some vets continue to hit on practically every player drafted..

Bruce looks pretty darn good, no? I don't know what he looks like in game, but the picture is only partially complete at this point. It'll take some time to settle.

Blair and Taylor should not have been regarded as VU. That would be betting on these guys to show up and then boom after camp, but they already have several quite high bars (Taylor, too, has an INT bar that looks possibly stuck at 0). With these guys, they can hold at best, or more likely there's much more room to go down. Potentially a lot.

If they were going to pop up from those bars, why weren't they a 7.5 graded top 10 pick? And it wasn't like their bars were all that high, either, so they weren't going to show up with 80 potential. Both look more like 40-45ish potential players, which is *very* common in the draft pool, and they have weak static bars to boot.

An example of a 40-45 player that did pop up (not as much as the league scout thinks, at least my scout says) is my 2nd round RB. He also has an okay grade, some okay combines, and a collection of decent to high bars. But his statics are through the roof: PI, STO, Breakaway. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that his breakaway/STO were so high, but his 40 time was quite low -- the kind of thing that made me discount his slightly lower grade and slightly poorer combines.

There's a big, wide range of "average combines" and "average grades" where anything goes, anyway, IMO. In between "obvious stud" and "obvious dud" you try to look at the other signs, and as Julio said, you try to think back to which picks panned out and which picks didn't over the years.

[Aston]

Ah, one more thing. Combine thresholds are no more. The 2.31 RB is a clear example of that.

The static bars are fairly intuitive. They're the "physical trait" bars, plus sense rush for some reason. The other bars you can think of as "skills". But if you do use DA, it highlights them in green for your convenience. If you don't, you can get a sense of it by looking at any rookies; these are the bars that always show up fully red from the get go. They move around with age and scouting variance, but never have any development to go.

[Aston]

Last, last thing for now -- ha!

With combine correlations a thing of the past, I've become fond of viewing combines exclusively as standard deviations instead of raw combine numbers. You can do this in DA.

I don't know how accurate the std numbers are (they come from Stelmack, and I don't know exactly how he got them -- presumably from older datasets) so maybe it's time they got updated. But they give a good quick sense of how far above or below average a combine score is, whereas just blue/red/green don't always tell you *how* blue, red, green, or black something is.

[Delandis]

It sounds to me like interviewing is not very helpful.

[Aston]

Yeah, it's not too clear to me right now how the 12 interviews should be used.

I would say that overall they offer relatively small insights. So just don't go overboard relying on them. They give you a little higher resolution in your data about the player, which is actually really useful with narrowing bars. When I see a 70-100 bar, it helps a lot to know if that's more like 70, or more like 100.

I don't know if anyone has a great sense of how accurate interview impressions are, only guesses. So it can help, or lead you astray, I guess. I think I got VU on Irani, for example, so that was *another* feather in the cap for a player whose profile already suggested he might pop. Plus, it really narrowed his STO and PI bars to near 100. I don't really view interviews as too necessary, and often pick players without one. When I get back an impression I'm always trying to decide how believable it is. I *assume* that the better my staff is at interviews, the more likely the impressions are to be accurate, with of course no 100% guarantee.

In the end, it's slightly more data points on your player. If everything is pointing to the same direction, I feel stronger about my guess on the player. If things are pointing in different directions, I might lose confidence in my previous guess, or gain confidence in a different view of the player. I try to interview only players where my guess is a very foggy one to start with, in the hopes that the picture might crystallize. Often it barely does at all, and I'm still left with "Eh?" Sometimes, I go "Ooh." It's an inexact art, picking out your 12 out of a pool of 860!

[Guest]

The only thing I use interviews for anymore is to bookmark 12 guys who I think can be "hidden gems" so I can quickly locate them during the draft. The additional look at the players bars is also something helpful.. But the underrated/overrated, etc.. I don't even care about that anymore.

I personally think that we should still get at least as many interviews as NFL teams get, especially since 39 drafting is the standard now. If the 12 we get can't be relied on to be accurate, then I find myself having a hard time caring about the results of them.