DawgTalkers.net Forums The Archives 2013 NFL Season NFL Draft (2013) NFL Draft from an MIT PhD Point of View

I thought that this was really interesting. It's not the MOST informative in the world ... but it explains some major things from a statistical point of view.

I have been reading some of Massey's research and it is pretty good stuff (IMO).

It's also interesting to hear how he breaks things down from a front office point of view and how it is more valuable to draft later in the draft and essentially flip a coin to get better talent.

And he is a PhD from UPenn and MIT ... so he at least knows a bit about this ...

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=708

Nerds.

Who cares what some guy from the Michigan Institure of Transportation thinks about the NFL Draft.

One thing he missed is that good teams usually have better players ahead of rookies who may suppress their number of starts earlier in their careers. Bad teams usually start more rookies/2nd year players who may sit and develop, and contribute as special situation, special teams guys early in their careers. They might not start, but they may contribute, as a situational pass rusher for example, even more than a rookie on a bad team might.

Aaron Rodgers sat behind Brett Favre for 3 years. Was he a "worse" pick than say Brady Quinn, who started 12 games in his 1st 3 seasons?

In addition to this, even backups and special teams players taken later in the draft may find it difficult to stick with a good team than a team that is struggling. If a team is constantly trying to get their starting lineup settled, they probably churn through a lot of guys at the bottom as well. Bad teams have a chance to keep more "new" players. Good teams may only have 5-10 "real" openings in any given year, and if they have 10 draft picks, many may not make the team.

One other factor is that certain positions do seem to transition more easily from college to the NFL. If a team is set at QB for 13 years at QB, like the Colts were, then they may draft a backup QB every 3 or 4 years, but they aren't taking a lot of chances there. This team may draft more linemen, RB, and other positions that transition most easily to the NFL, while avoiding picking a position with a great deal chance of failure, like QB, because they are already set at that position.

I do agree that there is some luck, for example, a team like the Colts goes bad in a year where a QB who is expected to be the next great QB will be the top overall pick. Another team will trade up to draft RG3, and others will miss out on him. At least 1 team may lose out badly in that situation, and because they simply do not have enough assets to trade up. It's possible that all teams considering drafting up for RG3 may wind up with failed 1st round picks. It's possible that they may all have successful 1st round picks. There is some chance in that regard, but I don't buy that it is all chance. I think, as I outlined above, that there are a lot of factors that he failed to take into account, and probably many others that I missed during my quick examination of the piece.

I'm not going to delve too far into this.

Listen from 20:00 - 24:00. That's the cream of the information.

The one piece you need to know going into that is that you have a 52% chance of picking a better player when you're picking between the #3 CB and the #4 CB in the draft or the #7 LB and the #8 LB in the draft.

Basically the draft is almost wholly a game of chance.

I personally agree 95% with this notion.

It's why I always banged on Savage for his hubris as it relates to his perceived ability to choose significantly better than other GMs.

To maximize your return in a game of chance you need more opportunities to play.

That's why 95% of the time I'm a fan of trading down not up.

Anyway...sorry for the short version.

Read James Surowieki's book The Wisdom of Crowds for more information. Great insightful book.

So more cards gives you a CHANCE at a better poker hand. The whole deck at an extreme would ice it. Seems the draft/combine process boils down to: Never know if your "card" is a winner or a bust, but you CAN eliminate some weker and rotten choices. Hedge your bet a bit.

Ummm.....

Your ability to sound even more asinine every single post is skill not luck.

Please never agree with anything I write. Deal?

Great counter argument...so since it's all "chance" let's flip a coin when we're on the clock at 4 if we should select Claiborn or Ryan Steed from Furman

The skill in drafting is the actual work to dissect those "tiers"...if Heckert would draft with 31 other GMs who are all poster on this board I'm sure he'd be much better...competent competition makes things closer...in any business...that shouldn't be news either...if after 162 baseball games Team A is 2 games ahead of Team B...is this luck too?

I'll do this once...against my better judgement.

52 times out of 100 a General Manager is going to be able pick the superior player out of two similarly related players.

For instance....in my examples....

Dre Kirkpatrick and Stephon Gilmore
Sean Spence and Nigel Bradham

We're not talking about Andrew Luck and Jacory Harris.

If you don't get it now then I give up.

Quote:

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This "statistical" result comes AFTER the fact....it's like going outside after it rained and telling the world it's wet outisde...that's not smart at all

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Bingo!

Wonder kids ... Look how well their statistics worked for Vietnam.

Bottom line is there is no short cuts.

You need to put in the work on the evaluation process.

Lol, I got it before this MIT crap was posted

The problem is that the "scientists" take it as a given that player A and B are ranked 4th and 5th best etc...that's not a given...it's AFTER the fact (and WORK done on team boards)...if it was all chance then those numbers would be all over the place...of course a player picked 10th is only slightly better then a player picked 15th overall...wow, what insight...is it newsworthy? Not really imho...it would be somewhat newsworthy if it was 48% to 52%...but 52% to 48% is pretty much what I expected....4%, that's an edge isn't it? If after 100 games played Team A has 52 wins and Team B has 48, that's significant, isn't it?

Also, this "work" balances out good and bad GM's work... a bad GM who overdrafts prospects get's (statistically) leveled out by the smart GM who finds a better player at the same position rounds later...but there still ARE better and worse GMs...and it's not unimportant to have a better one than a bad one...I mean, we as Brownsfans should know right?

Everyone just calm down and listen to some good music.

I'm calm, now where's the good music?

Well I found one copy of his essay (can't access it online however ... but in the Univ. Library) that did account for some things. It was about 88 pages in total when you considered graphs / charts / etc and it also had some other "thoughts" by a separate critic.

But there are always some sorts of factors as well. I am more impressed however that a professor at MIT / UPENN has the interest to spend research time on the NFL draft as compared to other (less fun) areas.

Did you even bother to watch the video?

This talk would be a million times better if they showed the actual graphs and charts. Watching some guy point to data off-screen kinda ruins the impact of it.