Review of the 2003 Draft

[PonyExpress]

Does SN do this sort of 3 years out rating every year?

GW,
TSN issues a scouting guide with grades for all players in the NFL every preseason. For instance, while LJ was the top player from the 2003 draft with a 9.6 grade, he was graded just #7 in the NFL, behind Tomlinson (9.9), Manning (9.8), Steve Smith (9.8), Gates (9.8), Brady (9.7), and Alexander (9.7).

 

[Mike the Brit]

My compliments, PonyExpress -- you've done a great job using the right methodology, IMHO.

Have you thought of offering it to a wider audience? FootballOutsiders, for example?

 

[PonyExpress]

MTB,
It was one of your earlier posts that prompted me to tackle the subject. But trust me, I know my place in football "geekdom"... it's right here on the patsfans.com draft forum. Anywhere else I'd be exposed as a blithering idiot, if I haven't been already.

 

[Mike the Brit]

MTB,
It was one of your earlier posts that prompted me to tackle the subject. But trust me, I know my place in football "geekdom"... it's right here on the patsfans.com draft forum. Anywhere else I'd be exposed as a blithering idiot, if I haven't been already.

My goodness, you've made my day! (blush)

Of course, it's up to you, but I wonder how long before some journo comes and lifts it anyway. Let's just hope they give you credit when they do.

Have you looked at the article by Massey and Thaler, by the way?

http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/%7Ecadem/bio/massey%20&%20thaler%20-%20loser%27s%20curse.pdf

It's a bit full of econometric technicalities, but they have a fairly interesting metric of their own based on starts, Pro Bowl and salaries IIRC. I think that yours is simpler and more revealing.

 

[PatsFanInVa]

Pony, first off, way impressive amount of work to bring this to the masses.

Secondly the "actual value of player when drafted" comment (Wesleyan,) doesn't come into play for me. That's a question of the usefulness/accuracy of the commonly held idea of the trade value chart(s), which are similar though not identical team-to-team. So if you can get better value trading down two spots, in terms of how you think your "actual value" will pan out, you do it, thereby smoothing out the irregular nature of any given draft class. So we're measuring what a team has produced, given the spots they had to work with (over which the teams do have influence) - seems legit.

Thirdly I did this big analysis of how hard it was to mate these two charts, one curved and one straight line, and only then realized you Occam's-razored it, and just stuck the players where they WOULD be drafted, rather than tried to come up with some fancy system to mate the charts. Looks right to me.

Then I lost my first attempt to edit that analysis, so any misled by my earlier version of this post, fahgeddaboutit.

Thanks for the hard work, Pony.

PFnV