there is some outstanding posts in this thread, thanks steblick, west, chief, Dr.Sens(e), blackshad, timlap, and Big Daddy, I do enjoy talking about this kind of stuff.
I've been wondering how it seems that over the past few years I can make a better list than teams can. Personally, I think it speaks to a systemic flaw in the scouting system - overvaluing the opinion of scouts who see a limited sample of games.
When you see a player only a few times (say, between 5 and 10) in his draft year how can you possibly expect to have a great read on him? Perhaps team A sees player X (on average) on better days than team B sees him, thus player X is higher on team A's ranking than on team B's? Maybe that is mainly what accounts for much of the variation among scouting rankings, and scouting staffs? In creating my list I don't have to worry about the bias of "saw a player on good days", that should average out among all the sources (to some extent).I guess this isn't really my theory, since it appears as well in "Moneyball" in some way as it releates to baseball.
To go further, I don't need to draft better than average for this way of scouting to make sense; by drafting at average I save the money spent on amateur scouting that can now either be spent on current player salaries or kept as profit.
we talked about this on the Oilers board in this thread, might be interesting to those interested in this:
http://www4.hfboards.com/showthread.php?t=154424
Of course, it's impossible to know how my list actually compares with the list of any team, since the list of a team isn't available. This leaves the problem of sample size; I can't know my list is better simply by looking at who I would have picked vs. who EDM (my team) picked, for at least 2 reasons.
(1) When I pick someone different from who EDM actually picked it would have changed the entire direction of the draft in an unknowable way without the lists of all 30 teams
(2) sample size. To illustrate...
team X's top 10 list, they pick 4th overall
BUST
BUST
BUST
HOME RUN
BUST
BUST
BUST
BUST
BUST
BUST
team Y's top 10, they pick 5th
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
BUST
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
HOME RUN
Team X picks a great player, team Y picks a dog, but without having their lists we can't see that team Y is CLEARLY the superior scouting team.
Interesting stuff, all of this. Well, to me anyways
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