Combine Checker Utility

[irabowman]

I have made up the following OLB and just plugged in some values. How would you read this score and see his Max Cur & Max Fut. I am trying to figure out how this program works and what too look for. http://www.younglifenorthdekalb.com/...p=115&drill=39 Thanks, Ira

[Guest]

Looks like he has a decent chance of being >40.

I use combine checker as a way to confirm or deny what I think I'm seeing.

"This guy looks like he'll tank." *uses combine checker* "Yup, look at all these terrible players."

"This guy looks like he'll be awesome!." *uses combine checker* "Yup, look at all these amazing players."

And then combinations thereof.

[Cory]

I've tried using that tool in the past with mixed results. What worked best for me is to figure out where I think the guy will be and then double check it against the tool, like that fish guy said. If I thought a guy would end up around 50 overall I'd count up the guys in the tool that were significantly above or below that number and use it as a guideline to figure out how risky that pick was. I look at the potential numbers, since I don't know what happened during their careers to determine why their current never hit their potentials. When I'm drafting, potential is what I'm looking for.

Using garion's criteria of an overall score of 50, I see 25% of the players in the tool have a potential score significantly higher than 50. 40% have a potential score significantly lower than 50. 35% have a potential score within 5 points of 50. So, you have a 60% chance of being around 50 or higher. Tommy Bryant appears to be an anomaly, so it looks like your ceiling here is 62. On the other hand all of the players that come in low come in real low, so there's a very real chance the guy can be a complete bust.

All of this being said, the tool is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't take into consideration the bars at all. If your staff is terrible at scouting and interviewing this tool will probably help a bunch, in that you can't trust your bars anyways. If your staff is even remotely competent I would think that the bars have to factor into your decisions. Others may disagree on how much this matters. I favor bars over combines, so their absence probably bothers me more than it would others.

[Guest]

I changed my post to say >40, which is what I meant to say.

But I agree, it's flawed. Helpful but flawed.

[irabowman]

I was thinking and hoping if I would take a player like this he have a future around 42 and hope he had a run def bar 3/4 way or within a few points. So if I did draft this guy and he hit Garrions 50 I would be elated, and very happy anywhere in 40's.

[Guest]

haha I never knew about this thing but it seems pretty cool.

[irabowman]

haha I never knew about this thing but it seems pretty cool.

I agree and I need all help I can get.

[sawblade300]

I use the same logic as garion. "This guy looks like he stinks"*uses combine checker*yup, he does", I still draft him anyway because I think I know more than this tool. Hence, my crappy drafts.

[Aston]

I think Scortch outlined the pitfalls quite well here. It can be awfully hard to tell (perhaps even misleading) how truly comparable any of those other prospects are.

[sawblade300]

I think Scortch outlined the pitfalls quite well here. It can be awfully hard to tell (perhaps even misleading) how truly comparable any of those other prospects are.

It's based strictly on combines and how those other players came out that had similar combines. I don't believe it's what that player *became*. So the bars don't factor into the comparison.

[Guest]

All of this being said, the tool is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't take into consideration the bars at all.

1. By definition it isn't. I was asked to create a utility that compares the combines of draftees to historical combines. That was the goal, and it does precisely that. (And, if I do say so myself, it does that very well. ;)) It's not designed to tell you what the player is going to be, only what other players with similar combines turned out to be, and I was very specific in my wording of what it is supposed to do.

I've now created an online utility that will allow you to input the combines of a player and see what sort of player guys with similar combines turned out to be.

If people misinterpreted that, then that's on them.

2. If someone *did* ask for something that took bars into account, I wouldn't try it at this point in my life. It's basically impossible to take the bars into consideration without a metric ton of work to remove the noise, otherwise it would be fundamentally flawed. If you didn't realize it, in the case of some players, every team sees the bars *very* differently, depending on scouting. So if someone were to put a particular player in the database based on a particular team's bars--which is really the only way to do it, since the league scouts are often terrible--then it may well show a very different view. You'd need MASSIVE data collection (I'm guessing somewhere north of 1,000 draft classes) to reduce the "noise" to an acceptable level. I strongly suspect that's precisely why what Greg is doing with Draft Analyzer and the draft slotting isn't working very well--he has only 80-100 draft classes in his database, I think.

3. One thing that I'd definitely recommend is that if people want to give something like this a shot, go for it. I taught myself to code for precisely some of the reasons germinating here: utilities for my FOF leagues weren't doing everything I wanted them to do. I was commishing a league, and I wanted a better web site (no one was doing bars back then, there was no automatic posting to forums, etc. etc. etc.,) so I went out and invested a whopping $15 or so on "PHP and MySQL For Dummies." (Yes, seriously. :D) W3Schools is also a wonderful online resource. With those two resources, it doesn't take long to get up to speed and it's not all that difficult: I hadn't written a single line of code since my senior year of high school (1987), which was in Pascal. ;) I picked up the book in late September of 2008, and by the end of that year I had figured out how to create player pages with full stats, bars, etc. etc. etc. A fair bit has been re-coded for FOF7's new outputs, but of the stuff that I'm displaying on my sites now, 7 years later, I'd guess that 75-90% of the stuff that I'm doing today on league sites was stuff I was able to do within 3 months. (I specifically recall that the auto-posting stuff was the last thing on my agenda after player pages, team pages, Dogbytes rankings, season records, and career records, and that I finished the auto-poster over the Christmas holidays that year.) Anyway, point being, it may seem to be daunting or mysterious, but really it's neither. (One caveat: that was before we had kids. It would definitely take longer with that factor included.)

That said, if no one has picked up the mantle and done it with bars included by the time my kids are old enough that I might have more time to do it (maybe 2-3 years from now,) it would be an interesting undertaking. Thinking through the mathematics of how to do it properly is rather intriguing, and should be a fun challenge. (Combine Checker was fun that way, too.)

[Cory]

I see your point. It's not that the tool is flawed, as it does precisely what you set out to do, it's more that drafting based solely on combines is a flawed strategy.

[Guest]

it's more that drafting based solely on combines is a flawed strategy.

Absolutely. And that's a fairly significant change from FOF2K7.

[Guest]

Draft Analyzer takes bars into account. I'm not seeing why the combine checker would need to when DA already does. Combine Checker is a nice resource, but it's not the end all be all of drafting, obv.