Player Compression - Food for Thought
Posted: Wed Aug 05, 2020 10:30 am
This has been a growing issue for several seasons! Over the years we have flip-flopped from not enough good players to having too many. As we all know, after the first couple of rounds in the Draft, things get pretty slim pretty fast. To address this, many seasons back I tried to make the Draft where there were at least two top 25 POT players at each position so that everyone would have a shot at one or more great to good players to keep the Draft interesting. We also came up with the Random Boost idea for the later rounds, which also emulates how the NFL often has a late-rounder that becomes a superstar.
Under the concept that all we really want to do is play football, the vast majority of the players are 95% of overall POTs. Yes, that makes for compression, but it also keeps people interested, because they have competitive players. For the past few Drafts, using a more random methodology, most positions only have one top 25 POT player, making the first couple of rounds even more important.
Let’s take LBs for example. Based on my algorithm to evaluate players, the top three LBs in this Draft have the following rating and overall POT position in the League before the button was pressed: 99.47 (15th); 99.28 (31st); and 99.20 (40th). By way of comparison, I ran a random algorithm for 50 LBs and I used the VPNFL Highs and Lows for each attribute with the top three being 93.71; 92.73; and 91.11. The lowest LB POT rating in the League currently is 97.29.
As you can see, the current Draft algorithm is tighter. However, assuming that each team needs three LBs (54 for 18 teams), and the third best in the League is ranked 40th overall, how long will it take before you can draft a top 50, or better still, a top 20 superstar LB? BTW, this is the method that I use for most of the positions, and obviously I make some modifications for positions like Punter, Kicker, and Fullback, since they are limited selections.
On a closing note, and then I will let you comment, even though the VPNFL method has some attractiveness, based on our current attributes, to adopt the VPNFL method would not have draftees competitive. To make is work, we would have to find a way to downgrade the attributes of all the current players, keeping them relative to all other players, which is not impossible, just difficult. In effect, my QB POT rating would drop from say 99.25 to 92.5, but all other QBs would have a comparable drop, thus keeping everyone relatively equal to where they are today.
Player Compression comments only
Under the concept that all we really want to do is play football, the vast majority of the players are 95% of overall POTs. Yes, that makes for compression, but it also keeps people interested, because they have competitive players. For the past few Drafts, using a more random methodology, most positions only have one top 25 POT player, making the first couple of rounds even more important.
Let’s take LBs for example. Based on my algorithm to evaluate players, the top three LBs in this Draft have the following rating and overall POT position in the League before the button was pressed: 99.47 (15th); 99.28 (31st); and 99.20 (40th). By way of comparison, I ran a random algorithm for 50 LBs and I used the VPNFL Highs and Lows for each attribute with the top three being 93.71; 92.73; and 91.11. The lowest LB POT rating in the League currently is 97.29.
As you can see, the current Draft algorithm is tighter. However, assuming that each team needs three LBs (54 for 18 teams), and the third best in the League is ranked 40th overall, how long will it take before you can draft a top 50, or better still, a top 20 superstar LB? BTW, this is the method that I use for most of the positions, and obviously I make some modifications for positions like Punter, Kicker, and Fullback, since they are limited selections.
On a closing note, and then I will let you comment, even though the VPNFL method has some attractiveness, based on our current attributes, to adopt the VPNFL method would not have draftees competitive. To make is work, we would have to find a way to downgrade the attributes of all the current players, keeping them relative to all other players, which is not impossible, just difficult. In effect, my QB POT rating would drop from say 99.25 to 92.5, but all other QBs would have a comparable drop, thus keeping everyone relatively equal to where they are today.
Player Compression comments only