Originally Posted by Dam8610 (Post 193601)

I just don't get the idea that these scouts know so much more than us, especially if you can watch the same games (they do have the advantage of college All-22, which is the holy grail of scouting) and learn what makes a player good and what doesn't. Also, I'm obviously not the only person who thinks Jenkins is a LT, because the Bears released a perfectly solid starting caliber NFL LT to plug Jenkins in there. I know you disparaged the Bears front office before, and I'm inclined to agree with you on their overall incompetence, but they had one hell of a draft, and by your logic, they are an NFL scouting group that believes in Jenkins's ability to play LT. I think they're right, they got 2 of the top 15 players in this draft, and they filled 2 of the 3 most important positions in football with them.



Irsay is hoping for that too. I will say this: I hate Kwity Paye the draft pick because his floor is bust, but I love Kwity Paye the human, because he appears to have a great deal of internal motivation to succeed as well as such an amazing story, and I hope that that translates into Kwity Paye the player developing an arsenal of pass rush moves and becoming the devastating edge defender he could be at his ceiling.

Originally Posted by Chaka (Post 193459)

On the other hand, we apparently chose Fisher over Leno, who is healthy, apparently favored the Colts, and also has strong ties to the Colts organization. So unless Leno was making exorbitant contract demands, this suggests to me a fair amount of confidence that Fisher will return close to his former self.

Originally Posted by Ironshaft (Post 193611)

And that is the fatal flaw almost all of us have.

I play golf. I have played golf since my teenager years going on 35 years at this point. At one point in my late 20s, I held a 10 handicap on PGA rated courses which means I was a pretty good normal golfer but nowhere near good enough to try the pros.

I got to play one round with a pro at a pro-am (Brad Bryant) who in 1997 was the 81st ranked player on the PGA tour by money. That was the highest ranking he ever had on the tour. Sufficient to say, he was only a marginal PGA golfer.

As we played, we talked through his logic on each holes and the factors that he used to determine his landing zone. His understanding of the game was LIGHT YEARS better than mine. He considered factors that I did not even comprehend existed. The type of grass, how it was mowed, how the wind was folding the grass over, how the bunker was raked, his reading of the green was so much better than mine.

In 2012, I was a little league coach for my son's 5th/6th grade team. I coached the O-Line and the D-Line. I played both O-Line and D-Line through high school, attempted to walk onto a Big 10 football team and spent three weeks in summer practice with Purdue before being cut, have watched and studied O-Line and D-Line play for decades as a fan.

Before the season, I went to talk to the high school O-Line and D-Line coaches (two different folks) about how they wanted technique taught at our level to then filter up to the middle school and high school teams.

Again, night and day about their understanding of technique, footwork training drills and mindsets that mine. The depth of what they understood about what makes for a successful skillset and mindset was much deeper than mine.

I have been in my profession for 25 years. I get kids out of college all the time disagreeing with my logic and recommendations on how to do task completion only to come back a couple of weeks later asking for advice since their project is all messed up.

There is a light year difference in those who DO and those who WATCH.

Originally Posted by Dam8610 (Post 193628)

I understand your point, but I would counter with: scouts watch, same as us. Yes, understanding of the game is important, but there are ways to get that. The subtle nuances of the best handfighting techniques, how to engage and defeat a blocker (DL), or how to reestablish hands and reanchor once a rusher has successfully defeated hands or gotten the blocker off balance (OL) are in fact techniques and worries best left to the coaching staff to understand and develop in the player, I would 100% agree with that as a big part of their job is player development. But scouting is more like checking off boxes on a quality check. You want to see the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly to determine what you think a player can and can't do. Then you get testing numbers, and if something stands out as unexpected, you cross check again. Of course the NFL front offices get a deluge of information we just don't get access to, and I think the Colts' employment and deployment of Brian Decker is brilliant and necessary in the modern NFL. Obviously that additional information is going to change their evaluations some, probably mostly by taking some players off their board. To me, that is the biggest difference between pro scouting departments and people who learn it on their own. After all, there are independent NFL draft experts, and they get a lot of things right that the NFL gets wrong (of course it goes the other way as well). I'm not saying that I'm one of those, but there also has been crossover between NFL front offices and independent draft experts, so I guess the question would be where do you draw the line?

Originally Posted by Puck (Post 193613)

This is exactly why you get so much push back. You ALWAYS think you're smarter than everyone else When you can see you're not, more people will take you more seriously

Originally Posted by Oldcolt (Post 193618)

It is somewhat insulting to think that what I do as a hobby I’m just as good as someone who has committed their lives to a job. No way my hour every few days is as good as spending 8 hours or more a day every day studying these dudes. Expertise takes time.

Originally Posted by Oldcolt (Post 193632)

There is no line. We all get to have our opinions, hold them strongly and argue over it. It is great because in the end it is just a game-the best game but still just entertainment. I am opinionated enough that every once in a blue moon I get it right over the pros. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.

Originally Posted by Dam8610 (Post 193660)

I don't really understand this. We're discussing opinions, I'm not just going to change mine because there are more or louder opinions from others. If I'm trying to change anyone else's opinion, I'm going to cite evidence that can be verified. Again, I'm not claiming to be an expert, but the best experts get it wrong more than half the time. That makes the margin between the best experts and random chance (which comes in at about 22% success) about 20%.



You're right, expertise does take time. According to people who study such things, expertise takes approximately 10,000 hours of investment in any subject to obtain. I'm no Dane Brugler, but I'd say over 16 years of doing my own film analysis of prospects, I've put in about half that amount of time. It would be neat to put Dane Brugler levels of time into it, but I don't have that much time available to me.



When does it become more than "a blind squirrel finds a nut"?

Originally Posted by Racehorse (Post 193659)

Another factor is what will sell where they are playing. What are the coaches looking for, and what is the organizational philosophy. What one franchise needs is different from another one. Fan bases expect a certain quality for their team. For example, Pitt players and Cheats players are somewhat different.