rmcjacket23
Ravens Ring of Honor
I think its much more simpler than that. I think you're just using data to draw an invalid conclusion. I think if you studied the data (and I know the article you're referencing), you would realize that you couldn't draw the conclusion you're drawing from said data.I agree. I am someone who uses facts, trends, and other data to come to a conclusion based on what the data suggests. Now data of course has outliers but understanding trends can help with effective decision making.
You seem to use more feelings/hopes to make decisions which makes such a discussion pointless, as shown by your response to the data showing what you did not like to suggest that the data itself must be wrong.
As we have a philosophical disagreement on the ideal way to come to a conclusion about an issue, the issue in question being "Is it a good thing to have a lot of rookie starters for the specific season in question?", any discussion on that matter would merely go around and around in circles and no consensus could possibly be reached as we use different criteria to come to that conclusion
Final note, I am not saying the rookies in question are worse than the players on the roster they are starting over, but having a bad position be less bad does not make that player average, hence why I would say in an ideal scenario you would not need rookie starters, but obviously the difficulty of managing a salary cap means you have to expect that not every position can be above average and some will be below average and those rookies typically are who you would hope to have occupy that space (as they tend to grow and it would mean that position is not a position of need in the draft).
And the reason for that, as others have suggested, is a lack of context. That data is taking a rookie player and comparing him across the board to all other players at his position in the league. That, of course, doesn't work, because a single NFL team doesn't have an entire league-wide pool of players by which said rookie can compare to. They have a finite number of players under contract, and thus, shouldn't be compared to the entire population.
For example... Bateman doesn't need to be be above average, league-wide, in order to start on this team. He only needs to be better than the pool of receivers that this team has access to. How he "rates" compared to an entire league wide population really doesn't matter in this context.