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The Random Thought Thread

rossihunter2

Staff Member
Moderator
I'm glad we were able to turn Wade into a better draft pick in 2022. Made that a win in my books and. a much deeper class.

im a little nervous about this draft class so far tbh - only 43 players in but it's certainly not blown me away in terms of talent yet (but it's certainly true that it's likely to be better on day 3 vs last year's class)

so not completely sure just how deep it is yet
 

rossihunter2

Staff Member
Moderator


the whole article is very interesting but this excerpt especially - les Snead basically trying to remove as much bias from the process as possible and also save time... removing extraneous words from reports, making sure he doesn’t tell them what he thinks of players until late in the process, not putting them together to come up with groupthink and not sending them officially to all-star events to have their opinions swayed by the crowd of other evaluators there

they’ve been excellent in day 3 recently too - obviously have missed as well but that’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ve basically guaranteed themselves elite production from their 1st rounders

part of their success has been to look at what players can do (and not worry so much about what they can’t do) and allow them to contribute and complement the players they already have in the building and specifically targeting guys with particular strengths that fit their scheme and the role they want within the scheme and use guys like Donald and Ramsey as force multipliers
 

RavensMania

Staff Member
Administrator


someone tell me how Cliff Branch wasn't already in the damn HOF. He should have been in the HOF downhill and on roller skates.
 

rmcjacket23

Ravens Ring of Honor


the whole article is very interesting but this excerpt especially - les Snead basically trying to remove as much bias from the process as possible and also save time... removing extraneous words from reports, making sure he doesn’t tell them what he thinks of players until late in the process, not putting them together to come up with groupthink and not sending them officially to all-star events to have their opinions swayed by the crowd of other evaluators there

they’ve been excellent in day 3 recently too - obviously have missed as well but that’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ve basically guaranteed themselves elite production from their 1st rounders

part of their success has been to look at what players can do (and not worry so much about what they can’t do) and allow them to contribute and complement the players they already have in the building and specifically targeting guys with particular strengths that fit their scheme and the role they want within the scheme and use guys like Donald and Ramsey as force multipliers

Makes perfect sense to me. It's sort of a spinoff of "Moneyball" analytics. Basically he figured out that Scouts tend to have biases towards certain players for a variety of reasons. Maybe its size, speed, whatever. You get some of these older scouts who have been in the business for decades, and they're unable to identify modern traits or things that project into good players.

Sort of the Bill James model. Cut right through the BS and give me some metrics or stats that we think correlate positively towards being a good player, and attack those.
 

JO_75

Hall of Famer
Well... Brady posted a clip from the final episode of 'Man In The Arena' with his Dad talking about his retirement. Final episode is coming in April.
We going to find out this has been a April Fool's Joke and he's going to announce he's coming back at the end of the episode isn't he?

 

BoredMarine13

Ravens Ring of Honor
Anyone have any recommendations on a good podcast? Need something new making the drive to work. Preferably nothing sports or politically focused.

Right now I'm just listening to a lot of Dan Carlins Hardcore history, Bret Einstein, and Rogan.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Deebo813

Hall of Famer


the whole article is very interesting but this excerpt especially - les Snead basically trying to remove as much bias from the process as possible and also save time... removing extraneous words from reports, making sure he doesn’t tell them what he thinks of players until late in the process, not putting them together to come up with groupthink and not sending them officially to all-star events to have their opinions swayed by the crowd of other evaluators there

they’ve been excellent in day 3 recently too - obviously have missed as well but that’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that they’ve basically guaranteed themselves elite production from their 1st rounders

part of their success has been to look at what players can do (and not worry so much about what they can’t do) and allow them to contribute and complement the players they already have in the building and specifically targeting guys with particular strengths that fit their scheme and the role they want within the scheme and use guys like Donald and Ramsey as force multipliers

This isnt what most teams do?
 

rossihunter2

Staff Member
Moderator
This isnt what most teams do?

some of the tracking data and stuff like that they use so that they dont need to rely so much on the measured data hasnt been available (or existed) until fairly recently - and in the past interviews and stuff like that with prospects at the combine and senior bowl were much less regulated than they are now so it required all hands on deck to make sure you got valuable time with prospects you wanted to talk to (like there are stories about trading prospects with other teams by taking them down the back corridor of the interview rooms so that no other teams could snipe them away - or even worse, steal their interview time with another team)

now they're able to record the interviews (if they're not done virtually anyway)

but for sure - there's a lot of stuff there that should have been obvious but football has been a sport of dinosaurs until fairly recently who had very little interest in renovating front office and back room processes despite massive advantages existing there to exploit

i imagine there are some other teams that do similar stuff (or maybe even more advanced stuff too or go about it differently but similarly interesting) - but some organisations are also more secretive about everything they do (and snead doesnt have that luxury in the same way that other GMs do because he's literally married to an NFL reporter lol)
 

Ellicottraven

Ravens Ring of Honor
Question for all of you: Do you think we overestimate the might of our scouting department and prowess and landing great players? Or is the EDC-led group as good as it is touted to be? I am really curious what your thoughts are. Sometimes, we get lulled into a false sense of comfort as can an organization.
 
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