You can't say they made exceptional evaluations unless you're saying they predicted they predicted the players would be as good as they became, that they saw things that nobody else saw. Also, age has nothing to do with it, I'm talking about level of performance. If your evaluation says 'player will be pretty good', and the player becomes a perennial all-star/HOF player, it doesn't mean your evaluation was exceptional, your evaluation was wrong, he exceeded your expectations and you got lucky. And if your evaluation says 'player will be really really great', but you wait until the 6th round to draft him, then you're taking an idiotic risk, aka, you're not good at what you do. Unless you're using exceptional in a general sense, in that if you pick a guy up and he plays worlds better than you ever expected, and you're saying the evaluation was exceptionally bad. If so, I could agree, but I'd still call it luck, since it worked out well for you in the end.
Exceptional evaluation that the player you thought would be good would be skipped over 198 times. That would definitely be exceptional planning and forethought!
Do you know who the one who begged the Red Sox to sign Ortiz? Pedro Martinez. David Ortiz had no offers after being cut by Minnesota in December. Red Sox signed him 1/22/03. The Red Sox were so convinced that Ortiz was going to be a great player they signed him to a one year non-guaranteed contract worth $1.25M. Then they barely played him (32 games in first 55 games). When Jeremy Giambi is being chosen to start over you that is not exceptional evaluations. Ortiz was expected to be .270/18/50 guy and Red Sox really lucked out and got a .300/30/100 guy. No one and I mean no one expected Brady to become one of the Top 4 QB's of all time. I 100% confident if you asked Belichick and Kraft they would damn well say they got very lucky that they got a HOF and one the Greatest players of all time at 199. It is not a slight at anyone saying that it was luck that got them these players. The evaluation in 2000 draft was the Pats needed a 4th QB for camp etc. Brady was best available at 199 and since the 199th pick was a comp and couldn't be traded Pats took best available QB.
I would even accept that the evaluation could have said something like "he has the 'potential' to become a very good/great QB", but they could have in no way thought the likelihood of this was very high, or they would have drafted him sooner. Meaning, their evaluation said that he would most likely not become anything like what he has actually become, hence, their evaluation was not correct. Nobody would ever risk letting a player who had a good likelihood of being a special player get taken by someone else, unless it was a situation like Larry Bird, and people don't really know he's available, or whatever the exact story was there. I never fully understood what happened there, beyond it was another smart move by Red, being aware of something nobody else understood, and taking advantage of it.
This probably not the right place to ask and I do not want to sidetrack things, but since Brady has been brought up... I will always have a few what ifs about Brady. What if Bledsoe doesn't get hurt? What if Bledsoe does not get hurt and throws for 4,000+ yards that season with a low number of INTs? Maybe the Pats have an average season, but do not win the Superbowl behind Bledsoe? Do the Pats move on from Bledsoe to Brady the next year? Maybe not? Brady could still have a great career, but would it be the same? I wonder what you could have traded Brady for before that season? I guess I just think that the Pats drafted Brady about where everybody thought he should be based on the information available at the time and that Brady was given his chance before he had earned it outright due to an injury to Bledsoe. Brady took advantage of his chance. The rest is history. If any team had wanted Brady badly enough they could have traded up to get him or picked him earlier. Nobody did. Nobody would have waited that long to pick him if they thought he was a potential franchise quarterback, much less a future hall-of-famer. I can think of a few times since 2002 where I think that an injury has done wonders for the USMNT in terms of finally giving player X a chance that the coach was never going to give him as long as player Y was healthy.
heh, how dare you mention something not exactly in the parameters of the name of the thread!?! Regarding Bledsoe not getting hurt, maybe Brady wouldn't have come in that season, but I've heard it said that the coaching staff was tiring of Bledsoe's performance and liked Brady better that pre-season, and the switch was coming eventually, if perhaps not quite so soon. As for Bledsoe having the season you describe, I'm not sure how likely that was. Many people forget how good he was for a while, and how much he helped build up the franchise from it's previous joke status, but he was getting rather mistake prone as well at that point. This is why the coaches would have already been thinking about Brady for the near future.
Box Goals = The highlight of the Revs 2014 season. The most common caveat for all Revs conversations: "At least we got box goals this season!" Could this be the new Revs forum motto? New Fort chants: All we are saaaaaying is we have box goals! No Goals! Own Goals! All's well with Box Goals!
Applying this to the revs, you don't want to wish injury on anybody but …we could really use an upgrade at left back and that's not going to happen until Tierney gets hurt. He's so damn durable that we can't even get a look at Woodbine. Same for JoGo, if he leaves in the summer it could open the door to playing Farrell at CB which is his normal preferred position. He may anchor our defense for a decade and win a USMNT spot there, who knows.
The backline I'd love to see (Woodbine/JoGo/Farrell/Alston) will never get a look unless Soares, McCarthy and Tierney are all out at the same time.
We are gfetting way off topic, but this is correct. BB was losing interest in Brady. The injury just let Brady in earlier than most would have expected, but he was expected to get a chance.
Well yeah, that is why they are the laughing stock of the league and of professional sports in general. The proof is in the results.
yawn....this organization is a joke and it always has been. the degree to which we bitch about it shouldn't matter. Focusing on those degrees is an ignorance of the real problems. So, congrats for that for all these years.
I don't see it that way. You evaluate players and decide whether someone is likely to provide enough value in return for their cost. You don't have to know or predict what their ceiling will be to make it an exceptional evaluation. And, if you provide the situation where a player can thrive ... and they do, I wouldn't call that luck. Some people will exceed expectations and some won't. There was a reason Ortiz didn't thrive in Minnesota. They under-evaluated him.
Basically, our definitions of "exceptional evaluation" are very different. For me, if you have a specific evaluation, and the subject doesn't do pretty much exactly what you said he would, then it's not exceptional, full stop. And if an evaluation was very open ended, as in "he could be mediocre, he good be good, he could be really good", that's not very exceptional either, as it sounds like you're just saying "we'll, he'll do something, but I can't really say what exactly". Not trying to put words in your mouth, but it sounds to me like you're saying what's most important is how well the player plays, not how close his performance was to the prediction, or how well defined the prediction was.
Predictions etc are good to have (although in the analytics industry it's often said "every model is wrong") but ultimately, performance is what matters, no? This goes for soccer, sales or really any role that's measurable.
Performance is definitely what matters, but the conversation is about what makes an evaluation "exceptional", so we're talking about the performance of the evaluators, where the prediction is the performance. In this case, for me at least, it's not about how well the player performs, it's about how close the evaluation came to predicting the player's level of performance. If you predict a player is going to suck, and he sucks, well the player's performance was bad, but the evaluation was good. If you predict he's going to be a decent sub, worth picking up to cover for injuries, and he becomes a league best 11 player by the end of the season, that doesn't make the evaluation a good one.
Fair enough, in that example it may not make the evaluation a good one but it's far better to err in the positive direction than say, Jerry Bengtson, who was (I can be confident here) predicted to score more than 3 goals in 2083 minutes over 31 matches, a rate of 1g per 7.7 games (694 minutes). One tidbit I just discovered, Bengtson is charging the revs almost 50k per goal ($46,280/g at his guaranteed 2013 salary of $138840) - probably more now. WOW. If you predict Brady is nothing more than a 6th rounder and he ends up as one of the best of his generation, that's simultaneously a bad evaluation and happy problem any manager would take in a heartbeat. The cost of replacement is normally 3:1 so you're always going to be thrilled if you're wrong about someone that ends up working out.
Well he was focusing on evaluation performance (bad) and I was focusing on on-field performance (good). Lucky or not, it doesn't matter as long as the results are there.
OK, so performance is all that matters. That means that if you and 3 other teams underestimate someone to the same level, thinking he's a mid-5th round pick, and another team who has this same evaluation as you takes that player a 2 picks before you in the 5th round, and the guy goes on to become an all-star, someone worthy of being a 1st round pick, then all those evaluations were "exceptional", because all that matters is the players performance on the field, and the player exceeded the evaluation. I disagree with that notion, because if all the evaluations were the same, and all 4 teams would have taken the guy in the 5th round, you can't say one team's evaluation was any better than anybody else's so if one is exceptional, then they all must be.
I know what you are saying but don't like the word "exceptional" here. It is an accurate projection, which is what predictions are supposed to be. With player x exceeding expectations you could say "exceptionally accurate" if you'd like (hinting a 5th rounder that performs like a first is an exception) but accuracy is an important qualifier as that's the goal when you're hiring someone. Does that make sense? Project 5th, perform AT LEAST like a 5th rounder. I think we're arguing semantics at this point.