DraftAnalyzer7
 

Draft Analyzer

UPDATE March 16, 2015, v 1.2.0.0:

Today's update has a new way of viewing the draft class based on some data mining analysis. You will see 5 new columns in the table view:

D? - how likely is this player to develop to a 40 rating or higher?
VG - how likely is this player to develop to a Very Good or Excellent rating?
G - how likely is this player to develop to a Good rating?
A - how likely is this player to develop to an Average rating?
FP - how likely is this player to develop to a Fair or Poor rating?

The calculation for these new columns is a combination of the player's grade, combine scores, percent developed, and the min range of the blue bars. The latter is scout dependent, so these ratings will not be the same for all scouts. Remember that these are percentages - my test cases showed in general about a 50% accuracy on the highest chance range being the range the player fit into, and above 95% on being within 1, if you've got a good scout. You will have to look at the pattern, and beware of players that are like 20/30/30/20 chances on these (QBs especially love to be unpredictable).

In addition, there is a new command on the Edit menu called "Slot by Rounds". This works by calculating a "slot score" from these new values (it's shown in the player details window). It's relatively straightforward, using the middle of each of these ranges to estimate player development, with D? being given a 40 weight (VG is 85, FP is 10, etc). The slot score is multiplied by your assigned position weights, and then banded to give players 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc round slotting. That generates a draft order for all players. There is a special case for high return and special teams bars that can percolate otherwise poor players into the 7th or possibly 6th rounds.

This should help bring some improved advice to the drafting, building in some of the patterns expert drafters have dug up on their own, but remember that drafting is still playing the odds, this may just help you understand the odds a bit better.

Original details:

This is a utility to help you comb through the draft class and prioritize players you want to pick. It will import the data that FOF exports, analyze them based on weights you provide for the various combine, bar, and other attributes in that data, sort them, and display them. You can then manually override the sorting in a number of ways. If you are playing in a multiplayer league that uses the Conscriptor utility for drafting, you can copy-paste the Analyzer output from it into the utility and click a button to mark all players that have already been drafted, and you can export a file that is imported by that utility to set your priority list.

Some details on how it works:

First, you must use the FOF options to Export Data and Export Personal Scouting Data during the FA period when the draft class is available. This is the data the utility will use.

Next, run the Draft Analyzer utility, go to File -> Load League Draftees, open the leaguedata folder that should be highlighted in the dialog, select your league, and click OK. Draft Analyzer will load the draftees and display them in a table.

File -> Save Draftees will allow you to save the current draft class with any customizations (more in a sec). File -> Load Draftees will load a draft class you've been working on. File -> Export Draftees and File -> Import Draftees will be of most use to people running smaller leagues without Conscriptor, as it handles saving/loading the list of players already drafted: commissioner can copy-paste from the FOF draft window into their utility, export draftees, send that file, and the other players import it; this is how I used to run my small office league. Export CSV dumps all the current draft class data to an Excel CSV file for customized work in Excel. And finally File -> Export Draft Order will save your current ordering of the draft class to a CSV that can then be imported in Conscriptor using the "Import Priority List" tab.

The View menu changes the look of the main table. There are three ways to display the combines, you can color the chemistry groups (search FOF for details here, it's not something I use much), you can have all drafted players automatically pushed to the bottom of the list (almost always turn that on), or you can sort players by a particular bar if you are looking for return men or something similar.

The Edit menu is where you will do a lot of work. Use Current Sort as Draft Order is a good initial pass - once you have your weights set, click the "Rate" column (or "Bars" or another column if desired) for a quick initial player sort, then use this menu item to set the draft order to the same sort as that column. You can then go through players and adjust as desired.

Predict Chemistry opens a dialog that lets you input your position leaders' birthdays, plus set a weight on each (advanced users based this on their personality and leadership ratings), and it will find and note players who have birthdays that would indicate a potential affinity or conflict and mark them as such.

Finally, Edit Weights is the meet of the utility. It opens a large dialog you'll mostly have to play with. Here is how you set up how important various draft data is to you: the relative importance of bars vs combines, adjustments for height/weight, a factor for the position (how important is QB vs WR for you in this draft?), and for each position how important is each combine or bar for you? The defaults here are reasonable (uses FOF's weights for bars to overall rating, and combine importance set based on this, and position weights using FOF's weights), but most drafters customize this at least somewhat. For advanced analysis of what is really important here, search other threads here on FOFC, searching on "combine" is probably a good start.

The main window includes a player detail window at the bottom, with biographical information on a player, some information on potential position switches, and bar details for the player. Some explanations on the coding of the bar details:

Green bars are generally considered "static", they don't change much until a player fully ages.

The lines on the right connect what are called "masked pairs", usually these bars end up around the same on a player, so mismatches here can indicate masking, either better or worse, on a player. Again, search on FOFC for details.

The small white bars are vague guesstimates of where the bar might be based on the combines. Do NOT expect these to be accurate, instead they give you an at-a-glance view of whether the combines might indicate the bar to be high or low, and can help uncover masking if they are much higher or lower than the bar range shown. Again, search on "combine" for more details on how combines work in FOF, and how much you can trust them.

The lower-right area is where you can paste an Analyzer dump from Conscriptor or the output of the draft window in FOF (for smaller MP leagues or single player games) and then "Mark Drafted" all the players who have been selected and are no longer available.

As for the main table, it is color-coded to show a variety of info. Green backgrounds on combines are generally considered "high", blue "low", and gray as "slightly below average". Orange means no combines. Red means it is below the "threshold" that good players generally have, see the thread on that here at FOFC.

Players with a red background on the line itself have been drafted. Yellow means "marked" by you.

There is a context-sensitive menu available by right-clicking a player, with keyboard shortcuts, for setting your draft order. 1-7 lets you set a round you'd like to draft a player in, X means don't draft ever, F for keep an eye on him in FA, D to mark drafted, M to "mark" the player (background turns yellow), and the +/- key provide fine tuning of the draft order.

Feel free to explore, this is set up to be customizable as every GM has their own view on drafting or what they want in a player. The defaults are a reasonable start, but you'll want to customize to match how you build a roster.

Thanks Greg. Really appreciate all the hard work you put in to your utilities.

Once again, thank you for this.

Nice! Will take it for a spin later.

You, sir, rule, sir!

Do we do this from in game? How? Then where do we select our league from? In DA I'm assuming...yes?

Ok, I've had a chance to try it. It works well that I can see, but I miss the chemistry prediction and the scout impression. Unless that is not relevant anymore? Was vol removed also because it is not relevant anymore? Or was it just not easy to include these?

First problem I've encountered is when I did an export Draft Order (Conscriptor). Only 28 of the players in that file imported into the conscriptor.

I'm getting NaN for all of my quarterbacks in the Bars, Comb, and a Rate columns. Any ideas?

At the bottom of the Almanac window are two options to export your league data to CSV files. You need both of those for this to function.

In DA, the File menu's first option will let you select your league folder, and it will import the rookies from that data.

Extractor is no longer involved here. At the moment, picking your league is a folder browser, I hope to put a better UI in that will let you pick the league more easily / clearly, but this got the version out much more quickly.

Birthdate, scout impression, and volatility are not part of the game exported data in rookie.csv or draft_personal.csv. Although I didn't dig far to see if the rookie's have info in the regular player data that includes either of these.

If we can get the Chemistry field currently on the player card into the exported data, I'll include that again. Same with volatility or any other data.

Double-check the weights dialog, you might be doing something unusual with them that I need to test.

I ran it and didn't modify the weights at all and have the same issue.

If one of you having the problem can send me the draft_personal.csv and rookies.csv files from your exported league, and your DraftAnalyzer.weights file from Documents\StelmackSoft\UtilitySuite, I will attempt to debug it.

gstelmack AT nc DOT rr DOT com

I did get a set of files - what I'm seeing is that the QB combine weights are all "0". That will generate a NaN. I don't know how the file got that way, but if you open the Weights dialog and change the sliders so they aren't all all the way to the left, you won't see NaN anymore.

Minor update pushed - I finally, after how many years, sped up the initial data loading into the list to be near instant.

Greg is the f'ng man

Pretty cool stuff...thanks!

A few issues I have:

- Export Draft Order CSV won't upload into Conscriptor (says no players found).

- Size is -500 for a few players which is killing their rating even though they have top combines.

- I tried going Default on weights (to see if it fixed the size issue) and it overwrote my saved Draft Weights for some reason. Even after getting my original Draft Weights file from a thumbdrive when I load up Analyzer it still shows the default weights now.

I may have to work with Wheels on Conscriptor - it used to require the birthdate, which I don't have anymore.


They are undersized for their position. It may be worth turning that to zero in the weights (not using defaults at all), as I used to have a hack to say "ignore this for their current position", but I don't know their current position anymore, just the position group. Thoughts are welcome.


You can load any weights file, and it should overwrite the default file it uses (DraftAnalyzer.weights I think is the name, have to check). You can always save to a different name, but whenever you close the weights dialog with OK, this file is written, and it is the one that is loaded the next time you run Draft Analyzer.

It has been pointed out to me that the player_information.csv has data for rookies, which includes birthdate and the correct position. That means I should be able to bring back several of these features once I can read that in.

New version pushed that brings back specific positions (which also improves the player height/weight notes) and birthdates, which brings back Predict Chemistry.

You da man! Keep up the good work.

I must be doing something wrong here! I Wasn't able to export "draft_personal.csv" for some reason therefore DA gave me error! "Rookies.csv" was there along with bunch of exported files.

What I did:
1) Almanac -> Create HTML
2) Almanac -> Export Data

Any step I missed or did wrong?

Thanks for help.

Hey Greg, just wanted to say thanks for this. This is the first time I have used the program and now I don't know why I didn't before.

Make sure you're running 7.0b, because there should be an "export personal scouting data" below the "export data" option.

Yup, and Create HTML is unimportant for Draft Analyzer.

Same here...holy cats.

I'm still shocked you had never used it before. You draft well, but I'm scared to see where this takes you.

Anybody have any weights they want to share? :D

The defaults are "reasonable", they match how FOF rates players. Tweak them to match what you are looking for.

A lot of it may depend on the league setting for combines, that should adjust how much you trust bars and how much you trust combines.

At some point I need to put something in to adjust the bars based on percent developed, as I personally am looking a whole lot more at "current" in this version than I have in the past, and that may be the best estimate.

So glad to see this! feel a lot better about our league converting to FOF7 now. So much easier to run too. Too bad affinities weren't included in the export data.

Draft Analyzer Utility (Excel 2010)
 

Excel Draft Analyzer Utility

Attached is a macro-enabled excel workbook I created to import the results of the exported .csv file from the Draft Analyzer v2.0.8.0 program created by gstelmack. This workbook contains several tabs that were put together based on the information contained in the numerous "draft related" threads on this message board.

Enjoy!
:popcorn:

Oooooh. A new challenger appears.

Browsing through this looks pretty cool. Thanks!

Very nice. The one thing I'd change/add/enhance would be that currently it's sorting by the combine score. How about adding an option to sort by either the "bar" score or the "overall" score?

I like the idea of sorting by bar/overall, but for now I have it sorting by what was available via export from the Draft Analyzer.

Unfortunately, I do not know how bar scores are calculated. If I did, I could come up with a hidden tab that makes these calculations after import and uses it for sorting etc... :cool:

I didn't think anyone was using the CSV export, so I didn't really touch it much. If it needs more exported, just let me know what and I'll look into adding it.

If "Bars" and "Rate" were added to the export, I could enhance the sorting feature of this workbook.

BTW, I really like your Draft Analyzer, but it was time consuming to mark players as they were drafted. Once I discovered that the draft window in FOF7 could be copied/pasted, I got the idea to use the exported data from your program and create a draft tracking spreadsheet using copy and paste :)

Um, Draft Analyzer supports copy-and-paste from FOF, and it's why the Draft Utility exports draftees in the same format ("Analyzer Export"). Paste them into the text window in the lower right and click the "Mark Drafted" button...

Very nice! - I missed seeing that when playing around with your program - I just assumed it was a notepad - LOL!

For a long time that's what I thought as well. It annoyed me that any text you typed wouldn't save. :p

Greg

I've had issues with it pasting ever since the new version came out. I've had to make an excel hack to put it in the format of the xxx.draftees to get the drafted players updated.

Any ideas?

No, the pasting from the Draft Utility has worked fine for me.

http://www.gstelmack.com/DraftAnalyzer/publish.htm

This site appears to be down.

Maybe a brief outage, it's working for me right now.

I'm in!

I've been pretty busy and haven't had a chance to really dive into FOF7 yet....this will get my interest back up (at least) for my MP experience. Thanks for this!

As I've been through 2 multiplayer drafts now, I'm finding myself valuing development percentage a lot more than I used to, so I'm trying to figure out how to work that into the ratings. Ideas welcome - I need to figure out if it should be a multiplier on the rating (not straight, some sort of curve) or another +/- like combines and bars. One trick is figuring out if I need to worry about positions - QBs in particular are often low development, but not always. I'll play around with something soon.

I've always looked at "grade" and "development %" side by side as sometimes high development's a good thing, sometimes it's not. To be honest, I don't really look at the game-generated "rating" either; the third thing I look at is "bars" as a rough overall quantifier of how high the bars are. Then I piece things together manually from there. I'm not sure there's a very reliable way to put it all together.

Although if I were to try, I'd put something in there like punishing players slightly for having much higher development than average for their adjusted grade, and rewarding them for much lower development than average for their grade.

It's an interesting way of thinking, although it's more complicated. I think you're right that it's the discrepancy between development and bars or grade (I ignore grade mostly, I get a good scout and trust the bars more) that is key. High bars / low development is often an indicator that the bars are lying, while low bars / high development may indicate the bars should be better. Jim has said in the past that low development means a higher risk in drafting, but we don't know how much that still applies in an FOF7 world.

That's why I'm trying setting an average percent developed, and rewarding or punishing based on a deviation from it. If a guy has high bars / low developed, it punishes, low bars / high development, it rewards, and low bars / low developed will be killed, and high bars / high development will get a nice boost. It gives me a chance to weed out the high bars / low developed guys that I am most worried about.

But I'm certainly open to discussion / examples about how I could add options for GMs to apply the rules they want.

New version pushed with a few changes:

- I added the aforementioned "average development" and "development weight" factors. I calculate the score by dividing the weight by the average development, and then multiplying that by the player's development difference from the average. So, the default is "30" for average and "10" for weight. 10/30 = 0.333, so for every point the player's development differs from 30, he gets +/- 0.333 points. A development of 15 will be -5, a development of 45 will be +5.
- I fixed an issue where the combine scores displayed under the individual bars in the table view did not necessarily match the best position rating the player is shown with. This may have been misleading some players in balancing their weights. For example, if a player was an SLB, but based on your custom weights DraftAnalyzer thought he'd make a better WLB, it might still be showing the SLB weights when you switch from score to rating view in the table.
- Show the individual combine weights for the best rated in position in the player detail view. Every component of the final score should be there that are summed up to get the final score.

Cool. I just.went through my first.draft.using this tool. Set it up and.let.it.fire away for me. We'll see.how it did in the next.few.days