Video: Round 2 of stage-by-stage with Ben and Quik

[Squirrel]

We didn't quite finish this off last time...so here we're back to talk through the regular season, including gameplanning, and the playoffs.

Hope you enjoy!

Round 2 with Ben and Quik going stage-by-stage - YouTube

[Squirrel]

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[tzach]

great stuff -- thanks squirrel, ben and quik for doing these videos.

[henry296]

I want to make sure I understand the league scout vs. my scout. Overall most of my coaches have what appear to be above average scouting bars. I have a TE that just finished his first season. My scout has him as 64 Current/Future, but the league scout is 54. Therefore his true rating is less than 64. Do we believe it could be less than 54 or some where in the middle?

[henry296]

Originally Posted by henry296

I want to make sure I understand the league scout vs. my scout. Overall most of my coaches have what appear to be above average scouting bars. I have a TE that just finished his first season. My scout has him as 64 Current/Future, but the league scout is 54. Therefore his true rating is less than 64. Do we believe it could be less than 54 or some where in the middle?

I have that backwards. This is a good player because my scouts are better than the league scout. That is good because I traded back into the first round for him.

The ones I want to be afraid of is when the league scout is higher. Devin Bush now in his 9th year is 60 by my scout and 64 by the league scout. Therefore, I should really expect him to start to decline and therefore not extend him.

[MIJB#19]

Originally Posted by henry296

I want to make sure I understand the league scout vs. my scout. Overall most of my coaches have what appear to be above average scouting bars. I have a TE that just finished his first season. My scout has him as 64 Current/Future, but the league scout is 54. Therefore his true rating is less than 64. Do we believe it could be less than 54 or some where in the middle?

Ben suggests that your player would actually be even better than 64 and it was suggested that he's probably closer to a 70 to 75 in disguise. The last bit is hard to judge with the actual scouting bars known, I would go with your staff and for now believe the 64 and hope he's an underrated 70.

[Landshark44]

great stuff.... thx again for sharing some stuff, that i didn't know....

questions-

when working on a gameplan... if i have 15/5 set on first and 10....does the order of the plays matter at all? are they just randomly picked from the 15? do they go in the order they are listed?

when Ben says- "if i have 65 plays, i only call each 1 time, for a total of 65 entries" I'm wondering what the number of "entries" represents?

is it the total of the 15/5 15/5 9/3 plays you have set in each category? what is "entry" in regards to number of plays called..

[triplykely]

Originally Posted by Landshark44

great stuff.... thx again for sharing some stuff, that i didn't know....

questions-

when working on a gameplan... if i have 15/5 set on first and 10....does the order of the plays matter at all? are they just randomly picked from the 15? do they go in the order they are listed?

when Ben says- "if i have 65 plays, i only call each 1 time, for a total of 65 entries" I'm wondering what the number of "entries" represents?

is it the total of the 15/5 15/5 9/3 plays you have set in each category? what is "entry" in regards to number of plays called..

The order is the order the plays will be called in that situation, so in a sense the order does matter. It’s debatable on if the sequence of plays improves efficiency but the order they are in the game plan is the order they will be called in game. When Ben says he has 65 entries he means there aren’t plays listed for multiple scenarios. Instead of having duplicates and 100ish plays in the game plan he only uses each play once.

[Landshark44]

Thank you...

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by henry296

I want to make sure I understand the league scout vs. my scout. Overall most of my coaches have what appear to be above average scouting bars. I have a TE that just finished his first season. My scout has him as 64 Current/Future, but the league scout is 54. Therefore his true rating is less than 64. Do we believe it could be less than 54 or some where in the middle?

I don't think this came across all that clearly in the video, but here's my distillation, which Ben definitely seems to agree with, numerically:

-In this example, I'll simplify to a one-rating player, though I think this actually happens bar-by-bar for each player... (though I think aggregate masking is a player-wide function, it may affect each bar differently in the game)

-A young player is created, with two encrypted ratings numbers: an actual rating, and a masking number

-The skill of the scout (i.e. staff person or people responsible for scouting), in this respect, is basically his ability to ignore the masking number... think of it as an inverse percentage, a really good scout can ignore 80% of the masking, meaning his assessment will be close to the actual rating than a weaker scout

-So, let's say we have a player whose actual true rating is 60, and he has a masking number of -20 (this would be an unusually heavily masked player, by the way, most guys would have a mask more like a 6, frex)

-The terrible league scout can only ignore 20% of the masking... so he still sees the player with a -16 (80% of 20) applied to the true rating... he sees the player as a 44

-My excellent scout can ignore 80% of the masking, so he only sees the player with a -4 (20% of 20) applied to the true rating... he sees the player as a 56

We believe that scout error, at least of the widespread "masked player" variety, basically works this way - it's a one-dimensional vector, away from the true rating, based on scouting ability.

So... that means, when your scout is better than the league scout:

-a differential in their ratings for a player means your scouting is more accurate, and
-the true rating lies not between the two ratings, but outside them, in the direction of the better scout

If you see a guy rated 48 and the crappy league scout says he's only 42... he's not a 46, he's more like a 50. And the converse.

[Ternvig]

Great video guys!

Nice how that 0/0 short passing QB works his way into every video

Ben mentioned the Gameplan analyzer - is that the stalmack utillity (didn’t know it still worked) or is it a reference to the ‘Film room’.

[Ushikawa]

That breakdown of the mask rating vs scouting rating vs league scout rating was solid GOLD!

[Ushikawa]

By the way on Playcounts, I logged playcounts by situation a few times to see how many plays I needed in each section. Obviously strategically there is some variation depending on how much you run/pass on 1st and short vs deep etc so I recommend you do the same but I actually found most teams had 11 or 12 possessions from that 1st-10 @ possession per game.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Ushikawa

By the way on Playcounts, I logged playcounts by situation a few times to see how many plays I needed in each section. Obviously strategically there is some variation depending on how much you run/pass on 1st and short vs deep etc so I recommend you do the same but I actually found most teams had 11 or 12 possessions from that 1st-10 @ possession per game.

I'm working off of the history of the GML, which has been on FOF8 for 85 seasons as of this writing. The translates to a sample size of over 56,000 drives. The average is 12.754, mode is 13, and standard deviation is 1.829. Quick check on IHOF FOF8 data (31 seasons, a little under 20K drives) gives a 12.770 drive per team per game average.


You can check this yourself by exporting league data using Stelmack's Interrogator. It's in the drive_results.csv file. But it's consistently a little under 13 possessions per team per game, with 10 and 15 being outliers.