Do you scout every week or bank your points and scout later?

[KBLover]

Quote: Originally Posted by CloudFuel

This is a great observation. I have kind of noticed the same thing with some of my guys, but never really looked into it too much. I just assumed I threw too early. So maybe AWR is good on everyone except those you COMPLETELY control (RB who ONLY runs & QB).

That's my personal feeling, and for QB I still think it plays some role in defender reactions to the ball (QB AWR vs Defender AWR + other factors = defender's aggression in attacking a pass).

It's just anecdotal, but it's not often a high AWR (85+) completely bombs, but it's hit or miss if a questionable AWR (50-70) can make it and anything other 50, I have no success with.

[rudyjuly2]

Quote: Originally Posted by CloudFuel

I don't see many people with this approach. How does it work out for you? The reason I ask is because I would think that you might miss out on someone who is fantastic for a specific position but has a low overall (due to other traits that don't matter for that position) or you could draft someone who has a high overall and is just 'ok' at his relative position.

I've only done two drafts. The first year I did a lot of scouting of individual ratings and got a good feel for those prospects but there are so many key traits to some players that you can't spend much on the overall rating if you still want that. I still tried to look at overall for guys I liked and that didn't leave me with a lot of information on a lot of guys. I felt the individual scouting locks you in to certain guys and makes it harder to figure out who are really good. I wasn't happy with my first draft as I felt I was running blind on too many guys from an overall rating perspective. Guys that I thought could be decent ended up having lower overalls than I wanted. I was disappointed. If you don't care about overall rating then you probably won't care but it bugged me.

My second draft I stopped scouting most individual things for the most part and wanted to focus on overalls because that's what I like. For WR and TE I did scout speed but that didn't cost me much. QB I did accuracy and I didn't do anything else. I think I only used 1000 points to scout individual traits, 2000 tops over the whole process. Everything else went to overall and with 3000 points a week it gave me a lot of overall grades. You go in to the draft fairly blind as to what type of player they are but I just look at height, weight and the overall grade to make my decision. I only wanted to draft kids in the first three rounds that I had an overall grade on. I looked back at my notes and I had 3 Bs, 3 Ds and 24 Cs for prospects rated between rounds 1-4. I may have scouted guys in the draft stories that had early grades that were lower.

Anyways, I scouted 3-4 positions pretty hard and across multiple early rounds and found three guys I really liked with one only rated a bottom third rounder (super steal). Those guys are great so far and I see them as future Pro Bowlers on my team. The WR isn't quite as fast as I like (he's slow at 84) but I can live with that. I'm definitely sticking with this approach and it's faster too.

I'd personally rather have less trait info and better overall grade numbers and target the guys with grades that are good. I traded up and down in the draft to get the guys I liked and just lived with their individual traits no matter how they turned out. With no generic info like 40 times, 225 bench, etc I feel Madden drafting works better by targeting players and moving around to get them rather than sitting still and waiting for a guy to fall.