Why not average Pete and Wonder? Why not have one board from this blog?
It is a very fair question. For a not so quick answer, Bill Walsh explains in his book on leadership. Paraphrased, there is one leader who makes decisions and hears all of the input. The leader in this case is YOU the reader. You have delegated the task of evaluating all the players to your scouts and you need to hear every voice. So you get all the data, you get the one scout who is jumping on the table for Jerry Rice while the others remain silent. You get to see if there was consensus BEFORE discussion began, as well as differences.
Since Pete only evaluated the Top 100 and that is a subset of Wonder’s Top 200, where did they not match?
For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll define a disagreement as when they are 2 points apart or more on a rating. The rankings interestingly enough become a little frivolous (or do they?!) in the end, which we will get to a little later.
For all the ‘shouting,’ there were 18 players out of 100 where they disagreed. So they evaluated 82% of the players nearly identically, considering that a 0-1 level rating difference is not very much in the grand scheme. Yes, those 1 level differences will need to be scrutinized because they may indicate one is still a much better evaluator when the final answers come. 82% is pretty good agreement.
Who do they disagree on?
Rounds 1 & 2: Brian Price, Dan Williams, Terrence Cody, Linval Joseph, Torrell Troup, Donald Butler (unrated by Wonder), Arrelious Benn, Golden Tate and Carlos Dunlap. We removed Jermaine Gresham and Jimmy Claussen because they both agree.. Pete is just willing to go a little further and call them busts while Wonder calls them (4) replaceble starters.
Round 3: there are ~4 players that are disagreements and 3 more that Wonder does not even rate in the Top 200.
Conclusion: To have two people who are working independently and they really disagree on what boils down to ~15 players (once you also remove the 3 others that they both pan to different levels), that is a pretty good message on the other 85. It will be interesting to see Wonder’s guys (Benn, Tate, to a lesser degree Dunlap) vs Pete’s guys (Cody, Williams, Price, Joseph, Troup). The two analysts were bound to have some differences. Today we celebrate them and appreciate the information we can glean.
Perhaps our commentators will have particular strengths… Benn and Tate are both WRs. Draft Daddy was a former lineman in college and confesses to feeling more comfortable in evaluating the OL and DL. Comprehensive objective data will put us in a position to be more informed about the players in front of us.
What about those rankings of Top 100, Top 200? Well, maybe they are less frivolous than I thought. We use the (1-7) ratings to make each analyst accountable for where they project each player. But there is an interesting positive consequence of this- by going through the necessary process of rating each player in the end, we can then go back and see how everyone’s rankings fared also. As an example, we have the Top 32, everyone makes a Round 1 ranking list. Well, we can add up the combined value of the Top 32 players each analyst has slotted and look to see who has the lowest number. That will objectively tell us who is ranking them better. This is a way that we can actually grade and compare the Kipers, McShays and Mayocks. Whether they like it or not.
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