The Lions' Pride

I live in Maryland so I only see the Rams if they come to play the Ravens.

I really love Sam Bradford's potential. Lets hope they can add the right pieces to be competitive before he gets knocked goofy.

The link below is a post that I made on a Bills message board. It's an analysis of our GM's (Buddy Nix) picks at San Diego and Buffalo. Basically, what I'm trying to do is identify trends in when and how often certain positions are selected. It's not real advanced at this point, but in the future, when I'm not as busy, I hope to add to it (like it says at the bottom).

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Thanks, man. Strangely, the guy didn't change my post much to make it into an article format.

I'm interested in the trends for other established GM's also. I think there are a number of ways this analysis could be extended, and I'm excited to sit down sometime and work it out.

Although frankly, statistics are an extremely weak area for me.

It's really not, if you know much of anything about statistics. Plenty of people who don't, though.

That said, I'm looking at making it more "complex." Trying to get away from the Gaussian distribution, for one thing. The other ways to change it are listed in the last part.

I agree, I remember reading an article (I also think the guy did a TED video) on the fact that statistic should be taught before many levels of high school math. Its definitely a much more functional discipline than some others.

I think question four in the final section would be rather difficult. Especially due to imperfect information. I remember back to the Raiders and Mike Mitchell. I know analysts were going crazy because most drafniks and Kipe valued him as a 5-7 round pick.

However, the Raiders had information that Bears were targeting him in later in the round, if I remember correctly. Although, they valued him as a 3rd round guy. They didn't value anyone on the board over him, so they pulled the trigger. I think Mayock and Kiper both apologized.

The fourth point in the last section is simply something I want to account for, not necessarily measure exactly. Basically, what I want to do is normalize the draft slots, because while there are 240+ picks in the draft each year, most teams only have ~7 of those.

One way I was thinking of accounting for that is instead of using the draft slots (i.e. the number pick in the draft), order them 1 through X, where X is the total number of draft picks for that team, and look at that analysis.

Not sure I explained that well, but it's the best I can do. I don't think it will be too difficult. The key is realizing that we can't account for everything, but we can change the analysis to estimate various factors. For example, do we add to the priority when a team trades up for a player/position?

You're good, Tommy.

The problem is that that chart was outdated even 10 years ago.

It was mostly a nominal question, and unless there is some appropriate way to quantify it, I'll probably end up ignoring trades.