A Study on the effectiveness of Bum Mining

[RashanGary]

2 Corey Rodgers in 1 draft? Gross.

LMFAO

[RashanGary]

No, Wist, it's not that. TT got 2-4th round and 2-7th round picks for moving back a little in the 2nd round and out of the 3rd.

And Jeremy Ross is an UDFA. If we didn't draft players, we'd have more UDFA's fumbling punts and less draft picks (like Will Blackmon, a 4th rounder in his time) on the roster. Just listen to yourself, "bum mining" and all that. It's just not realistic, Wist. 4th round picks aren't all that different from 3rd rounders. Two picks is a lot different than 1. It's exactly double. And two 7th rounders to boot. That means TT can have his pick of 2 extra UDFA's without 31 other teams having a say-so. It matters.

All of these 4th and 7th round picks. They might seem like nothing, but it's a process. It all adds up.

[sharpe1027]

Respectfully, any analysis that uses rounds to group picks has a fundamental flaw. You end up analyzing the last pick in the first round as if it has the same value as the first overall pick. Meanwhile, the first pick in the second round is analyzed in a completely separate group despite being only one pick away. This happens for each round.

You can't just say, rounds 1-3 net a lot of starters so trading down with a third round pick is bad. the discussion needs to be about how many spots TT traded down. He didn't move that far in IMO.

[Cleft Crusty]

You guys have wandered off the reservation, and want to play a moneyball/statisics game. So have at it. You haven't read anything I've written, so I'm out.

Let me ask ya this before I move on to other threads - how did you feel in your gut when Jeremy Ross was settling under that punt in the playoff game?? I'm sure he'll develop into a fine punt returner some day. I would argue a road playoff game against the toughest team in the NFL is not the place to get his feet wet.

Good learning experience for Ross though, huh??

Ross wasn't in there to get his 'feet wet' - he was in there due to injury to a 'legit starter.' You argue against your own point - Ross was depth, not starter. Perhaps you are critical of TT because he didn't sign Josh Cribbs as a backup, jus in case Cobb was hurt in the Divisional round. Perhaps you should look around at other teams and how they fill gaps on their squad when they have injuries.

[Cleft Crusty]

But when a GM uses his picks in those first 3 rounds simply to accumulate picks in the last 4 then we should be looking at what that GM is getting in terms of value from those trades.

when Thompson starts doing this, I will analyze value.

[Upnorth]

Ross wasn't in there to get his 'feet wet' - he was in there due to injury to a 'legit starter.' You argue against your own point - Ross was depth, not starter. Perhaps you are critical of TT because he didn't sign Josh Cribbs as a backup, jus in case Cobb was hurt in the Divisional round. Perhaps you should look around at other teams and how they fill gaps on their squad when they have injuries.

+1

[Zool]

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com...d-free-agents/

Patriots are bum mining too.

[3irty1]

The Pats are pretty much doing exactly what wist would do. He doesn't deny that you have to sign bums... he would just rather never use draft resources for bums when you can sign them for free.

[denverYooper]

This thread is awesome. I tried to rep the dirty one for the great work but the rep police wouldn't allow it.

Unfortunately I've been balls-deep in google appengine's request processing pipeline and every time I come up for air from that sonofabitch I can barely see straight, let alone engage this information.

But it has the makings of an interesting model. I'll have to give it a good going over once I'm out of the rabbit hole.

[3irty1]

Here are the conclusions that I've reached after playing with this quite a bit:

Wist is right to question trading down and classifying it as "mining for bums." Clearly there exists a level where a team can be relying too heavily on a large volume of long-shot players to farm starters. The NFL roster size, plus the cumbersome task of sorting through a large volume of talents are your bottle necks here that prevent this from ever being a viable strategy.

I also don't blame wist and others for not subscribing to the strategy of trading down even when you've got a big pile of players all rated about the same. In a vacuum it does make sense that when you don't have a preference, take the free pick and let the bones decide which of your players you'll get. This is not a vacuum though and there is phantom value to taking the guy that other GM's wanted rather than letting everyone win. Its hard to quantify that value but its real and should be weighed against the "free" pick you could get. However mid and late round picks do have real value especially if you can hit on 9% of them. Any one of them is a long-shot but as a whole they add to big value with an overhead of roster turnover that is well within the range of acceptable for a 53 man roster. This is evident in the study in this thread. A nice analogy for late picks is the lottery. Now lets say a lottery ticket costs $1 and the odds of winning are 1 in 127M, how high does the jackpot have to get before it makes sense to play? Well in a simple world where obama won't get any, if the jackpot is over $127M, it now starts to make sense. You could buy 127M tickets for $1 each and probably break even. Well this study can be seen as proof that the late round pick lottery is well worth the cost of entering, even at a 9% hit rate!

"Star mining" is also a thing. 1st and 2nd round picks are not always hits and missing on one is exponentially more detrimental to a team than whatever happens anywhere else in a draft. The fact that a 1st round pick signs a 5 year contract can give a team not just 5 starters but 5 cheap starters if they always nail this pick. Its easy for the casual fan to fall in love with the Vikings draft but the truth is that they had quite a bit more draft resources than we did to begin with. The best move they did in the draft wasn't to draft who they drafted or trade up when they traded up... it was to get what they got for Percy Harvin. We lost a start this year too but will get nothing more than a comp pick for him. To overcome the parity in the NFL that comes from the monstrous windfalls at the top of the draft, you've got to get draft picks for the players you can't pay.

22 wist-calibre legit starters is unrealistic and even if attained is probably not sustainable. In today's NFL its also not necessary. 2 specialists can platoon to be as good or better than a starter who never leaves the field. Places where you can't do this is where you want the bulk of your draft resources to go IMO. QB, OL on offense. Secondary and pass rush on defense.