My headline may be an overstatement, but not by much. Read this article . . .
What Jeremy Lin Teaches us About Talent (Measurement/Evaluation)
The article has much more to say about football than Jeremy Lin or basketball. Here is one of the more interesting points:
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A few years, Cade Massey and Richard Thaler came out with a paper that looked at the “return on value” from these early draft picks. In essence, they constructed a model in which all the players at a given position – quarterback, running back, linebacker, etc. – were ranked according to the order in which they were picked in the draft. Then, they compared any two of these players in consecutive order, so that a tight-end taken early in the first round might be pitted against a tight-end taken late in the third. The comparisons were based on a number of performance metrics, such as number of games started and yards per catch. As Thaler notes, if teams knew nothing, the player that went higher in the draft would outperform the lower ranked player 50 percent of the time. In other words, drafting talent would be roughly equivalent to a coin flip; all the scouting would be perfectly useless. In contrast, if teams knew what they were doing – if they could effectively identify the best college players – then the higher draft picks should outperform their competition close to 100 percent of the time. So what did Thaler find? Flipping a coin is the apt metaphor, as the higher picks proved better only 52 percent of the time. The teams beat randomness, but barely."
My conclusion, teams like the Bills need to put far more stock in production than combine scores. Draft people that play the best competition, and who have had the best results (winners) . . .