Draft Analysis - We're All Debi from Depew

[Shaw66]

18 minutes ago, oldmanfan said:

Good discussion with you and Shaw.  I wanted to comment on the value of expertise.  One of the truly dangerous things going on in the country today is the lack of respect for expertise.  We saw this most vividly during Covid on social media.  I  am a scientist with reasonable knowledge of virology and had hairdressers among others tell me on social media they knew more about Covid than me or other trained professionals.  
 

Front offices in the NFL have way more data than folks on TBD, thus a better chance of picking correctly.  More data always is better than less.  There are a few folks on TBD who really dig into as much film and that as they can, and I fund their assessments more worth a read.  But the vast majority base in on maybe one YouTube video, if that.

Absolutely, both on the COVID side and the NFL side.  Exactly.  

 

Is TikTok a threat to national security?  I have absolutely no idea.   There are very few people, possibly in the tens of thousands but more likely in only the hundreds or thousands who are competent to ask answer that question, but there are tens of millions of people who think they understand.  

 

I think football is much more about coaching than about talent.   I think we'll see it this year - this team is going to be better than most people expect.   Why don't they expect much?  Because the talent is unproven.  Why will the Bills succeed?  Because the coaching IS proven.   I think outsiders who really know football, like the best broadcasters, understand that it's more about coaching, but they don't talk about all that goes into building a successful team.   Why not?  Because it's bad television.  It's much better television, throughout the course of the game, to talk about the stars, to sell the idea that the stars are the reason this team is great and that team is struggling.  It makes for a nice on-air drama.  It's boring if all they do is talk about Xs andOs, and about the work the coaches did to design the offense and understand what defenses are doing to them.  The ins and outs of that stuff gets tedious.   

 

The result is that we - the fans - don't understand all of the detail the coaches and scouts do.   Instead, would fed a more or less nonstop stream of how great these players are, and that leads us to believe that what our eyeballs are seeing is all that there is to understand.  It leads us to trust our eyeballs, so when the Bills draft Coleman we run off to see his highlight reels and read a couple of soundbites and reach a conclusion about him.  

 

There are people in every modern field with enormous expertise, and that expertise makes a big difference.  

[Rampant Buffalo]

32 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

Shaw, my main point was simply this: We need to have a little humility.  I've seen posters write as if they're smarter about football than Beane and the entirety of the Bills personnel department.  These same posters often disrespect the opinions of their fellow posters - which I think is wrong.  

 

I had the honor of leading soldiers into combat during the First Gulf War.  Before the war, I read some articles about how it was going to be a long, protracted fight against a battle-hardened enemy with significant American losses.  This was not the kind of stuff I wanted my soldiers to read.   What really annoyed me, and made me laugh at the same time, was the sense of certainty and intellectual superiority that dripped from some of these articles.   Of course, the talking heads were cluelessly wrong and American armored units quickly rolled into the Euphrates Valley with minimal losses leaving a trail of destruction in their wake and Iraqi soldiers crying the Arabic version of "No Mas" by the tens of thousands. 

 

Non-experts thinking they're smarter than experts is a type of hubris.  Just think about amateurs commenting on your own profession, whatever it is.  Expertise is too often underrated.  

 

But it's also true that so-called experts aren't always expert.  Matt Millen, case in point.  And there are so many unknown/unknowable variables in predicting which college players will succeed in the NFL and which won't, that sometimes fans will be right and GMs wrong.  And I'll acknowledge this, too... my main source of information about the draft is TBD.  I always appreciate your commentary, GunnerBill's, etc.  I think the collective Bills IQ of TBD is much higher than the collective Bills IQ of the national media.  This is my primary source of information about the club.  What I read here heavily influences my own opinions.  

 

I'm just hoping people can be humble - and kind - with their opinions because we're not as smart as the pros and, even if we were, there's no certainty in this game.  Every pick is, to some extent, a roll of the dice.  

 

Personally, I've watched video on all our draft picks, reviewed their draft profiles, read the opinions here, and have some weak opinions of my own about the likelihood of their success.  Mostly I'm just keeping an open mind and hoping the dice fall in our favor.     

 

 

Humility is definitely a solid virtue, and I strongly respect the fact that you've praised it here.

 

I'd divide humility into two categories: 1) Good humility. "I could be wrong, and I need to work hard to try to be right." 2) Overdoing it humility. "It's not my place to question my betters."

 

I also believe in accountability. To take the example you gave, consider the articles which provided inaccurate military predictions. Accountability would mean looking into previous articles written by those authors, to determine whether this inaccuracy was part of a pattern. If it was, then maybe consider having their places taken by people who have a good track record of making accurate military predictions, even if only to a small audience. The principle of accountability should apply to everyone. Professional credentials, college degrees, and so forth should not grant someone immunity from accountability.

 

There's a difference between someone who says, "I'm right because my ego is too big for me to be wrong," versus, "I'm likely to be right, because I've used a very rigorous process."

 

While we as fans should be humble, we shouldn't be so humble that we lose the ability to hold our front office or coaching staff accountable. If they do something incredibly stupid, such as using a soft zone/prevent defense in a playoff game against the Chiefs, they absolutely should be called out on that.

[hondo in seattle]

23 minutes ago, oldmanfan said:

Good discussion with you and Shaw.  I wanted to comment on the value of expertise.  One of the truly dangerous things going on in the country today is the lack of respect for expertise.  We saw this most vividly during Covid on social media.  I  am a scientist with reasonable knowledge of virology and had hairdressers among others tell me on social media they knew more about Covid than me or other trained professionals.  
 

Front offices in the NFL have way more data than folks on TBD, thus a better chance of picking correctly.  More data always is better than less.  There are a few folks on TBD who really dig into as much film and that as they can, and I fund their assessments more worth a read.  But the vast majority base in on maybe one YouTube video, if that.

 

Agreed!

 

While I know a few scientists sometimes let political and personal agendas shade their work, the devaluation of science scares the heck out of me.  This is a little overdramatic, but the present anti-science/expert environment reminds me of China's "Cultural Revolution."   Pretty soon we're going to send scholars, doctors, and scouts to work on Western New York's dairy farms and let amateurs teach college classes, perform surgeries, and run the Bills personnel department!

 

 

[hondo in seattle]

35 minutes ago, Shaw66 said:

This is great.   Thanks.  I agree completely.  I'm glad you clarified your point.   Actually, I suppose it may be that I just missed the point in the first place. 

 

Humility is the key.   I don't score high on the humility range, but at least I get that the gap between what real experts, the people in the business, know and what all the rest of us know pretty wide.  I don't how many times I've said something like, "look, I don't know.  I'm just looking at the decisions that have been made and trying to figure out why they made them."   I don't always assume that Bills management was right; I just assume that they had some pretty good reasons for doing what they did, reasons that go beyond what I can understand.   Reasons based on knowledge I don't have and conclusions driven by years of experience in the field.   

 

So, yeah, I agree.  It's the attitude that says, "I've watched a lot of football and I understand this stuff," that bothers me.  Truth is, you pretty much can't possibly understand what McDermott and Beane understand.  

 

And I think @Rampant Buffalo put it in a very interesting way - knowledge and insight.  The area where I have some sympathy with those who aren't always so humble is the question of whether McDermott is good enough.  Is he stuck in a rut, or is he still in the process of accumulating insight?  And even if he's accumulating insight, how long is going to take for him to accumulate enough?  Of will he ever?  After all, millions of people spent their lives thinking about all sorts of things, but there was only one da Vinci.  It's time for McDermott to paint a Mona Lisa.  

 

I've read enough of your posts over the years to know, (1) you're humbler than you're giving yourself credit for, and (2) you make informed, reasoned arguments.

 

And I agree about judging McD on whether or not he produces a Mona Lisa.  Recent draft picks are hard to evaluate.  The team on the field is not.  We can all see whether the team plays well or not, wins or not.  The only question, I suppose, is how much credit/blame to attribute to Beane and how much to McD.  That makes for a good debate, I think.  

[SoCal Deek]

Covid and football in one topic? The season can’t start soon enough! Or at least the Schedule release, so we can get back to our sweet spot, saying ‘we’ve been screwed again’ with a modicum of NFL science to back it up. 😁

[hondo in seattle]

Just now, SoCal Deek said:

Covid and football in one topic? The season can’t start soon enough! Or at least the Schedule release, so we can get back to our sweet spot, saying ‘we’ve been screwed again’ with a modicum of NFL science to back it up. 😁

 

Yeah, it's the offseason.  

[Shaw66]

4 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

Covid and football in one topic? The season can’t start soon enough! Or at least the Schedule release, so we can get back to our sweet spot, saying ‘we’ve been screwed again’ with a modicum of NFL science to back it up. 😁

When the schedule comes out, we can get back to complaining about how the Bills got screwed!

[finn]

3 hours ago, hondo in seattle said:

 

Finn, I hear you...   

 

I was kind of riffing off of "Debi Downer."   I have a wife and two daughters - one of whom is entering med school, something I certainly didn't have the grades to do.   Each of them is better than me in many ways.  If anyone in my family has monopolized stupidity, it's me.  

Thanks for your gracious reply. Didn't mean to jump on you. I have a daughter, too, certainly brighter and more capable than I am, and I might be oversensitive to signs the world won't give her a fair shake. 

[hondo in seattle]

20 hours ago, Shaw66 said:

Absolutely, both on the COVID side and the NFL side.  Exactly.  

 

Is TikTok a threat to national security?  I have absolutely no idea.   There are very few people, possibly in the tens of thousands but more likely in only the hundreds or thousands who are competent to ask answer that question, but there are tens of millions of people who think they understand.  

 

I think football is much more about coaching than about talent.   I think we'll see it this year - this team is going to be better than most people expect.   Why don't they expect much?  Because the talent is unproven.  Why will the Bills succeed?  Because the coaching IS proven.   I think outsiders who really know football, like the best broadcasters, understand that it's more about coaching, but they don't talk about all that goes into building a successful team.   Why not?  Because it's bad television.  It's much better television, throughout the course of the game, to talk about the stars, to sell the idea that the stars are the reason this team is great and that team is struggling.  It makes for a nice on-air drama.  It's boring if all they do is talk about Xs andOs, and about the work the coaches did to design the offense and understand what defenses are doing to them.  The ins and outs of that stuff gets tedious.   

 

The result is that we - the fans - don't understand all of the detail the coaches and scouts do.   Instead, would fed a more or less nonstop stream of how great these players are, and that leads us to believe that what our eyeballs are seeing is all that there is to understand.  It leads us to trust our eyeballs, so when the Bills draft Coleman we run off to see his highlight reels and read a couple of soundbites and reach a conclusion about him.  

 

There are people in every modern field with enormous expertise, and that expertise makes a big difference.  

 

I personally wish there was more X-and-O stuff during a broadcast.  

 

But, you're right, football tactics doesn't bring in the viewers.  It's the drama of individual players and their performances.  

 

You're also right that casual fans aren't well educated in the X-and-Os.  At least, I'm not.  I've watched Kurt Warner and other former NFL players and coaches do video breakdowns of the Bills.  And I find myself sometimes thinking something like, "Holy Cookie Gilchrist!  I've been watching the Bills for decades and think I know football, yet I didn't notice that when I watched the game live!"   

 

If Warner and I sat down on a couch and watched a Bills game together, we wouldn't have the same experience because he'd be seeing it in so much greater depth.  It would be like I'm watching on an old, 1950's fuzzy b&w tv while he's watching on a giant 3D IMAX screen.  

 

 

18 hours ago, finn said:

Thanks for your gracious reply. Didn't mean to jump on you. I have a daughter, too, certainly brighter and more capable than I am, and I might be oversensitive to signs the world won't give her a fair shake. 

 

You're right for wanting to defend your daughter, and the women of the world.  

 

Edited May 9 by hondo in seattle