The Quality of Our Opinions

[hondo in seattle]

I have ambivalent thought about how smart we are.

 

On the one hand, none of us here is as smart about football as professional coaches and personnel guys.  As much as I respect some of you, and I do, we're just not.  Imagine if you worked 50, 60, 70 hours a week for an NFL club.  You spend all your time talking to players, coaches, and personnel guys, getting their insights.  You study reams of tape.  You're at very practice.  You attend seminars, read books & articles, call up the brightest brains you know and pick them.  As smart as you may be right now as a poster, in that environment you'd be so much smarter.  

 

So I pay close attention when NFL coaches and personnel guys talk.  

 

On the other hand, I was reading the ESPN article by Jeremy Fowler where he has execs rate players.  One exec rated Allen as the best QB in the league.  Some others didn't list him in the top five.  And I found myself not really caring because I'm confident in my own evaluation.  I've watched Josh's every throw.  Some execs in the NFC may have only watched a couple of complete games and some highlights.   

 

Now if Bill Belichick got on TV to talk about Josh, I'd hang on every word because he knows football 1,000 better than I do.  And he's studied Josh at a level I probably can't even imagine and knows Josh better too.  But if one of the execs Fowler talked to was Justin Chabot, for example - the 49ers Assistant Director of College Scouting - why should I value his opinion about Josh?  While I'm sure Mr. Chabot knows football far better than I do, I bet I know Josh Allen better than him.  All of us do.

 

Does anyone care about these rankings?  

[NewEra]

Definitely don’t care about any rankings 

[The Frankish Reich]

Abstract rankings mean nothing.

I go with what economists would call revealed preferences.

If Josh Allen plays out his contract, how much is he offered in a bidding war? Is it more or less than Kirk Cousins? Than Lamar Jackson?

[DrDawkinstein]

The "rankings" and that article is just offseason fodder. ESPN has milked Fowlers article for 2 days of morning talk, and will likely talk about it tomorrow too. It's all just subjective BS.

 

From what I've seen, Josh ended up #3 on the list in the article, but was #2 on a lot of the talking heads' lists.

 

Either way, I'm just thrilled that the Bills have a QB in that top 3-5 discussion.

 

With regards to the quality of our opinions vs the professionals, I was very interested in watching the Giants Offseason Hard Knocks to see the real discussions that go on while building a team. Turns out, they are VERY similar to discussions here and that I have with my buddies. The only difference is they have more access to the players. Not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse (that I'm not making $1M/year for my TBD posting).

[boyst]

i 100% disagree that none of us are as smart as those in professional football.

[mushypeaches]

What I will say is that sometimes these professionals that spend countless hours on player evaluations can become too close and too wired into the little details.

They often can miss the big picture or common sense stuff that to fans is much more apparent

 

I like to refer to it as "boiling the ocean" - yes it's a corporate buzzword, but I think that a lot of teams are guilty of it, to some degree.

[TBBills Fan]

13 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

The "rankings" and that article is just offseason fodder. ESPN has milked Fowlers article for 2 days of morning talk, and will likely talk about it tomorrow too. It's all just subjective BS.

 

From what I've seen, Josh ended up #3 on the list in the article, but was #2 on a lot of the talking heads' lists.

 

Either way, I'm just thrilled that the Bills have a QB in that top 3-5 discussion.

 

With regards to the quality of our opinions vs the professionals, I was very interested in watching the Giants Offseason Hard Knocks to see the real discussions that go on while building a team. Turns out, they are VERY similar to discussions here and that I have with my buddies. The only difference is they have more access to the players. Not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse (that I'm not making $1M/year for my TBD posting).

I've noticed that with herd knocks as well

[FireChans]

21 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

I have ambivalent thought about how smart we are.

 

On the one hand, none of us here is as smart about football as professional coaches and personnel guys.  As much as I respect some of you, and I do, we're just not.  Imagine if you worked 50, 60, 70 hours a week for an NFL club.  You spend all your time talking to players, coaches, and personnel guys, getting their insights.  You study reams of tape.  You're at very practice.  You attend seminars, read books & articles, call up the brightest brains you know and pick them.  As smart as you may be right now as a poster, in that environment you'd be so much smarter.  

 

So I pay close attention when NFL coaches and personnel guys talk.  

 

On the other hand, I was reading the ESPN article by Jeremy Fowler where he has execs rate players.  One exec rated Allen as the best QB in the league.  Some others didn't list him in the top five.  And I found myself not really caring because I'm confident in my own evaluation.  I've watched Josh's every throw.  Some execs in the NFC may have only watched a couple of complete games and some highlights.   

 

Now if Bill Belichick got on TV to talk about Josh, I'd hang on every word because he knows football 1,000 better than I do.  And he's studied Josh at a level I probably can't even imagine and knows Josh better too.  But if one of the execs Fowler talked to was Justin Chabot, for example - the 49ers Assistant Director of College Scouting - why should I value his opinion about Josh?  While I'm sure Mr. Chabot knows football far better than I do, I bet I know Josh Allen better than him.  All of us do.

 

Does anyone care about these rankings?  

You may know more about Josh Allen than a random NFL exec, but do you know more about the NFL QB’s at large? 

 

Probably not.

 

I don’t care about the rankings really because they are meaningless. But if you are gonna have any objective opinion on QB rankings across the league, watching every throw of Josh Allen, then watching highlights or redzone of the rest of the NFL is going to completely ruin that.

 

It’s fine to have Bills blinders on to consume your entertainment. But you gotta recognize that.

14 minutes ago, DrDawkinstein said:

With regards to the quality of our opinions vs the professionals, I was very interested in watching the Giants Offseason Hard Knocks to see the real discussions that go on while building a team. Turns out, they are VERY similar to discussions here and that I have with my buddies. The only difference is they have more access to the players. Not sure if that makes me feel better, or worse (that I'm not making $1M/year for my TBD posting).

Daboll pulling up PFR rankings on his phone was legendary television for me.

Edited July 16 by FireChans

[DrDawkinstein]

4 minutes ago, boyst said:

i 100% disagree that none of us are as smart as those in professional football.

 

We could absolutely put together a decent FO from some posters here.

 

Not trying to be arrogant or naive. But guys like Beane and Schoen were just regular dudes who worked their way up in a company.

[Don Otreply]

12 minutes ago, The Frankish Reich said:

Abstract rankings mean nothing.

I go with what economists would call revealed preferences.

If Josh Allen plays out his contract, how much is he offered in a bidding war? Is it more or less than Kirk Cousins? Than Lamar Jackson?

This right here ^^^
 

teams would pull up the brinks trucks to get Josh, and be willing to pay noticeable more than Jackson or Cousins, and they would do it without much additional thought, 

[Philly McButterpants]

I stopped reading where it said that, "Most agree that Allen should have played in at least one Conference title game."  Ummmmmm...

[Ed_Formerly_of_Roch]

21 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

I have ambivalent thought about how smart we are.

 

On the one hand, none of us here is as smart about football as professional coaches and personnel guys.  As much as I respect some of you, and I do, we're just not.  Imagine if you worked 50, 60, 70 hours a week for an NFL club.  You spend all your time talking to players, coaches, and personnel guys, getting their insights.  You study reams of tape.  You're at very practice.  You attend seminars, read books & articles, call up the brightest brains you know and pick them.  As smart as you may be right now as a poster, in that environment you'd be so much smarter. 

 

While many here will likely disagree with my opinion, but I would also add to your list, for the most part local beat reporters.  They have direct access to the players, coaches, and front office that none of us do.  They also likely are privy to many off the record conversations. A reporter may talk to Beane off the record and he'll state "we're considering doing X"  It may then be reported in an off hand way by the reporter "I wouldn't be surprised if X happens" and everyone here jumps on the reporter as what does he know, especially if they don't like the message.  He's not going to quote Beane, but he does have inside information on this.

 

National writers with a few exceptions, they more are often reading tea leaves form afar.

[Shaw66]

Well, I look at and listen to some rankings.   I find I'm most interested in those confidential polls of GMs, because I think collectively the GMs know the subject better than anyone else.  I also listen to the anecdotal evidence from other players.   I think PFF is a joke, but I still feel good when they rank a Bills player high!

 

Posters here?   In my professional experience, I came to realize that there are some people who are just really smart, and if they put their minds to it, they can form really good opinions about subjects where they aren't experts.  There aren't many people like that, but there are a few.  And there are some people here like that, people who even though they haven't worked in the NFL for 20 years, or coached D-I for 20 years, still somehow are right about things most of the time.  The rest of us?  We just have opinions that seem correct to us, but in reality, we aren't right often enough to be experts. 

 

Having said that, I'll also say this.  I read somewhere that if you take a big glass jar, a jar that holds maybe two gallons or five gallons, fill it with gumballs, and then ask a thousand people to guess how many gumballs are in the jar, you'll get a guess or two or three that are very accurate, and you'll get some guesses that ridiculously off, and you'll get a lot of guesses in between the accurate ones and the hopelessly wrong ones.   However, it turns that if you take the average of all of the guesses, that average comes out close to the right number pretty consistently.  It means that the collective knowledge of human beings is quite good, even though the knowledge of any one individual is spotty.  Therefore, I'd guess that the collective knowledge of all of us posting here is pretty much on the money.

 

Therefore, there are some things we can be sure of:

 

The Dolphins suck.

Keon is slow. 

Diggs used to be great, but now he's a jerk.

It's always worth taking a peak at Rachel Bush images.

Ralph was cheap. 

It was a forward pass.

The Dolphins suck.  

[oldmanfan]

The key is that opinions are just that: opinions.  Not facts.  We are all guilty at times of substituting one for the other, some more times than others.

 

This topic also brings up what I see as a real problem with society at large now days:  a lack of recognition of expertise.  With the advent of social media everyone thinks they're an expert on any given topic you name, while those who truly are experts in their field are told they don't know anything.  I have run IVF labs for decades and some woman insisted on arguing with me on social media that she knows more about reproductive biology than me.  Her claim of expertise was apparently that she was a hairdresser.  

 

So the GMs in the league?  All have expertise far greater than I have or will ever have so I take what they say seriously.  Talking heads who get paid just to throw an opinion out that may or may not be educated?  Not so much.

[The Frankish Reich]

5 minutes ago, Don Otreply said:

This right here ^^^
 

teams would pull up the brinks trucks to get Josh, and be willing to pay noticeable more than Jackson or Cousins, and they would do it without much additional thought, 

Let's say some court voids all NFL player contracts tomorrow. Everyone is an unrestricted free agent. My guess, biggest contract to lowest (this of course takes age into account):

 

1. Mahomes (clear first)

2. Allen (fairly close second)

[big gap]

3 - 6: some relatively close ordering of Burrow, Herbert, Stroud, Jackson

[another big gap]

7-8: Goff/Prescott or Prescott/Goff

[Logic]

Two things that are always helpful to keep in mind:

1.) Controversy creates clicks and viewership. Engagement farming is a real thing. Networks and analysts and Twitter personas KNOW that they'll get a whole bunch of engagement when they say something controversial or rile up a passionate fan base, and engagement = money. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the football watching audience don't want to learn about the intricacies of bunch formations, trail technique, or the 3-3-5 defense. They want to get in heated social media debates about which QB has the most aura. It's dumb, but it's the reality of sports viewership.

2.) Many of these analysts watch SOME of ALL the teams and players, but almost none of them watch ALL of a team or player. In other words, most of the analysts or anonymous league sources or whomever have watched Josh Allen play in a few national games, have seen a few highlights, but they don't watch him as often as Bills fans do. It is absolutely possible, by virtue of watching the Bills and Josh Allen much more often and studying the team and player with a much finer toothed comb, that some Bills fans are more knowledgeable about the team and its players than national analysts, who only take a cursory look at all 32 teams and dozens of players.

There are exceptions to both rules. 

Some analysts genuinely want to educate viewers, and they make well-informed and erudite observations and statements. Some analysts DO watch lots of tape and evaluate players in depth. But for every Dan Orlovsky or Kurt Warner, there are 100 Nick Wrights and Skip Baylesses. 

Never forget that sports is entertainment, and that just because a guy has a microphone, it doesn't mean he knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
 

[Steve Billieve]

It's bad on purpose to make you click.

[DrDawkinstein]

 

Orlovsky with some good stuff here.

[Einstein]

42 minutes ago, hondo in seattle said:

 

On the one hand, none of us here is as smart about football as professional coaches and personnel guys. 

 

This tells me that you have not been in the company of professional coaches and executives.

 

It is a common misconception and one that extends to the c-suite.

 

People often assume: “X person made it to Y level, they must be brilliant”.

 

That is often NOT the case. Much of it is luck, mixed with opportunity, mixed with timing, mixed with attitude, mixed with who you know, mixed with several other factors as well.

[hondo in seattle]

44 minutes ago, mushypeaches said:

What I will say is that sometimes these professionals that spend countless hours on player evaluations can become too close and too wired into the little details.

They often can miss the big picture or common sense stuff that to fans is much more apparent

 

I like to refer to it as "boiling the ocean" - yes it's a corporate buzzword, but I think that a lot of teams are guilty of it, to some degree.

 

I agree but with the emphasis on "sometimes."   Normally, I think they're smarter than that.  But I remember a lot of talk from OBD about EJ Manuel's big hands, as if that was meaningful.