birdog1960

it's not surprising you all are apologists for one of the worst run professional sports organizations in recent history. you lack the ability to use reasoning and calculated analysis to make judgements devoid of favoritism or wishful thinking. but carry on. this type of support for failure must be very satisfying.

statistics don't hold for every example. they hold for the majority of examples. they represent what is most likely to happen not always what does happen. it's really a pretty simple concept. not rocket surgery.

did you even read the buffalo news article on analytics? what you describe follows the core tenets almost exactly: later rounds hold more value (more picks mena abetter chance at finding a diamond) trading up is almost always a mistake (teams just aren't that good at choosing future stars especially if they are injured to start with) the power running game is statistically a losing philosophy. passing is where you win. (pick lots of qb's) the opposite of seat of the pants. this all makes statistical sense. the more qb's you draft, the better chance of finding a brady.

outcomes follow methodology and ability. the bills outcomes suck, consistently. gronk was taken by a team that appears to follow pretty conventional thinking, acts rationally ( often coldheartedly) without emotion, rarely trades up, rarely makes huge draft gambles and has drafted nearly 2x as many qb's in the last 20 years than the bills. their methodology strikes me as more in line with the philosophy of analytics and much less seat of the pants. their outcomes are the best in the league overall. I don't think it is coincidence. it's a mindset that the bills still don't appear to share.

this is hilarious. the common theme is obviously that they were wrong in both cases. it's almost like they try to be wrong. that's the common denominator in bills drafts year after year. they are mostly wrong.

in the sense that they generally ignore conventional wisdom, take big risks and pretend they no better than the pack, yes, i'm serious. it's been a recurring, relatively constant theme.

perhaps jack should have gone even later. interesting that another desperate, perennial losing nfl franchise was the first to pull the trigger.

agreed, over the long term. that's what statistical analysis is all about. I think the bills have a large enough sample size to measure the outcomes and draw conclusions about the drafting methodology that appears little changed over the last several decades.

most, if not all jobs involving evaluation and judgment are inexact. same in my job and likely yours. that makes the spectrum of quality levels attained in that evaluation process even more obvious and important. the outcomes almost always speak for themselves.

yes. because the bills have been right so many times recently when everyone else in the league was wrong... it's germane in that whaley and the bills repeatedly act like the cat that ate the canary only to end up looking like the cat that took a dump on the carpet. hmmm, top 15 went at 19. jack, top 5 went at 36. a knee that can be played on short term is worth 30 spots. a shoulder that can't 4. the average nfl career is 3.3 years i believe. these numbers are germane. make perfect sense. once again seat- of - the pants decision making is not a common trait among successful nfl franchises. it's a ubiquitous trait of desperate, perennial losing franchises that can't seem to recognize the fault.

so for you, lawson's injury had no effect on his draft position, nor, in retrospect should it have. at least you are honest. would you concede that would be a solid minority opinion among nfl gm's and scouts? this is exactly the magical thinking that leads the bills to go against the grain so often with predictably bad results. this one might be different. even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.

clear as mud. jack was a projected top 5. he fell 30+ spots by the nfl market, real life calculus. yet your calculus results in him being taken almost 20 spots earlier. so my conclusion is that you, like the bills and your average loser stock picker, believes he has some magical ability to beat the pack in such decisions. what other conclusion can be drawn? enlighten me... while lawson's injury may represent less long term risk, it certainly represented some short term risk which was likely underestimated by the bills. the fulfillment of that risk has some significant negative draft value adjustment associated with it. do you not even concede that?

are you retracting this comment then? does that not imply that you believe you knew better than at least 17 nfl teams and their staffs? here's a metric: no other team took him before buffalo did at 19. i'm not an analyst. what should a torn labrum and missing all of training camp and several months of a rookies first year be valued at? don't know but it's clearly worth something. there's probably several algorithms that quantitate that risk. I doubt the bills used any algorithm. if you disagree and believe they did, tell me why. what Brandon recently said doesn't support an analytic approach to the question.

you made the comparison. in your infinite wisdom, you would have taken jack at 19 instead of 36 where the market (and very likely a good number of analysts) ultimately valued him. serious injury or not, you clearly felt the benefits outweighed the risks. it's very closely analogous to the calculus involved in valuing this injured player that the bills actually did pick.

"If you find it crippling to take a well researched risk in a business that risks are part of the environment then it is recommended that you find another field of endeavor. " it's not about being "crippled" by risk. it's about being smart and playing the odds. it's about the meaning of "well researched". as high an upside as miles jack had in most teams eyes, his known injury dropped his draft number greatly. yet the bills felt differently about this pick. I suspect it relates to the analytics thread that should, as an issue of importance to this organizations success, be at the top of the forum. interestingly it has dropped from sight. analytics be damned. gut feelings and instincts by perpetual losers are the path to success.

there are good analysts and bad analysts. just as there are good mutual funds and bad ones. the fact that some suck doesn't make the entire model invalid.

this. but it takes innovators and people with conviction to accept new paradigms. eventually the new becomes standard and the laggards are miles behind while losing to all the innovators in the meantime. from the article, it seems the paradigm shift has occurred in the majority of the league i think the investment analogy is especially apt. the bills appear to be trying to time the market. make the big score by gambling. but in that model you need to time the market top AND the market bottom. any analyst worth his salt will tell you that's very unlikely. yet like losing investors that play this high risk game, the bills continue to believe that they are special. they can beat the odds. they can't. it's called statistics.

i don't think it says that at all he Carolina Panthers ranked first in rushing attempts, and Cam Newton ran most among quarterbacks. The Panthers went to the Super Bowl, but Football Outsiders ranked them the NFL’s second-most efficient defense. The Bills’ defense ranked 24th. The first Football Outsiders essay, written by founder Aaron Schatz in July 2003, refuted the long-held belief an offense must establish the run: “There is no correlation whatsoever between giving your running backs a lot of carries early in the game and winning the game,” Schatz wrote. Victorious teams in today’s NFL generally end a game with solid rushing stats because they were winning and working on the clock. i think it says carolina won in a large part because of a good defense that let them run out the clock often. the rules buffalo is accused of breaking are apparently core, established principles among respected analysts. will they sometimes be wrong? of course, but more often than not they'll be right. the bills repeatedly seem to think they're better at guessing when the core principles will be wrong than anyone else. and they have been repeatedly wrong. from brandon's comments, they are no closer to smartening up.

this. the difference between this and the other rookie injury examples is that this was foreseeable. many teams not called the bills appear to have predicted a problem.

you all play pretty loose with numbers. he has a 4 year contract. coming back in Nov is more like 8 games which constitutes 1/8 of his contracted time before he plays his first down. that's common sense.

what would constitute the end of the world in NFL terms? 25 years with no playoffs? this pick moves one step closer to that. not a sure thing but neither is lawson after surgery (and presumably we've now accepted "next year" as his time to start contributing).

careful. you may well be childishly vilified here. but somehow i'm betting that doesn't overly concern you. it indeed looks really bad to anyone without blinders on.

no. the problem is more that so many fail to see that racism is institutionalized in many states or they do see it and fail to condemn it: In fact, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys presented a statewide training course in 1995 that included a handout called "Batson justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives," listing 10 kinds of "justifications" that can be offered as a race-neutral explanation for a juror strike. <img alt="When courts pretend it&amp;#39;s not about race" class="media__image" src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/120525034351-ifill-racial-dignity-story-top.jpg"> The Texas District and County Attorneys Association distributed a similar list, called "Batson Basics" at its Prosecutor Trial Skills Course in 2004. Of course, a prosecutor is supposed to give the actual reason for striking the potential juror, not one prepared by someone else long before trial. The lists provide a rare public glimpse of a common practice: Strike the black potential jurors because of race and later assert a plausible, race-neutral reason for the strikes. Some prosecutors give a "laundry list" of reasons in the hope that one of an unusually large number of reasons for the strike will be found to be a valid reason for striking the juror euphemisms and nuanced words are minor problems compared with the very real problem of pervasive racism.. trump's success is a testament to that fact.

interestingly, the supreme court ruled on ethnicity in juries and judged that excluding anyone because of this was unconstitutional. it would logically follow for judges. http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/23/opinions/supreme-court-black-jurors-bright/index.html it was certainly racist in the case the supremes looked at. also lost in the shuffle is the implied threat to this particular judge by trump should he win in November. the analyst that I heard said that this was unprecedented in a party nominee.

exactly. but the bills propaganda team here gets there panties in a wad when you call them out on it.