KATD League Issue

[dilbert719]

I keep coming back to the same issue with the re-draft, GU. If we go that route, we're not going to have 16 teams. We may not even get to 12, since a lot of people will be put off by the thought that, despite all the effort put in so far, we got absolutely nowhere, and did nothing but a trial run (and the draft ran us just shy of two months. That puts us to April before we actually get to doing anything that would be considered productive.)

If you want to concurrently run another draft, that'd be cool with me, and I'd be among the first to sign up, but I have absolutely no interest in scrapping everything we've done with this league so far.

[GiveUp2122]

I think we'd be able to get 16 teams again...maybe not the same 16 but 16 none the less

[Goose31]

I understand your concern, PatsFan (Go Pats, btw! ... words I cannot believe are coming out of my mouth. Feels icky saying it. But, Go Pats.)

And I apprecaite that you dont want to ruin anything we've done so far. However, it would certanily not change anything that has happened so far. And I'm 99.5% sure it would not mess with anything going forward with the exception of having an effect on the player we adjust. I can say this because when I played a season on a previous version of this game 3 years ago, I was mid-season and found out that I had entered a players data wrong. Typed an extra digit in a category or something that was causing that player to dominate. It was like 55 sacks for a linebacker instead of the correct 5. Anyway, I went in and adjusted his numbers mid-season and it had the desired effect. He played more like he should the rest of the year and it didnt effect his stats he had already accumulated. So, based on that experince, I think this would work. Eventhough I would need to change 90% of the players, so its on a much greater scale.

Ok, let me give you a quick example for each position. I'll give you some of the biggest offenders along with some unchanged. And keep in mind that I havent checked to see what number of games will allow what Durability rating. So, these might not be 100% accurate. What I'm doing is saying, for example, Sayers is a 3 Durability. So, .30 times 16 games = 4.8 games. So, I'm taking Sayers stats over 4.8 games as opposed to 16.
QB - See Aaron Rodgers example from the first page of this thread. QBs unaffected - Unitas, Good Manning, Marino, Elway, Favre, Tarkenton, and others.
HB/FB - Sayers (3 rating) goes from 233-1166-5.0-9 to 70-350-5.0-3. His 9 Breakaway and 3 Short ratings are unchanged. HBs unaffected - Emmitt, M Allen and others.
WR - Sterling (5 rating) goes from 85-1162-13.6-9 to 43-581-13.5-5. Catch and RAC ratings of 7 each are unaffected. Many WRs unaffected like Rice, Moss, Owens, Largent and 16 others.
TE - Winslow (5 rating) goes from 81-1008-12.5-7 to 41-504-12.3-4. His blocking (4/4) and receiving (9/7) ratings unchanged. Unaffected are Gonzalez, Sharpe, J Smith and others.
OL - Boselli (4 rating) only sees his games played reduced from 16 to 7. His ratings of 7.5 overall are unchaged.
DL - J Allen (5 rating) would only see a drop in sacks from 12 to 6. His ratings of 6 overall (3 Run 8 Rush) unchanged. Unchanged are Olsen, Page, Randle, Reggie, Bruce and many others.
LB - Ware (4 rating) Sees his sacks fall from 13 to 5, but all ratings unchanged. Uncahged are Ray Ray, Hendricks, Seau and many others.
DB - Easley (4 rating) sees his INTs drop from 6 to 2 and his sacks from 2 to 1. His ratings of 8 overall (2 Run 6 Pass 2 Rush) unchagned. Unchanged are R Woodson, Blount, Green, Krause, Dawkins and many others.

I dont think their performance on the field will be effected because their per game stats remain unchanged. They (those with lower Durabilities) are just playing fewer games. They might need to come out of games for a little bit, and will be more susceptible to injury. I believe that will be the only effect. And that's the intent. And if we did this, if we see problems arising from this, we can always change it back.

[MarkItAZero!]

Sounds good to me Goose. Thank you as always for going well in depth to explain your positions.

Anyway, with that being said, what is the timetable to getting games running again for week 5? Have you had time to adjust the ratings back to what we all drafted upon?

[Goose31]

Goose, if you need someone to do the leg work on the potential games spreadsheet, shoot it my way. Once the spreadsheet's set up, I'll take a look and see what I can come up with. Let me know what kind of deadline I'm working with, and I'll do my best.

One thing that's tricky, though: do we penalize a player who spent multiple years as a backup, for not playing in games he technically could have, but didn't due to a coach's decision? That's not a measure of his durability, but rather a reflection on his depth chart position. I'm thinking here especially of Steve Young, who certainly could have played 16 game seasons from 1987-1991, if it weren't for the slight complication of some shlub named Montana racking up 2 MVP trophies during that time period.

Good point, Dilbert. I did think of that, and it a perfect world, we would be able to account for that, but I'm not sure we always will be. I did take this into consideration in a few cases in our current stats. As one example, Josh Cribbs started out his career as strictly a return man. Then they started getting him involved in the offense as a receiver and wildcat QB. When I calculated his receiving stats I only used the years he played receiver. This game him fewer career games played (in that category alone, he still got full credit for his games on his Durability rating) which increased his number of catches and yards per season. It was a small increase but accurately portrayed what you could expect from him when being used as a receiver.

I think (where possible) we should override the games played for the games in which the coach allowed him to play. Something to discuss further.

Thanks for the offer here, too. I will probably take you up on in, but we dont need to do it now. Let's see if owner want to do that and if so, we can get started on it before the end of this season, to make sure you get plenty of time to do it.

[Goose31]

Goose:

What are you planning to do for the rest of the season based off the comments? I liked what you wrote in your response to my last post, but that is incredibly time consuming and would definitely have to wait until the off-season, which will give us plenty of time.

Are you planning on just leaving everyone at a 10 for the remainder of the year or have you begun to adjust the durability back to what we drafted on?

Either way, i'm fine.

Well, I think we need to adjust, as those ratings were supposed to be included in the game all along and were not. But I'm not going to do that until we get a little more feedback from other owners. So far I'm showing you voting to adjust, me voting to adjust, GiveUp and YK voting not to adjust (although I am urging YK to reconsider because adjusting would align with his earlier point to play it out this year as the rules were initially stated.) And then PatsFan and Fem on the fence. Dilbert deferred to my opinion, so I'm putting him in the adjust category unless he tells me different.

[Goose31]

I really don't see why we should care about longevity at all.

Well, I think Longevity is much more important to an All-Time Draft league than Durability. Take a guy like my player Jim Brown. He never missed a game. Played in 118 of a possible 118 regular season games over 9 years (with 9 Pro Bowls and 8 All-Pros, by the way, pretty amazing. Has to be the highest number of All-Pros vs Years Played in NFL hitory by at least 20% but I digress.)

His numbers are amazing, no doubt. But he walked away from the game early. He didnt have that typical decline in his later years that a bunch of other players had. And how do you compare a guy like Brown to a player like Emmitt who had nearly double the carries over their careers. Even if his production went down slightly after his prime, he was still an asset to his team. It's easy to see that decline from a running back, but how about a lineman? How would you grade Bruce Matthews against Mike Munchak? Both are in the Hall. Both were All-Decade players. But Matthews played in 296 games to Munchak's 159. Again, almost double. We have to have a way to account for longevity, meaning give credit to those who played a long time. If we were re-simming the 2010 season, longevity wouldnt matter, durability would. But when we are playing with guys from different eras and giving them one grade to cover their entire careers, longevity is important. In my opinion, at least.
I think the players with shorter car

[PatsFan2003]

I keep coming back to the same issue with the re-draft, GU. If we go that route, we're not going to have 16 teams. We may not even get to 12, since a lot of people will be put off by the thought that, despite all the effort put in so far, we got absolutely nowhere, and did nothing but a trial run (and the draft ran us just shy of two months. That puts us to April before we actually get to doing anything that would be considered productive.)

If you want to concurrently run another draft, that'd be cool with me, and I'd be among the first to sign up, but I have absolutely no interest in scrapping everything we've done with this league so far.

Yes, absolutely. I think of that as insane. Some might like the drafting process but the sim with warts and all is where it really gets interesting to me.

[Goose31]

HOLD THE PHONES!

I might have a solution that would please everyone. (I'm a bit of a dumbazz for not thinking of this first!)

So, I started doing some research on how many games it will take to be able to reduce a players Durability rating. I started with my own guy Aaron Rodgers. I made sure I copied down all his details (both real and season data) before I started tinkering. Anyway, I reduced his games played without adjusting his stats yet and then reduced his Durability and then saved. And this time it accepted it.

Sooo, my question is this: Do we want to try doing this, playing one week's worth of games, and seeing if this fixes the problem? I would vote yes. If this works, it shouldnt ruffle any feathers. However ...

The potential downside: By lowering the number of games these guys have played, yet keeping the stats the same, it essentially inflates the per game stats. For example, DeMarcus Ware shows 13 sacks per season (formerly 16 games.) With him having a Durability rating of 4, his games played will need to be reduced to a 7. That means his stats are showing he is now getting 1.875 sacks per game, or the equivalent of almost 30 over a 16 game season.

So, honestly, I dont know how this would affect the game results. My guess is that Ratings are more important to the outcome of a play (and then ultimately the game) than the Stats are. But that's just my theory, I dont know if that is the case or not. So, this is just an idea at this point. Do we want to make this slight change to the number of games played only and see if this fixes our problem? I guess I could always change two of the team and play an exhibition game between the two to test it first. I'm willing to do that, play one exhibition game just to test this option. But one test game is not a lot of data to go on. Just keep in mind that if it seems to work and we start playing another week and it doesnt work, I'm going to play out that entire week before we make any more adjustments.

Ok, so I guess the new question is this: Should I make this change for two teams, run an exhibition game to test it out, and then we analyze the results together?

I'm going to propose we run the sim game between BHamita and Femurov as those two teams have many of the offending players.

[PatsFan2003]

I understand your concern, PatsFan (Go Pats, btw! ... words I cannot believe are coming out of my mouth. Feels icky saying it. But, Go Pats.)

And I apprecaite that you dont want to ruin anything we've done so far. However, it would certanily not change anything that has happened so far. And I'm 99.5% sure it would not mess with anything going forward with the exception of having an effect on the player we adjust. I can say this because when I played a season on a previous version of this game 3 years ago, I was mid-season and found out that I had entered a players data wrong. Typed an extra digit in a category or something that was causing that player to dominate. It was like 55 sacks for a linebacker instead of the correct 5. Anyway, I went in and adjusted his numbers mid-season and it had the desired effect. He played more like he should the rest of the year and it didnt effect his stats he had already accumulated. So, based on that experince, I think this would work. Eventhough I would need to change 90% of the players, so its on a much greater scale.

Ok, let me give you a quick example for each position. I'll give you some of the biggest offenders along with some unchanged. And keep in mind that I havent checked to see what number of games will allow what Durability rating. So, these might not be 100% accurate. What I'm doing is saying, for example, Sayers is a 3 Durability. So, .30 times 16 games = 4.8 games. So, I'm taking Sayers stats over 4.8 games as opposed to 16.
QB - See Aaron Rodgers example from the first page of this thread. QBs unaffected - Unitas, Good Manning, Marino, Elway, Favre, Tarkenton, and others.
HB/FB - Sayers (3 rating) goes from 233-1166-5.0-9 to 70-350-5.0-3. His 9 Breakaway and 3 Short ratings are unchanged. HBs unaffected - Emmitt, M Allen and others.
WR - Sterling (5 rating) goes from 85-1162-13.6-9 to 43-581-13.5-5. Catch and RAC ratings of 7 each are unaffected. Many WRs unaffected like Rice, Moss, Owens, Largent and 16 others.
TE - Winslow (5 rating) goes from 81-1008-12.5-7 to 41-504-12.3-4. His blocking (4/4) and receiving (9/7) ratings unchanged. Unaffected are Gonzalez, Sharpe, J Smith and others.
OL - Boselli (4 rating) only sees his games played reduced from 16 to 7. His ratings of 7.5 overall are unchaged.
DL - J Allen (5 rating) would only see a drop in sacks from 12 to 6. His ratings of 6 overall (3 Run 8 Rush) unchanged. Unchanged are Olsen, Page, Randle, Reggie, Bruce and many others.
LB - Ware (4 rating) Sees his sacks fall from 13 to 5, but all ratings unchanged. Uncahged are Ray Ray, Hendricks, Seau and many others.
DB - Easley (4 rating) sees his INTs drop from 6 to 2 and his sacks from 2 to 1. His ratings of 8 overall (2 Run 6 Pass 2 Rush) unchagned. Unchanged are R Woodson, Blount, Green, Krause, Dawkins and many others.

I dont think their performance on the field will be effected because their per game stats remain unchanged. They (those with lower Durabilities) are just playing fewer games. They might need to come out of games for a little bit, and will be more susceptible to injury. I believe that will be the only effect. And that's the intent. And if we did this, if we see problems arising from this, we can always change it back.

Ok. Boy it's too bad you can't make a copy of the data and run some games with that. I think it might be worth a shot to see what happens.
I'd say the people with the biggest stake in this are those with the players in question.

What say you?

[GiveUp2122]

Goose....you can mark me down for not caring if we change the ratings or not...I was only for it b/c I think a re-draft really is neccasary with everything we have learned post draft (qb audible rating, qb avoid sack rating, how longevity will work, how durability must be calculated, CB's getting the tackles instead of LB's, ect)

[GiveUp2122]

HOLD THE PHONES!

I might have a solution that would please everyone. (I'm a bit of a dumbazz for not thinking of this first!)

So, I started doing some research on how many games it will take to be able to reduce a players Durability rating. I started with my own guy Aaron Rodgers. I made sure I copied down all his details (both real and season data) before I started tinkering. Anyway, I reduced his games played without adjusting his stats yet and then reduced his Durability and then saved. And this time it accepted it.

Sooo, my question is this: Do we want to try doing this, playing one week's worth of games, and seeing if this fixes the problem? I would vote yes. If this works, it shouldnt ruffle any feathers. However ...

The potential downside: By lowering the number of games these guys have played, yet keeping the stats the same, it essentially inflates the per game stats. For example, DeMarcus Ware shows 13 sacks per season (formerly 16 games.) With him having a Durability rating of 4, his games played will need to be reduced to a 7. That means his stats are showing he is now getting 1.875 sacks per game, or the equivalent of almost 30 over a 16 game season.

So, honestly, I dont know how this would affect the game results. My guess is that Ratings are more important to the outcome of a play (and then ultimately the game) than the Stats are. But that's just my theory, I dont know if that is the case or not. So, this is just an idea at this point. Do we want to make this slight change to the number of games played only and see if this fixes our problem? I guess I could always change two of the team and play an exhibition game between the two to test it first. I'm willing to do that, play one exhibition game just to test this option. But one test game is not a lot of data to go on. Just keep in mind that if it seems to work and we start playing another week and it doesnt work, I'm going to play out that entire week before we make any more adjustments.

Ok, so I guess the new question is this: Should I make this change for two teams, run an exhibition game to test it out, and then we analyze the results together?

I'm going to propose we run the sim game between BHamita and Femurov as those two teams have many of the offending players.

Go for it Goose....1 SEC sim it

[dilbert719]

Honestly, I think it might be a better test to run a sim game between a team with many offending players and a team with few, or something like BHam's team modified vs. BHam's team unmodified (which is probably not possible) so we have a control group to look at, but it's always preferable to have some data over none, so sign me up for a test sim.

[Augustus]

Well, I think Longevity is much more important to an All-Time Draft league than Durability. Take a guy like my player Jim Brown. He never missed a game. Played in 118 of a possible 118 regular season games over 9 years (with 9 Pro Bowls and 8 All-Pros, by the way, pretty amazing. Has to be the highest number of All-Pros vs Years Played in NFL hitory by at least 20% but I digress.)

His numbers are amazing, no doubt. But he walked away from the game early. He didnt have that typical decline in his later years that a bunch of other players had.

Yeah, I see that -- particularly in the case of RBs and a couple of other positions. It seems a bit unfair that my starting QB takes the hit though, when the four years he missed were the first four after being drafted, due to being required to serve in the US navy after winning the Heisman trophy for Annapolis.

[Augustus]

Honestly, I think it might be a better test to run a sim game between a team with many offending players and a team with few, or something like BHam's team modified vs. BHam's team unmodified (which is probably not possible) so we have a control group to look at, but it's always preferable to have some data over none, so sign me up for a test sim.

Do an exhibition game after modification, duplicating a match-up that has already occurred. That way, we can compare the "before" and "after".