Week 2 Game Thread

Morgan's Magic Snowplow

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Jul 2, 2006
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I think you're letting the Browns off too easy. I suspect people in NFL circles were pretty sure the Rams wanted Goff by the time the Browns dealt the pick, so the trade was fundamentally a bet against Wentz -- if he becomes a league-average QB by his second or third year, his value will swamp the value of the picks the Browns got in return, unless they fall ass-backwards into the next JJ Watt or something.

People talk about the Rams fleecing Washington in the RG3 trade, but the Rams are still waiting for their first playoff appearance since that trade, because their QB situation is a train wreck. We'd be looking back at that trade as a disaster for the Rams if RG3's career had played out to even the 30th percentile of the range of expectations at the time he was drafted.
People will give the Browns all sorts of grief if Wentz becomes an all pro but the grief will be misplaced.

Results-oriented evaluation of these trades is fundamentally wrong. It is the equivalent in poker of saying that somebody was dumb for folding against a massive bet when drawing to an inside straight because they would have gotten their miracle card and won the hand. Or looking at a roulette ball that landed on black and saying somebody was wrong not to bet all their savings on black.

Decisions need to be evaluated based on the information you had at the time the decision was made. If somebody wants to argue that Wentz was such a great prospect based on the available tape and other information that the Browns should have turned down the Eagles offer, that's a fair argument. But what Wentz did later should be irrelevant.
 

Royal Reader

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Sep 21, 2005
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People will give the Browns all sorts of grief if Wentz becomes an all pro but the grief will be misplaced.

Results-oriented evaluation of these trades is fundamentally wrong. It is the equivalent in poker of saying that somebody was dumb for folding against a massive bet when drawing to an inside straight because they would have gotten their miracle card and won the hand. Or looking at a roulette ball that landed on black and saying somebody was wrong not to bet all their savings on black.

Decisions need to be evaluated based on the information you had at the time the decision was made. If somebody wants to argue that Wentz was such a great prospect based on the available tape and other information that the Browns should have turned down the Eagles offer, that's a fair argument. But what Wentz did later should be irrelevant.
What Wentz did later is the major source of evidence available as to to how high his underlying talent level is. Clearly, it would have been better to make the same trade for Andrew Luck than JaMarcus Russell. The problem is precisely that we don't know whether the player is drawing to a straight or holding a full house. It's clearly possible for one team, vis a vis another, to either have better information or to draw better inferences from that information. So we can say 'Given that the Browns didn't think Wentz was going to be a league average or better starter, their behavior was optimal' but that still leaves open the question of whether the Browns were correct in their assessment of Wentz.
 

mauf

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People will give the Browns all sorts of grief if Wentz becomes an all pro but the grief will be misplaced.

Results-oriented evaluation of these trades is fundamentally wrong. It is the equivalent in poker of saying that somebody was dumb for folding against a massive bet when drawing to an inside straight because they would have gotten their miracle card and won the hand. Or looking at a roulette ball that landed on black and saying somebody was wrong not to bet all their savings on black.

Decisions need to be evaluated based on the information you had at the time the decision was made. If somebody wants to argue that Wentz was such a great prospect based on the available tape and other information that the Browns should have turned down the Eagles offer, that's a fair argument. But what Wentz did later should be irrelevant.
I think your analogy to drawing an inside straight works fine for a mid-round pick, but not the 2nd overall pick. There's a reason why the first two picks in each of the past two drafts have been QBs -- in today's NFL, it almost doesn't matter who else is on your roster if you don't have a decent QB. The Eagles were willing to pay a king's ransom for that 2nd overall pick because they thought Wentz had a good chance to be the solution to their QB problems. The Browns, in turn, were betting against Wentz -- because heaven knows they had QB problems of their own.

Maybe an ex post analysis of Wentz's success isn't the only lens through which to review that trade from the Browns' perspective, but I strongly disagree that Wentz's career path is irrelevant to the analysis.
 

Morgan's Magic Snowplow

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Jul 2, 2006
22,345
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What Wentz did later is the major source of evidence available as to to how high his underlying talent level is. Clearly, it would have been better to make the same trade for Andrew Luck than JaMarcus Russell. The problem is precisely that we don't know whether the player is drawing to a straight or holding a full house. It's clearly possible for one team, vis a vis another, to either have better information or to draw better inferences from that information. So we can say 'Given that the Browns didn't think Wentz was going to be a league average or better starter, their behavior was optimal' but that still leaves open the question of whether the Browns were correct in their assessment of Wentz.
Teams can draw better or worse inferences from the available information but a huge amount of evidence suggests that drafting is overwhelmingly a matter of luck once the conventional wisdom about players is incorporated. There is massive uncertainty attached to every single player - how will they adapt to the league, will they get injured, will they be able to mentally process a more complicated game, will they keep their head screwed on straight. There is a systematic component that teams can do or better or worse jobs predicting and drafting but players tend to be pretty close in this regard once conventional wisdom is incorporated and so differences in the ability of teams to distinguish better and worse values in this systematic component end up being swamped by variance.

In sum, even for a highly rated QB the uncertainty level is large enough that if another team offers you a big enough package in return you'd be an idiot not to say yes. Indeed, probably one of the biggest mistakes that teams make in general in drafting is believing too strongly in their own evaluation instead of just looking at the draft from a value perspective and understanding that their own ability to "beat the draft" is highly limited. This is particularly true for a player like Wentz who came from a small school and thus arguably had above average uncertainty attached to him.