MVP2110 wrote:ReasonablySober wrote:MVP2110 wrote:
67%>33% so I'm not understanding your logic.
I'm saying something not working 66% of the time isn't a reason to never do it. 1 in 3 odds isn't terrible. Like I used in my examples, many Super Bowl wins don't happen if teams weren't trading up.
Most of your examples were from 20 years ago or longer. so I'm not sure how relevant they are to the modern NFL. But if you know a trade you make has a 33% chance of success and a 67% chance of failure then it doesn't take rocket science to know that trade is a bad idea even if in the end it might work out. It's also worth noting that of the trades won its not like they were all for HOFers, it's not you have a 33% chance of drafting a HOFer and a 67% chance of drafting a bust, that'd be an entirely different thought process then. Heck let's even look at Gute's record as an example. The trade up for Jaire was a massive success(although it was directly after he moved down in the draft). The trade up for Oren Burks was bad, the trade up for Darnell Savage was bad, the trade up for Christian Watson is TBD, the trade up for Amari Rodgers was bad. I excluded the Love trade up because as Walder says trading up for a QB is a different thing entirely and often worth it. Now looking at Gute's trade backs, last year he moved back and acquired the picks to take Jayden Reed, Dontayvion Wicks, & Karl Brooks. He's also moved back in the Jaire Draft to acquire an extra 1st the following year and still was able to get Jaire. He himself(along with most GMs) has had much more success moving back then moving up
I guess you could argue that a good front office is less likely to overpay to trade up and more likely to draft a good player when they do, but I'm pretty much on Team Trade Down all day, every day. The recent analysis of trading up vs. trading down was terrific because of how it articulated what I was clumsily trying to say all along, which is that trade-up costs systematically overestimate the likelihood that any given prospect will be better than the next few prospects drafted at his position, a bias that cascades basically all the way through the draft. I think as you get closer and closer to the draft, you get more and more groupthink about wanting the most hyped players, but getting more bites at the apple is usually a better way to play the odds.
Just imagine being an average team and trading your average first for two average seconds and (maybe?) a third every year for ten years. I think you're quite a bit more likely to get 10 good players with 20 seconds and 10 thirds than with 10 firsts, and without many of the firsts being so good that it makes up the difference - especially since some of the seconds and even thirds are almost as likely to be great.
Wut we've got here is... faaailure... to communakate.