Whats the story with player roles?

Thanks

It can help you with recruiting.  Say, you do a player role for PGs.  You assign a value to each skill level, based on how important it is for your PGs. Then, you go to your recruiting page and sort by that specific player role.   You'll find it in the 'overall rating' tab.

I think they're a useful tool to help sort recruits, as long as you're taking into account the entire picture and not just one little rating.  Especially if you take the time to customize the roles to your own preferences.

all respect to alblack (who I adore) but I don't find they have any value. They don't take into account potential, so have no real value in recruiting, unless you plan to recruit players that will not improve. yatzr's recruiting tool however allows for the input of formulas that do factor in potential FWIW...

I suppose that player roles can be marginally useful to compare existing recruits to one another.

I used to completely agree with what dacj501 posted, but I use them sparingly now.  I find it's useful to have one loaded for each position or role I might want (e.g. defensive SF, SG sniper, etc).  It's just another way to sort for recruits and identify the ones I'm interested in. 

Granted if you use something external to WIS like that yatzr tool, then what I just said is irrelevant.  I prefer to just do it the old fashioned way personally.

kb, how do you adjust for potential though? Especially for things like lp and per that if high high frequently have huge gains? Do you just make a mental note? 

I use them so often that I completely forgot they were part of the game until I saw this thread.

someone told me they used player roles to set their own depth chart, but that just sounds like madness to me. its so hard to even set a value on a recruit for a certain position, for a particular role, how one could hope to encapsulate all of the complexities of the context of the team, interaction with other players, etc, into a formula to decide who is best to play a certain spot, is beyond me! of course, if you are just looking to go through the exercise for experimental or masochistic reasons, then more power to you. outside of that, i see little value, personally... although i can see limited potential in recruiting, i guess.

Posted by dacj501 on 8/20/2013 3:24:00 PM (view original):
kb, how do you adjust for potential though? Especially for things like lp and per that if high high frequently have huge gains? Do you just make a mental note? 

I use them the way I would sort by Ath or Def or Per or whatever.  It's a way for me to identify players that stand out at something, and I visually scan potential while it's sorted by the player role.  Or I might use roles pre-FSS to help decide where to scout.  Or maybe during recruiting to help decide what new state to FSS for new targets. 

I think they're useful as a tool or filter, but definitely not as an overall player rater because of what you mentioned.

I don't use it at all for recruiting because of potentials, but I do occasionally use it to help set depth chart. If you truly value a key set of attributes for a player in a certain position, sometimes setting these roles and looking at your roster while viewing this will remove some bias you have towards certain players. Sometimes you'll be surprised by which guy is assumed to be best for a position based on the attributes you valued there.

Lets say I value my sg by importance spd, def, ath, per, bh, pass ( in % out of 100 - 20/18/16/16/10/10). I might see SG - A with respective attributes of 75/60/55/60/40/40 and SG - B with 60/65/50/65/50/50. With the eye test, I would probably go SG - A, but using my player role figures, SG- B might actually be higher rated. (I did not actually run this, but this is just to demonstrate the example)

An actual example using my set roles for my team is Gitlewski and Walker. From a quick look, I might say Gitlewski is better for either guard position because of the perimeter shooting, but using my player role settings shows that Walker is actually better at both positions and the gap between them is largest at pg.

In the end you still have to account for potential growth, IQ and personal bias and may choose to go against the ratings shown, but if you have a tough decision between 2 players, this could be one way to make the choice.

www.whatifsports.com/hd/TeamProfile/Ratings.aspx

I exclusively use player roles for my depth chart. The way I see it, if I set the value to equal my total distribution then maybe I get a better idea of just how effective a player really is based on what I value ratings wise.

I think its useful in recruiting for sorting roughly similar groups of recruits together.  If I know I need a center, I'll load my center player role into the search and sort by that.  That way I at least know that most of the guys I'll be looking at are big men.  Beats the complete randomness of sorting by overall rating.