How do you evaluate trade offers for young prospects?  and...  more importantly - how do you evaluate talent for the amateur draft ?    I am in my first ever HBD season and though I can see the value of alloting that budget money elsewhere....    (for ex : One "free" 20 mil IFA per season) ...  I cannot understand how one who has zero adv scouting can conduct a draft properly.  Am I missing something ?

The ADV scout has nothing to do with the amateur draft. The draft prospect projections rely on your college and high school scout budgets. As far as evaluating young players that are already signed, you get a feel for that after a few seasons.

Once a prospect has one or two full seasons of development, you can see and "project" the development pattern for a particular player and roughly determine where he's going to end up.  The more seasons of development he already has, the more data points you have to work with and the better your projections will be.

Start with current ratings and go from there. You can look through your current players in your franchise to figure out development patterns

It can vary on a player by player basis.

Posted by tecwrg on 8/3/2013 7:43:00 PM (view original):
Once a prospect has one or two full seasons of development, you can see and "project" the development pattern for a particular player and roughly determine where he's going to end up.  The more seasons of development he already has, the more data points you have to work with and the better your projections will be.

So really... if a zero adv scout team receives an offer for a 1st or 2nd year player..  or from a team that has poor training and/or poor coaching at the low levels... the zero adv scouter is handicapped big time.  the early development is skewed from poor training and misrepresented.   

I would love to have an extra 15 mil sitting around to throw at some of these IFA's right now...  but as a new plyr...  I find more value in adv. scouting I think.

The advance scout is no guarantee. It's not a crystal ball. There are many reasons why a player may not reach the projections given by an advance scout. Injuries, for one. But many owners like the advance scout. Others find better ways to use their money. Different strokes...

What bj said.

Interpret it as at 0, you are relying on current ratings + educated guess at where the prospect is going to land. It's not a total guess, but not an exact science either.

But, probably as exact as a high ADV budget if you are good at it.

New owners probably shouldn't go 0 ADV.  Learn the game a little then start reducing it. 

That was the implied statement, yea.

"if a zero adv scout team receives an offer for a 1st or 2nd year player..  or from a team that has poor training and/or poor coaching at the low levels... the zero adv scouter is handicapped big time."

It's more true that a new owner who receives an offer for any player from a veteran player is handicapped big time. Unless the veteran is making an offer that clearly deals away from a deep position to fill a hole and the offer does the same for the recipient, chances are the veteran owner is going to come out ahead. A new owner shouldn't go to 0 ADV until he understands the ratings, and should be cautious about trades until the same time.

A veteran of 0 ADV who spends some time researching is not handicapped when making a trade for a 1st or 2nd year player. You can tell a lot from IFA bonus, draft position (also taking into account the owner's draft tendencies and skill), makeup, a few in-season development cycles, and other factors.

IFA's are not the Mondyball advantage, at least in my experience, that they once were.  Everybody is in on them and they get real expensive real quick, even for marginal types.  To take advantage of a bunch of money in your Prospect Budget (enough to sign that $15M guy, anyway) you also have to have a bunch of money in Int. Scouting, to guarantee that you see him in the first place.  If that is just $10M, then your one IFA guy cost you $25M.  You just spent close to 15% of your budget on a guy who just got bid up. 

What else could that $25M buy you?   

I've only been playing for 4 seasons, and I went to zero advanced scouting asap. I still made lots of rebuilding trades on first and 2nd year players and most of them have worked out. In addition, I was able to sell inherrited  prospects I thought were over hyped (high draft position but rankings would not reach potential) and it worked out well for me. It's not hard to do the math, and based on high draft position you can assume the stat increases will continue for the full 4 years of growth.

It's not needed. I also think dropping international once you are done rebuilding is a good idea too, because then you only need 6-8 million for prospect budget. I would also analyze your world's budgets and only choose high school or college, whichever is least used. In my world most people had college so I chose high school. So you can drop another category in this fashion as well altogether.