Posted by oldwarrior on 2/7/2021 2:22:00 PM (view original):
I think there may be some correlation to the player position and their ranking on the big board. I've been switching player positions for about a year, but I haven't found success preventing the early entries.
I had a stud Junior PG and I switched his position to PF. The final Big Board had him listed as #42 overall, On the Fence. On the Board he was behind 8 players listed as PG's. I didn't think any of them had better PG ratings. Looking back he was actually 1st team All-American at PF.
He went early and was drafted #5 overall.
i thought this too - well, less i thought it - more, i am less than fully comfortable with my explanation for the major big board hops, and so am continuously on the hunt for alternate theories.
i considered the listed position to be one of the best bets, but i looked and could not see a correlation, and also im like 98% i threw it in as a side question on a ticket and got a straight forward 'no' from seble (does listed position matter). my comment on the actually played position being the next thing i wonder about having some impacted, is a direct consequence of crossing the listed position off my list, if you will...
most likely those PGs who were ahead of him were being counted as PGs which tend to be higher on the board, while your guy was considered a SG or SF for whatever reason. i would argue we 'know' there are positional formulas - or at least something that approximates positional formulas. i'm not sure we actually know this but i probably talk about it like a fact most of the time, and roughly consider it so for my own purposes. this has been known to me for pretty many years, i think about 6 months after the big board came out, but the positional formulas are pretty weird and nonsensical. so it often makes no sense, why one guy is above another, on face value - but its almost definitely the positional formulas, a PG counted as a SG might show below a PG counted as a PG, even if the first guy is objectively better in basically every way. this is most pronounced for SF-y players flipping in and out of SF equations, but definitely the PG equation is distinct from SG and causes many nonsensical inversions in the guards.
anyway, to tie a bow on it, the only place i consider it remotely viable something like listed position (which i consider at least 99% out) or actually played position, to be a factor in the big board, is as a factor in the positional formulas. well, i assume there are positional formulas, and logic to decide who is calculated by which position, and i really lump that all together - but specifically, i wonder how it calculates which positional formula to use, which position to consider a player as, for big board purposes (there may not be exactly 5 positional formulas and they may not be 'positional formulas', but i would almost guarantee there are at least 4 formulas which evaluate player talent, and a mechanism for assigning players to each of those formulas, which is calculated in real time and thus able to change in the course of the season).