With the help of a few seasoned coaches, I just now learned how to effectively use this tool. It’s a game changer. I feel more confident in my depth chart and my analysis of opponents for game planing and scheduling.

If, like me, this tool is messy or confusing to you, I absolutely recommend learning it!

The best part of the player roles feature from a recruiting and team evaluation standpoint (and I don’t know if everyone uses it this way, or even knows you can do this) is that you can customize the evaluations tailored to your own system. If you want to build a FB/P system focused on heavy physical cores, you can jack up the ath/spd/stamina and defense and de-emphasize lots of other things you don’t feel will be important to your system. If you don’t like the system defaults for the roles, you don’t need to accept them.

The thing I would really like fixed about this feature - adlorenz, if you’re reading! - is that if I change them in user settings in one world, it uses those settings in every world, which is kind of silly. I would like to evaluate players a little differently based on the sets I’m using in a specific world, like if I’m running FB/Press in Iba next season, I will have stamina much higher, and LP and block much lower in the evaluation than with my flex/press/zone teams everywhere else. It’s not a HUGE deal, but it’s a pain. Let us use the tool specific to the team, not the user!

i am too old of a coach (in coaching years) to have ever picked up the player roles thing. i think it has value and potential though.

however, one word of caution. the same word of caution i like to throw in any time folks use linear formulas for player evaluation. that word of caution is simple - never bail on the eye test. never use the number on a spread sheet as gospel. it is mathematically impossible to put together an accurate linear formula for player ratings / roles, and 5 roles is simply not enough to cover the range of guards, small forwards, and bigs that are obtainable in this game. that's all before you get into the range of circumstances encountered by every program which result in changing priorities and values season to season, or the differences between programs that shoe mentioned.

these linear formulas - whether in the form of player roles, excel spread sheets, or something else - are a great way to get a bird's eye view of the situation. they are a great way to reduce the scope of recruits you are looking at and whatever else. its also a fantastic critical thinking exercise IMO to help dial in your thinking on the value and impact of different ratings. but don't cede your decision making to whichever number is higher, and don't ever think you can replace analysis with a simple formula, without giving up something majorly significant.

I agree with Gil.

Player Roles is not a flawless evaluation tool but, in my opinion, far superior to the default HD ratings. I like the personalization of player roles... and have found that I do not value SFs. Haha. Maybe I should stop recruiting them.

SFs tend to be awful until high d1, i only had a couple true SFs in my entire d2/d3 career. i mostly slid a guard over, occasionally a big. the really amazing SFs are just like, ridiculously amazing. but most of them are just garbage. a little bit of everything, good at nothing, yuck! there's definitely more viable SFs now with potential (so the past 10 years), it used to be even worse, but its still pretty bad until high d1.

Player roles are good to learn the game, but don't use the system ones.

My spreadsheet advanced player ratings are much better than linear player ratings though.

And an experienced coach's eye test is much better than my spreadsheets' player ratings.