I am only in D2 and D3 at the moment, but I am having some issues with potential and practice time. I should be able to figure most of this stuff out, but I guess I just don't have enough experience yet.

I constantly hear people say that practice plans are clear cut, but I have not necessarily found it that way.

A few Potential Qs:

Sometimes, I get people come in as "average" in FSS and they are "high" in the "player thoughts..." email. Now, some one told me that it's possible for FSS to be wrong. However, I just take it as some overlap-- i.e. "high" in FSS means 20+ over career, while "high" in the Player Thoughts email means 16+ for career, or something. Anyone have a word on this?

Do players struggle to grow more as they get older? I had a guy who had a 1 in rebounding come in as "high" in the players thoughts email, but the following year (despite no practice in rebounding) he did not come in as high. I am not sure what to make of this.

Kind of random as well-- I had a guard who came in from a Player Eval as "good upside if he works at it" in rebounding, so I elected to practice it since he had a very high WE. He went up ~3 or so, and he came in as "low potential" in the Players Thoughts email. That makes it seem like he's not going to go up much more, but I figured from the player eval that he was going to go up 10-15 in rebounding... is this a function of it starting at only 14?

I have a question about practicing times and low work ethic players. I recruited a guy who had a 25 WE (this is pretty much the lowest I will possibly take) and he is a SF so he has all sorts of things that I want to practice for him. He has no "high" potential categories, so I should be able to get him close to his maximums, especially since he will start as a Sophomore. At first I started practicing him with 10 minutes in everything (I don't have much practice time since I play a combo defense) [ everything means rebounding, defense, per, bh, passing, FT shooting ] however I realized that he was simply not going to make any strides by practicing such a balanced schedule. I decided to sacrifice BH and PER completely in order to get 15+ minutes in all categories. I figure that he won't be an offensive option until he is an upperclassmen, so I will max out other categories first. Is this sensible? What is the most efficient way to practice guys like this? Will he have the same potential and cap in the categories that he is currently losing points in?

Sometimes I feel my AC has as much trouble understanding potential as I do. From what I understand, the FSS is a snapshot of what the AC saw during his eval. The Player Thoughts are formed after watching the player practice for a month prior to the start of exhibition games. The skill differences between the two reports can be attributed to the longer evaluation period. It can be frustrating to think you have recruited a player with High potential in key skills and then find out he doesn't have that growth level. However, on rare occasions I have seen it go the other way.

I don't think players necessarily struggle as they get older but it is extremely hard to grow at either end of the bell curve. I wouldn't expect much from anyone below 10 or above 90. Of coure there are random exceptions where a player will go from 5 to 40 for example but I believe that WE and PT have a major influence there.

I generally go with 10's across the board for SFs except that I only put 8 in BH and Passing and I put 12 in FT. That usually leaves a couple of extra minutes which I use on his shooting and rebounding. If you are playing any defense except M2M you can cut his defensive skill practice to 8 also. I never go below 7 in any skill that has a rating above 15. To me, BH is not a skill that I would want to see drop for a player who I expect to give significant offensive distribution to later on.

These are just my thoughts. Other coaches will have different opinions or approaches. Good Luck.

Thanks

the "good upside if he works at it" is the evaluation of an average potential in rebounding. Average potential is somewhere between 4/5 points of improvement up to about 20 points of improvement. That's a rather large unpredictable window.

If his original max number was only an improvement of +6 or +7, and he improved 3, then his potential could fall from an average remaining potential to a low upside remaining.

it may take a bit of recruiting to understand the somewhat vague evaluation notes. Here are the five levels I've seen for rebounding:

high/high = there's no reason to NOT expect HUGE improvement here.
high = based on my experience, he can still improve substantially if we work with him and he's willing.
average = good upside if he works at it.
low = probably not going to see much improvement.
low/low = don't see any upside here.

I have also seen a Average/low: Still has some upside if he works at it.

oldwarrior, are there different eval notes for different categories? (you said "here are the five levels I've seen for rebounding")

i guess i figured that "good upside if he works at it" was average/high, but maybe that was too hopefully and maybe that doesn't even exist.

also, i don't even know what to think when i see "limited" in the player thoughts email-- could mean 1 or 2 or 3 or whatever points to improve.

yes, each of the 11 categories have unique evaluations for each level of potential.

Most often, you will see a High, an Average or a Low description.

The high evaluations generally have words like major, significant, big, a lot...

The High-Highs will have words like HUGE, "TREMENDOUS", massive, dramatically....

Quote: Originally posted by aejones on 9/30/2009oldwarrior, are there different eval notes for different categories? (you said "here are the five levels I've seen for rebounding")

i guess i figured that "good upside if he works at it" was average/high, but maybe that was too hopefully and maybe that doesn't even exist.

also, i don't even know what to think when i see "limited" in the player thoughts email-- could mean 1 or 2 or 3 or whatever points to improve.

when you say average/high, i assume you read the dev chat where admin said they were adding 3 levels of detail per level of potential. the release notes just said this feature was added, but failed to give any details. in any case, its not true, no category has 3 levels.

also, on your original post, potential information you are given is never wrong (at least, i am pretty sure its not). sometimes, the practice before the assistant email will push border cases one way or another. however, this doesn't completely explain it - ive had a guy with medium potential get more than 8 minutes of practice for the first practice and show up high, and other coaches have reported this as well. i think the answer is that ratings are floating point values, not integers, i have long believed this and am almost positive it is true. CS has said the assistant emails figure potential the same way as the FSS data, so i am figuring they missed a rounding error - like, the FSS data truncates the difference between max potential and current rating, where as the assistant might round to the nearest integer. or maybe it was a bug they have since fixed. in any case, when the information doesn't line up for me, it has always been a guy right on the border. i've never heard of anybody who has experienced it differently.

i've long held off posting the following information, as it may cross the line of too much information, but a lot of time has passed since potential came out and much of it is common knowledge now. also, the system today sucks, i sent a ticket once i figured it out and seble (i think) agreed the current system was stupid. he said the problem in fixing it was that the wordiness involved in describe potential with a sentence made it difficult to do better. but, he said he was open to the possibility of improving it, possibly by eliminating the wordiness (i assume by just giving the answer). so i think there is a good chance they will change it in the next patch. also, i hope a couple readers will agree and send in a ticket asking for it to be changed, let them know deciphering cryptic messages that are actually unambiguous is really not fun, and taking it away would only make the game better. as a programmer it seems to be a very simple change, especially compared to some of the other stuff they are doing, so it probably only would take a couple tickets to get it in if its not already.

low potential: 0 - 6
medium potential: 6 - 20
high potential: 20 +

note this is measured from the time a player is recruited to the time you get the maxed out email, and there is often a point, maybe even two, to be gained. i think there might be a little wiggle room about when you get the potential email too.

there are 5 subcategories, low low (0-3 i believe), high low (3-6), med (6-20), low high (0-30ish), high high (30ish +). this is why the system is stupid - the evals are supposed to give you more info, but the 14 point range of medium is undivided, which is potentially huge in a core. but how often will you turn a guy down bc he had 3-6 pts to go instead of 0-3? note on high/high, i once had a guy gain 28 - but that was 72 to 100. i suspect maximums may be allowed to go over 100, to allow more rapid improvement to 100, but current ratings are not allowed to improve past 100. that may not be true though, making high/high 28+, but everybody else ive tracked has been at least 31.

deciphering the messages:
i once was building a complete list of messages, but stopped because the rest i didn't have didn't gain me anything else. low/low, high/low, and medium are all pretty obvious, so ill just give a couple examples, along with the high messages for everything. there is exactly one message per sub category per rating, although a couple months into potential, some of them changed, which is why somebody above mentioned having 2 replies for medium. it threw me off for a while, but seble confirmed there was now just 1 message per category for the 5 categories when i sent my ticket.

low/low:
I don't see how we're going to get any improvement
realistically I think he's tapped out

high/low:
very little room for growth
probably not going to see much improvement

med:
we should be able to improve his endurance with our training program
I think he does have some upside if I fine-tune a couple of things on his release
I definitely think we can correct some fundamental issues to help him improve (this is probably the trickiest medium, its ft%)

here are the high and high/high messages. they aren't always in order but i think its clear which is which when you see both. if anybody is unsure feel free to ask for clarification

ath:
Good athleticism - I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he could improve substantially if he really works at it.
Definitely wasn't the best athlete on the floor - unless I'm an idiot and/or this is the laziest kid ever, we can *dramatically* improve his athleticism.

spd:
with the right diet and conditioning he could be MUCH quicker than he is today
if he works hard at it, we could see *massive* improvement here

reb:
Fantastic rebounding instincts - there's no reason to NOT expect HUGE improvement here.
based on my experience, he can still improve substantially if we work with him and he's willing.

def:
if he's willing to listen, we could really see some major improvement
I really think we could see massive improvement by his Senior year

sb: (i am guessing the first one here no longer exists)
definitely has above average room for growth with the right drills and coaching.
he's shown glimpses of raw ability which make me think he just has *tremendous* room for improvement.
has a LOT of room for growth with the right drills and coaching.

lp:
has a LOT of room for growth with the right drills and coaching
skys the limit

per: (2nd is high/high)
I know this may sound crazy, but I think he has the potential to really improve his shot.
I see such solid fundamentals that with enough practice I don't see why he can't be a *significantly* better shooter than he is today.

bh:
with the right drills and assuming he's willing to put in the time, I see big upside.
he has the raw skills to make me think he has *tremendous* upside.

pass:
I'd like to see him play more, but still, I really think we could see fairly significant improvement.
with more experience I expect to see TREMENDOUS improvement.

sta:
even with that, I think we can really improve upon his conditioning.
with the right diet and drills, I think we can see a *dramatic* change in his conditioning.

ft: (only have the 1, assuming its low/high)
the fundamentals look solid, with time and coaching, he could really show some improvement.


Anyway, I think using evals to get more potential info is a very interesting part of recruiting, its a good trade off. The question of spending money for credit vs information makes recruiting a much more interesting problem, and I think the eval refinement of FSS data is a critical part of that. So I think it really blows that medium potential is not subdivided. And I would love to see 3 sub divisions, so there was more reward for using evals - now, unless the guy has a bunch of high cores, its really only worth it if you have money to blow. If you agree, please take a minute to send a ticket in! If you think about it, it should be really easy to change, so I wouldn't be concerned about it possibly delaying the release.

Thank you very much for posting that, I've known *most* of it but I have been looking for a breakdown like that and it feels great to read it out by someone who knows what they're talking about.

You are gillespie1? If so, thanks for beating me in the first round of the Tark NT, I somehow got a 6 seed after being #8 rpi and had to play a team that improved so vastly from the non conference schedule it was like night and day. I had a really good player or two but made mistakes (that I won't make again) in recruiting that kept me from being more than a pretty good team with a ridiculously outside chance of making a super deep run.

The one I think is a little ambiguous is speed-- MUCH and *massive* seem a little close, although I'd imagine that anything with *'s in it is the higher one. Seems like the passive-aggressive attempt to be subtle when you're really veiling a great deal of strength (as I try to get into the mind of my scout, I suppose). LP is a little close too, but I would imagine sky's the limit could simply be taken literally.

Thanks again, that was pretty much exactly the post I wanted to see.

your very welcome! and yes, i am also gillispie/1. thanks, my team really did suck it up in non conference, but i've been super busy the last month, so the regular season basically gets the axe. i think these guys have to be one of the best 11 seeds of all time... although, their inconsistency is somewhat remarkable.

you are right on spd/lp. i agree the capital MUCH was a bit much, thats why i had to put a list together... without the other message, it was guesswork, and the impact was too much to let it slide! i really hate that part of the game, when i started, even responses to phone calls threw me off. being uncertain when you know a message has a definite meaning just plain blows, i don't see how anybody could find it enjoyable, and there is 0 strategy or skill in it. i feel like WIS should publish the messages you get and their meanings, not doing so just screws over the new coaches, and its tough enough for them as it is!

Good stuff