I have the 4th pick, very little salary commitments, and I am not likely to have any sandwich picks.  Am I better offer putting all of my scouting money into college or hs and then favoring one or the other on my draft board or I am better off putting max money into both?

College will be closer to ML ready, if that is what you need.  HS players have more upside and will take longer to develop.

Different people have different opinions and strategies. I believe in maxing out one and putting 0 on the other, and the one I max out is college, for no big reason in particular (though I think eeyore put it best). But in general I'd rather have accurate projections of half the draftees than mediocre projections of all draftees.

It all depends on how much you want to allocate.   10/10 isn't a good idea.    Nor is 20/6.   IMO, if you're not going to put 15-16m into it, you may as well go with 0.

With the 4th pick I'd max both; it's at the very top of the draft, where there are the fewest players of equal quality to each otehr available, that not seeing a particular player can hurt you most.

Thanks!

Posted by prezuiwf on 12/2/2010 9:24:00 AM (view original):
Different people have different opinions and strategies. I believe in maxing out one and putting 0 on the other, and the one I max out is college, for no big reason in particular (though I think eeyore put it best). But in general I'd rather have accurate projections of half the draftees than mediocre projections of all draftees.

I typically max out on college and zero out HS scouting. My original reasoning was indeed that college players were closer to the show, so I might as well concentrate on them. However, since I've been doing it this way for several seasons now I realize that there is a better reason for preferring college to HS (at least when employing a 20/0M strategy). Simply put, while even with a $20M budget you still won't see all the available prospects, you will definitely see more if you max out on college. Maxing out on college shows you at least 500 college prospects - maxing out on HS shows you less than 500.

BTW, even if you punt with a 0 budget, you will typically see 5-10 prospects from that "bucket". The projections will of course be way off, but the current ratings are still true. More often than not you will even see 1-2 gems (since they are heavily discounted by the 0 budget as compared to the max budget players, only players with relatively high projections will float high enough to be in your top 500), but you'll probably pass on them out of fear for paying top dollar for xirconium.

In your case, if you have the 4th pick, you probably need everything.  I'd try to max out both.  Once your team becomes more established, more successful, you may find it unnecessary to spend so much on recruiting and cut back.  If you do that, I agree, if you cannot commit at least 14M to HS/Coll don't bother

I have always kept them balanced but am considering starting to increase college and decrease HS across my teams. I would definitely not max HS and cut out college, college players develop faster and there are more of them. But with a top 10 draft pick, you need to go as high as you can in both categories - you dont want to pick a piece of trash with a top 10 pick.