Posted by gillispie1 on 7/10/2019 11:56:00 AM (view original):
Posted by shoe3 on 7/10/2019 9:47:00 AM (view original):
Posted by gillispie1 on 7/10/2019 1:40:00 AM (view original):
Posted by shoe3 on 7/9/2019 10:25:00 PM (view original):
Walkons don’t add value. Unless you have an A+ prestige team and have a shot at landing actually usable walkons on occasion, it’s a wash against an ANQ or redshirted player for the first year, and significantly less valuable than an active player you intend to give minutes to.
Walkons do give you extra buying power *for one season*. That buying power is *potential value*, but it has to be realized in terms of a player who adds value to your team. And to what extent another open scholarship helps you do that is tough to quantify. In 2.0, that buying power was worth considerably more than it is now. Folks don’t have to be scared off by a team with more open scholarships. So quantifying how much better shot you’ll have with a single recruit, or how much higher you can successfully reach because of the extra open scholarship in a given year is kind of a fool’s errand. A+ teams go all the way in and still lose guys.
Zone is a different kind of beast for a lot of reasons, and it’s absolutely true that flexibility, which includes the flexibility to take walkons when desired, is an advantage. But the open scholarship is not adding value in itself. You still have to turn it into a player at some point. There are lots of instances where projects, ANQs, and jucos are going to be quantifiably valuable to your team; a bird in the hand vs two in the bush, and all that. Advising folks against recruiting those types of players - because zone - is not helpful, especially for C+ level mid-majors who should be playing in the possible early entry candidate pool for their top targets. Having those “useful bench players” is sometimes the only thing keeping a team above water through the bad luck streaks we all know can happen.
you are directly quibbling between 'value' and 'potential value' here. you admit there is potential value, but deny this translates to real value. the event where you get to convert that potential value into value is all that must be examined to determine if you are drawing a difference with distinction or not.
in this case, as long as you are coaching next season and have less than 6 openings from non-walkons, you are guaranteed to experience an event (recruiting) with the potential to convert that potential value to value. over a series of such events, it is unquestionable that having one or more scholarships of money, lets say 2 = 40AP + 6k, is going to significantly improve one's ability to recruit quality talent. it may not work out every season, but all those extra resources will pay significant dividends on average, unless you are totally incompetent.
so, it is clear here that the expected outcome is that the 'potential value' of a walkon will get converted into 'real value' of considerable significance. your argument therefore holds no water.
Calling it a “distinction without a difference” is incorrect. There’s a big difference. A walkon doesn’t help you win any games, ever. Even a mediocre player helps a team, if he is better than the walkon, and gets game time. Of course, I’m not advocating filling a roster just to fill it. That’s dumb. The player should project to better than replacement level.
The resources for an open scholarship are enough to get you in on about 1/2 of an all-in battle. Two open scholarships gets you another all-in battle. You can’t choose who will challenge you, of course, so it could be all in on a battle that never materializes, it could be all-in against multiple other teams, where even if you’re “in the lead”, you could be less than 50%. It could also get you to a point where you can lock in a guy that you would have had to battle for, without the extra scholarship. That’s ideal. But ideal doesn’t materialize nearly as often as you seem to think (“all those extra resources will pay significant dividends on average”).
I don’t disagree that walkons can be useful. I do take them sometimes. There is definitely a distinction between useful and valuable, though. If it seems like splitting hairs to you, I emphasize this distinction here because the bad advice initially given - throw all your resources on one guy, plan to always have 2 walkons - is exactly the kind of advice that gets people really frustrated with this game. Commodities go for a very wide range of prices, and bring a pretty wide range of value, and there is no linear correlation.
absolutely nothing you said here addresses the point of whether recruits have value or not, other than your unsupported and contradicted claim that they do not. the goodness or badness of the original advice has nothing to do with whether recruits have value. the unexplained distinction between useful and valuable has nothing to do with whether recruits have value or not.
the main thing you should realize is this. you spent half your talking talking about how, in a single example, having extra walkon money *might* not help you. you close with '<it doesn't work out well> as often as you seem to think'. you are conceding it does happen sometimes. all im saying is, the value of walkons is clearly not 0. they clearly help you win games and titles by giving you extra resources to fill your team with good players with. you are claiming it is 0, while acknowledging sometimes the walkons have value. it makes no sense. whether they have a little value or a lot is debatable; whether they have some or none, is not.
it is, to be frank, ridiculous that your counter to recruits having value through raising talent level is 'well 1 season the extra money might not buy you anything'. logic simply does not work that way. what happens in 1 contrived example does not dictate what happens over the long run. what determines if walkons have value or not, is whether in the long run, on average, they lead to better results in recruiting. of course there is fluctuation, we all know that - but we also know, literally every single coach, that having 6k and 40AP extra every season would ultimately lead to having better talent on the team in the long run, unless you are completely and totally incompetent. better talent leads to better results. it's really no more complicated than that.
It’s hard to tell here if you’re intentionally obfuscating the point, or if you’re just as particular about language as I am. I’ll presume the latter, and try to crystallize some of the points so far, as I see them, so we’re not accidentally talking past each other.
We both seem to mostly agree that a benefit of zone is the flexibility to do lots of things with the roster, because you don’t *need* contribution from the last 2-4 spots in a given season. That includes - but is certainly not limited to - taking walkons, and using their resources to try to get better recruits next season. It also includes the ability to take projects, ANQs, and transfer/jucos (for those not aware, you can sit a senior, redshirt him at the end of the year, and get to use all of the resources as if he was graduating, even after you stick the redshirt on him prior to RS2).
A walkon not on the depth chart does not add value to the team. They’re not even giving your starters a breather, so they play more minutes at fresh. It’s exactly the same as a redshirted player or an ANQ in their first season. The difference is that you know you will get value from the redshirt and ANQ down the road. The walkon not on the depth chart never adds value, ie he never contributes to winning a game. The open scholarship is *useful*, but although usefulness and value are synonyms sometimes, they don’t mean the same thing. Money is useful. But its “value” is all perceived. Value is added benefit, in and of itself. Money is useful, but the bread, shelter, and entertainment it can be used to purchase is what has value. In life, in a stable economy, the correlation between price and value is relatively linear. Not so in 3.0.
A player above replacement level on the depth chart has *value*. As you say, the level of value is debateable, but if he’s on the depth chart and better than replacement level, he is adding something tangible to the team’s effort. That’s not to say this player is always worth a scholarship, as has been said, to fill a roster for the sake of having a full roster. Ultimately, the calculus comes down to whether you would rather have the bird in your hand, or if you’re going to go for the prettier one that may appear in the bush next season. It’s situational. But people should not expect that an open scholarship, or even two, will result in an appreciably better commodity down the line.
7/11/2019 8:19 PM (edited)