This (bolded above) is precisely the issue.A Mike Mayock sentence goes something like this: Tape, tape, tape, kid, kid, tape, kid, tape, tape kid, tape, tape.
And that's all you need to know.
Mayock has been a boon to the type who somehow think it's a revelation to look at tape. As in, look at me, I'm watching the same thing as everyone else.
Perhaps we should throw a parade.
Fixation on tape is laughably simplistic. The high error rate in scouting is largely due to obsession with tape while ignoring the peripheral variables and how to weigh them. But I concede it won't change. Guys in this era are brainwashed to rely on tape, just like college football fans are now paralyzed to evaluate a team minus strength of schedule.
Two horses can be dead even at the top of the stretch. But how they got there and their likelihood to win the race, or subsequent races, can be vastly different. If you know the pedigree and the surrounding details, you understand that. It's not a surprise when there's a 7 length gap at the wire. But the goof with the binoculars and no background in the sport is cheering for the red saddlecloth and little else. If he sees Ryan Tannehill and Johnny Manziel looking roughly the same in a Texas A&M uniform late in their careers, he concludes they are parallel and their pro potential is roughly the same, if not advantage Tannehill. Heck, draft each one of them in the 8 spot. Disregard that one guy has been a special playmaker all his life while the other has been a perennial tease.
Tape lies all the time when conventional wisdom is the principal ammo of the beholder.
Bar stool types are shocked to be challenged. That's verified daily here. They are accustomed to screaming this guy sucks and that guy sucks and awaiting peer approval. That's how a modern day Steve Deberg-like Alex Smith and his lifetime pathetic 6.6 yards per attempt, just good enough to get you beat, is actually preferred above Colin Kaepernick and his 7.9 lifetime number and adjusted 8.1. It's rare for the second number to be superior to the first but the happy adjusters are wonderfully oblivious. Something in their system screamed suck so they stick with stuck. They don't even understand the criteria that places the second number above the first but none of that matters as long as the guy in the adjoining stool is equally bewildered.
futurescout is talented but he makes basic mistakes. Like yesterday when he announced that Cameron Wake has many top years left since he was inactive in his early 20s. That's happy adjuster caliber. Walrus properly scolded. Now the onslaught on numbers. I remember when I was new to Las Vegas and bet strictly on line of scrimmage mismatches. I scoffed at the eccentric nerds who were babbling about situational bias, and some vague concept of value. I threw away my stubbornness, studied what I'd previously dismissed, and prospered. Let it happen to you.
In the meantime, make sure you never speculate.
And when someone is no one but a fan on a message board (myself included), he ought to recognize his potential for bias with regard to what he believes he's seeing on his television screen, and use objective data to confirm or disconfirm the conclusions he makes via that medium.
Likewise, Steve Young had an adjusted yards per attempt of just 5.0 in Tampa. That's awful. Was Steve Young a terrible quarterback? How then does he pull off an incredible 7.9 adjusted yards per attempt in his 13 years in San Francisco? Do you think that coaching and supporting cast matter? Because I do. I think they matter a lot.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's worthless number that has no meaning. Colin Kaepernick is just a great example of a player who has a really high YPA yet isn't a particularly good quarterback.
Take Young and Montana for instance. Kaepernick's got a higher career YPA than Joe Montana, I believe. You'd really take Kaepernick over Montana?
All I can say is that if you truly believe that one statistic means everything, and tells you everything you need to know about an individual player, then you must also entertain the possibility that David Carr is a significantly better quarterback than Andrew Luck. But I know you don't.
Ironically, "metrics" would tell you exactly how much weight to give those variables in terms of winning, and in developing a complete picture of a QB based on all of the objective data available.
If the objective data tell us the same thing we're seeing on TV, that's sure great, but when we're highly emotionally invested in seeing one thing and not another, which happens a great deal more when watching players for our own team (as opposed to Kaepernick, for example), then in my opinion we should sure allow the objective data to disconfirm our subjective perceptions with regularity and without issue.
