I'm changing my preference from Daniel Lasco and the guys I named earlier to Kenneth Dixon.
I didn't watch any tape to prompt the switch. Instead, I ran into a thread on another forum with a focus that made a great deal of sense to me, even though it was all but ignored by the regulars. Credit to our own tannenbombs for offering the only encouraging post in the thread.
http://www.footballsfuture.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=577997
A guy named Kent Hullamania studied scouting reports after the fact for several years, determined to identify which qualities were most predictive of NFL success at running back. He isolated two: Quickness and Yards after Contact.
He apparently posted his study at the same forum prior to last year's draft and identified three backs who fit best: Todd Gurley, Karlos Williams and Jay Ajayi.
Not bad. Good news for the Dolphins.
This year he has two clear qualifiers -- Ezekiel Elliott and Kenneth Dixon -- followed by three guys with ambiguous but promising scouting reports, Jonathan Williams, Keith Marshall, and Peyton Barber.
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I love that type of thing because it's another vehicle to be correct more often than not, while bypassing the time necessity and inherent problems of doing your own subjective study. Naturally I've tried this type of thing for sports betting purposes, and going back more than two decades.
In the early '90s a New Yorker who spent months in Las Vegas every year would pay me 50 bucks per day merely to travel to a cigar shop and pick up the specialized horse racing tout sheets. Those sheets were unlike anything I'd ever seen. Very complicated numerical analysis. One was the Ragozin Sheets. I forget the name of the other one. Anyway, I decided to study the sheets, which included dozens of factors, many assigned to each horse in each race. For example, beside each horse it might say 2, 6, 13, 17, 24. They all stood for something, described in the glossary below. For several months I charted the horses who won and tried to identify which characteristics were most vital. Three stood out, when combined. I think the numbers were 10b (maybe 10d?), 19 and 21. One indicated that the horse fit the distance of the race, one indicated it was an improving horse, and one indicated that the horse fit the conditions of the race. In other words, the horse wasn't moving up in class. Owners and trainers often will get too ambitious that way with a horse on the uptick.
That combo was certainly logical. When I put it into practice it didn't fare as well as on paper. That's typical. Basically it was a method to bet horse racing on a daily basis and not lose any money. I was trading dollars. That in itself is a triumph when you consider the hefty house take, which is many times the burden in sports betting. I gave up after a while. That sheet with the same numbers is probably still available, and I bet the system still works, and likely could be improved upon with greater study.
Several years later I used the same idea and applied it to golf betting. This time I profited tremendously for years, until the sportsbooks finally started to catch on, and the basics still work today. I've mentioned this several times: Bet golf matchups (one player to beat another player) based on superiority in both driving distance and putting. I'll never forget when I hit the calculate button on my Excel spreadsheet after entering the data for two months. That simple combo was responsible for a 74% winning percentage. And it held up when applied. I should have been more greedy.
You'll notice from the link that Kent has started to apply his ideas to other positions. It's generally more complicated than Quickness and Yards after Contact when he veers elsewhere. But I have no doubt there is tremendous potential, especially when combined with analytic findings that support the same player.
I have to say that categories like Yards after Contact are tremendously helpful, along with aspects like hand size for quarterbacks, arm length for defensive backs, and the edge rusher explosiveness studies. Overall the available information is exaggerated in comparison to yesteryear but certain advancements more than make up for it. We certainly didn't have Yards after Contact specifics when I started following football.
Hey, Quickness and Yards after Contact, doesn't that describe the running back we let escape, Lamar Miller? Those are perhaps his two greatest strengths. Seems like a blunder. I'm not sure Miller would have been described with Yards after Contact strength leaving college, but it certainly turned out that way.