TL/DR Alert!
[stacking the Hierarchy of Sciences, Art and Scouting]
That makes sense as far as it goes, but it still doesn't account for the fact that Robinson made a lot of big plays in the past two years, and many of them weren't against reserves (and other top WRs also presumably benefited in a similar way). I highlighted just ONE play from his body of work. If MOST or an inordinate amount of his production came against reserves (and if other WRs didn't also benefit from big lead situations at times), than I'd be more concerned.
To make it more explicit, I'm not disagreeing that individual plays might be misleading in some contexts (though I also stand by thinking a lot of WRs don't make that play).
Great players have bad games sometimes (STL day three CB Gaines shut down Evans, for instance).
I'm not implying Robinson is a slam dunk future All Pro. As to Crabtree, you may not have intended it as such, but some may interpret it as a back handed compliment and damning with faint praise, as it were. I saw your comment that (paraphrasing) Crabtree had the minimal requisite athleticism to be a WR1. I'd just obseve that in the last eight games Crabree played with Kaepernick at QB in 2012, including the playoffs, he was something like a top 3 WR in some leagues over that time frame. That would leave room for Robinson, even if he is a poor man's Crabtree (as long as he isn't a destitute one
) to be pretty good. I like Robinson's chances to be a WR2 better than a WR1, I don't know if he has that kind of upside. I have much more conviction on Watkins, for instance (and I know we disagree on this, and that is fine, I don't want to address that here). But Watkins was drafted far higher in the NFL draft, and this massive pedigree disparity is reflected in the fact that he is drafted a lot higher in dynasty drafts. I like Lee better than Robinson, but it is a lot closer for me, and Lee was also drafted higher in the NFL draft and generally goes higher in dynasty. While on the subject of Lee, you didn't make this point, but it doesn't add up for me that the role Robinson will fill is more important, so we can overlook or dismiss the fact that Lee was prioritized by JAX in the draft. If JAX really thought Robinson's prospective role was more important to the team's fortunes in an OVERALL sense, I don't think it adds up that they would draft Lee first.
I definitely think Lee and Robinson can co-exist and both be productive, though if Shorts is extended that could complicate at least one of their projections.
* Below this point is kind of like the scouting theory/philosophy equivalent of old maps in which certain regions were designated - Dragons be thar!
I've always thought scouting is part science and part art. If you drop a rock from a fixed distance and precisely measure the time until it hits the ground, and replicate the data, that is an example of the material of science and how it advances. This is similar to the combine dimension of scouting, with tests and measureables. Position specific field drills are already a level removed, requiring some interpretation (though if a RB like Andre Williams bricks all his reception attempts, we would probably expect to see a convergence of interpretations that at a minimum, he has a lot of work to do, and even further for some, he may never be a natural hands catcher). When it comes to looking at game cut ups and making a judgement call on whether things like a given prospect's agility, COD and elusiveness will translate to the NFL, and how well, is at this point, beginning to enter highly subjective realms. It is hard to account exactly for how the typical NFL player's relatively greater size, strength, speed, athleticism, talent, experience (college players never have to play against opponents that have been developed at that level for a decade, for instance), technique, football IQ, coaching, etc., compared to college counterparts, will impact different players development, or lack thereof. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and when some scouts say little things can be the difference between greatness and mediocrity, that saying hints at this state of affairs.
If some teams developed proprietary analytics, heuristics and algorithms that greatly increased the chances of spotting talent (and they could churn out Pro Bowlers like cranking a sausage grinder), there would be a lot less busts. SEA has been doing a really good job lately, so I can see how there could be variance in the scouting community, and genuine talent may not be evenly distributed, but it is still in the end a highly subjective art (referring to the part that isn't science, any competent time keeper can be trusted to clock 40 times). They have made mistakes, like Matt Flynn, but they more than made up for it in that case by drafting Wilson, and than having the healthy self confidence and good sense to admit they were wrong and correct the mistake ASAP.
Once we get to a factor like projecting a player's ability to improve, that can get even more subjective. There may be indicators that are seemingly SUGGESTIVE (Brian Quick coming from a lower level of competition might fall into this category, though some products of this level have come further and faster than Quick has to date). Mo Clarett sneaking booze in the facility didn't bode well. Larry Fitzgerald coupling his Gumby-like, contortionist flxibility and acrobatic aerial skills with being a student of the game and technician, probably since he was a child, exposed to the influence of Cris Carter and Randy Moss, as well as his driven work ethic, did bode well. But between those extremes, in the absence of compelling evidence in one direction or other, anybody is guessing as to if or how much a given prospect will improve, and over what time frame.
Another part of the problem is nothing is ever the same in terms of context, not just opponents, but supporting cast and surrounding talent. If we ever have computer models comprehensive in scope and powerful enough to account for 100% of the possible variables under study, it would be helpful to run hundreds, thousands or millions of simulations, with Watkins, Evans, OBJ, Cooks, Benjamin, Lee, Richardson, Adams, Latimer, Robinson, Landry, Moncrief, etc. all playing for every team in the nation, and against every possible opponent in the nation, in every possible permutation, than average them and see how they all stack up, respectively. No wonder this stuff is difficult and people disagreeing is, far from the exception, the rule of the day.
There is a hierarchy of complexity in the sciences. Chemistry and the combination of elements presents challenges not found at the level of the elements themselves. Biology is orders of magnitude more complex than chemistry (DNA compared to combining hydrogen and oxygen atoms to form water). Psycholgy presents another level of complexity (the brain has roughly a few billion neurons, with several thousands of possible synaptic connections tying together each one [[?? I could be wrong, but my recollection]] - supposedly 2 billion to the two thousandth power is a number larger than the number of atoms in the universe). Sociology is a level removed from that, studying things like the behavior of crowds and mob psychology, and how many unpredictable personalities can interact in even more unpredictable ways on societies, cultures, economies, etc. The higher, more complex levels are stacked on top of their precursor substratums.
This hierarchy of complexity can possibly be mapped on to counterparts in scouting to some degree.
In some ways, the art-like aspects of scouting are to the interpretation of physically instantiated, dynamically moving bodies, as semiotics is to studying the meaning of abstract symbols and codes, or exegesis is to the more delimited field of textual analysis. Note that in some respects, even about one player, with so many possible dimensions to account for, it is certainly possible we could both be right and wrong in some respects. The power of a thread is the potential for anybody to take the best ideas from different people (sometimes dozens in an active thread) and eliminate their respective weaknesses, and maybe be in a better position to lop off entire sectors that are spurious and collapse the less relevant probablility spaces into a more accurate forecast. One thing I like about fantasy football in general and dynasty specifically, is things usually come out in the wash, eventually (though even there, disagreement can exist as it can be hard to compare different players through the complication of their rarely/never being in IDENTICALLY comparable situations).
Is the painting Guernica by Picasso a genuine work of genius, or that of a talentless hack inexplicably elevated into canon by the subjective impressions, opinions, whims of a tipping point of the societal critical apparatus? Some critics have noted that the anguished, rent asunder nature of the painting is symbolic of the Spanish Civil War. Some people, hearing that for the first time, might appreciate it in a different light, and like it where they hadn't before. Others might understand the point, but still hate it on aesthetic grounds. I would never want to say somebody is right or wrong for thinking Guernica is the expression of genius, or amateurish doodling.
Some people like Schlitz malt liquor, some like vintage Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. Some people might say the Schlitz drinker's pallette is "coarser" (people who are experts at combining scents and aromas to formulate new combinations, may be equipped differently at a fundamental, physiological/perceptual level to make hundred or thousands of fine grained, nuanced distincions that most humans, not so equipped, could never approximate with any amount of training). If not trained or with an aptitiude for it, the Schlitz afficianado in a cross-training taste test, may not notice the discrete undercurrents of sub-flavors in the wine (hints of raisin, chocolate and coffee, blah, blah, blah) Nonetheless, in his domain, he may be better at predicting which new flavor of Schlitz malt liquor would be more likely to appeal to the masses. Conversely, an experienced wine drinker with a highly trained pallete and descriptive apparatus may be terrible at predicting what wines will be popular, if his taste contains too little overlap with the norm. They aren't necessarly mutually exclusive, but can be discrete and separate skill sets.
Finally, what if we could take a peek, and pull aside the Wizard of Oz-like curtain of something as fundamental as the computational aspects of vision, what would we find? Probably hundreds or thousands of sub-conscious perceptual cues (how angles are subtended, relative sizes calculated by distances - a matchbook pressed close to our eye that appears larger than and obscures a distant mountain is not bigger than a mountain, etc.) our eye/brain linkage was trained long before we could speak, and is therefore refractory to retrieval of those individual memories at the conscious level, and ineffable. In an evolutionary sense, it is probably impossible for the myriad discrete acts that go into the computational aspects of vision to be comprehensively reported back to us at the conscious level. I can barely remember a string of 7 digits like some phone numbers. People aren't wired to make sense of the maelstrom of discrete information sent by myriad rods and cones. It is hard to imagine what that would be like, it might be akin to what would happen if a centipede with thousands of legs had to suddenly make a conscious adjustment of each leg in order to move and became paralyzed by a bottlenecked control apparatus overwhelmed by the sensory and percepual tidal wave. For cavemen being chased by saber tooth tigers, it was far more important for the brain to interpret the information reported to it by the eyes with a minimum of fuss, and that translates to not having access to how the mechanisms of vision report to consciousness at the micro-level.
Why this digression on vision? IMO, too often people argue about seeing different things (or seeing the same thing differently). To me, the fact that humans can see at all and be conscious is a miracle. Sometimes I don't think people always appreciate this. Not only is it not unlikely that people should see things differently sometimes, it would be bizarre and shocking if that weren't the case. Not to mention, it would be mind numbingly, crushingly boring if everybody always agreed with us. Like the Twilight Zone episode in which the protagonist dies, wakes up in a place where he always gets whatever he wants just by thinking about or asking for it, quickly tires of this, tells the host that he thinks he belongs in the "other place", only to be informed in classic Twilight Zone reversal style... This IS the other place.
** I do question at times (I do think some have a gift for scouting - though, if literally a thousand factors might be subconsciously informing our conscious understanding, that gift may be different than the ability to articulate what some are doing and how), and I'm not excluding myself, that if we employ a set of criteria for success, like a formulaic set of algorithms or heuristics, and it works sometimes and doesn't others, and we can't account for why, what does it mean to say we were "right". In other words, if someone was doing the scouting equivalent of flipping coins and mixing up their calls, and getting about half right (as probability would suggest), but selectively remembering the times they were "right" and forgetting the same number of times they were "wrong", that wouldn't stand up as an impressive feat of scouting to me. But if people track their actual successes and failures and identify a statistically improbable hit percentage, that would be more impressive and suggest to me they were probably on to something.
But again, being able to do it and communicate what they are doing are two different things (I think EBF has a knack for this). Another way to look at this issue, it would be impressive to me if two or more different scouting "archetypes" opened up dueling schools to communicate their methods (like an old school martial arts movie
), and one school's students were demonstrably more accurate than the other, that could, and probably WOULD, suggest one method was superior, but also, perhaps that school was better at communicating what they were doing and how.
