A Draft and a Lot of Hot Air

So, I was watching the NFL Draft this weekend, which is the annual market for college gentlemen trying to make the NFL. ESPN has made a spectacle out of this annual roulette where people get all excited about potential, 40-yard dash times, and "upside." Mel Kiper, the Punxsutawney Phil of sports commentary, gets pulled out of the freezer for his yearly appearance to shed some wisdom on the whole process. He comments on every single player and seems to have a strong opinion on everyone from the highly touted prospects out of big-time schools to a second string wideout on Cal Poly Tech. Nobody knows if he's right, and I don't think anyone has ever tracked if his analysis correlates with success in the NFL (thus proving that you can stay on TV almost indefinitely if you sound like you know what you're talking about and nobody in the audience knows any better. I call this the Giada Rule....I don't know if what she's saying is right, but I'm interested).

What's amazing is that nobody really has the draft figured out. Good players slip, and players that don't pan out get drafted early, even with the best teams and despite millions of dollars in scouting. Why is this? I think it's because there is no way to truly measure the variables that will correlate with success in the NFL. Prospects are drafted based on a number of correlative and measurable factors that aren't necessarily causal: 40-yard dash times, bench-press reps, Wonderlic tests, and their track records performing against inferior competition.

In statistical parlance, or at least in my limited knowledge of it, this would be called extrapolating, where you plot known points and try to guess a new data point (NFL performance) outside of that data set using a bunch of previous data points (previously mentioned measurables). Extrapolation is normally less than desirable, because it's outside the range of your experience. It's like trying to guess how much weight you'll gain in college; you might have an idea based on a number of factors, but it's generally a wild card. It's normally much better if you can interpolate, or, given a set of information, trying to guess a point that occurs within the extremes of that data set. It's not always right, but it's normally more accurate. It's kind of like trying a new Belgian beer; if you've had Belgian beer, even if you've never had that one, you probably have a good idea if you like it.

What's amazing is that, like the NFL Draft, most major decisions are based on extrapolations, where you take a number of factors that we know and try an make a decision that is kind of related but not entirely causally linked to those factors. Generally, college or high school kids choose a career without having a real in-depth experience of what goes on in that career or any appreciation for the required time or emotional investment. Hell, you even pick an apartment without having a real way of knowing if if the people living above you have the grace of inebriated elephants, your window faces a street that is the major ambulance route to three hospitals, or the wall separating you and your ever-naked neighbor is paper thin (OK, I knew that going in, and it worked out well).

Most of the time, you try to interpolate new decisions and data points and try to figure out how they fit in your previous experience. I'm convinced that this is how a lack of experience, or a couple of anomalous experiences, can lead to messed up thought processes. For example, imagine if one of the first topless women that you ever saw was the girl from Total Recall with three breasts (NSFW but Google it if you're the one person who reads the blog and doesn't know what I'm talking about..and yes, this movie was on at my friend's house when I was about 7). Without additional experience, encountering a tri-breasted individual would not seem terribly unusual. In fact, if that was all you had seen of women (just roll with it), you might expect that to be the norm. You can take this example a number of different directions, but, in the end, most of our experiences are interpreted through interpolation into established schemas.

The cool thing about the draft and big life decisions is that there are major statistical efforts to try and "plot" people (or anything else for that matter) on the general data set of a larger population and interpolate the outcome. Myers-Briggs does it with careers, Chemistry.com does it with dating, Billy Beane did it with baseball, and Football Outsiders did it with running backs in the 2009 draft (Eagles pick LeSean McCoy is missing, unfortunately). I feel like almost anything could be reduced to statistics, somehow, to give some interesting results and predictions, and if you're the first to do it, you make a ton of money or at least get a book/movie made about you. Now if only I could find that thing and liked doing statistics in my free time instead of just pontificating about them...