Joe Burrow may force his way out of the Cincinnati Bengals

[DontTazeMeBro]

I don’t think Brown will budge. He’s shown for decades that he doesn’t care that much about winning. I could see him drafting Burrow and not trading him just to be spiteful.

[ramssuperbowl99]

29 minutes ago, ET80 said:

I think I'm starting to get it more now that I'm reading it and not multitasking. 

An immediate observation is that both MLB and NFL remain in that 40-50 Gini Coefficient - which tells me both are fairly down the middle in terms of parity.

Still reading, getting more thoughts.

I think it's also important to think of not just parity, but quality, which isn't plotted. 

Hypothetically, a crap flinging monkey would have a 0 coefficient but that's not the ideal here. I think it's more useful to compare the sports and the different mechanisms for how they work. 

I look at those results and see wild changes in the amount of parity in the NBA year over year because you had the Warriors/Cavs making the finals 4 times in a row, compared to the pre-dual super team era where you had the Spurs/Rockets who might have shaken things up.

With baseball, hockey, and football it's interesting to note that you have larger rosters, more player turnover, higher injury rates, and wildly different mechanisms for signing/extending players or bringing players into the leagues. The NFL has no minor leagues, the NHL/MLB do. The NFL draft has much more present impact than the MLB/NHL draft, but that doesn't appear to add anything unexpected.

And what's wild is that even when you have virtually no parity (the EPL), it doesn't seem to disengage fans with the product itself.

[Shanedorf]

I'll not get into the stats vs other leagues - but I will say that one marker of parity is how much turnover we see in playoff teams from year to year
And on that front, the NFL has a lot of turnover every season.

"By my count, over the last 5 years, there have been 28 teams to make the playoff after missing the previous year. 11 in the AFC and 17 in the NFC. That’s an average of 5.6 per year and there were 8 new teams in 2017, representing a 67 percent turnover, the highest in the last five years. "

[ramssuperbowl99]

4 minutes ago, Yin-Yang said:

The Dolphins aren’t really an example of that. I’d be with you on the Colts - but I don’t really see that running rampant in the NFL. It occurs in basketball but that’s a very different sport where single players can massively overhaul a franchise. 

 Bad drafting happens. Poorly run organizations make bad choices and sometimes remain bad. I don’t think that is a parity issue. These will always occur in sports, you can force a horse to drink. You can only give these teams the opportunity, what they do with that is up to them. P

 

By definition bad teams staying bad is a parity issue. 

[VigilantZombie]

21 hours ago, Ray Reed said:

As a division rival, awesome.

But no way this actually happens lol

It sort of happened with Eli Manning and LAC..just saying.  It's definitely possible but would be a seriously bad look for Burrows.

[ET80]

Just now, ramssuperbowl99 said:

The NFL has no minor leagues, the NHL/MLB do. The NFL draft has much more present impact than the MLB/NHL draft, but that doesn't appear to add anything unexpected.

I think you said it better than I did, and it allows me to ask the following - wouldn't these two cancel each other out, in essence? Functionally, it's the respective pipeline for each league - player plays, player starts to decline, player is replaced by minor leaguer/draft pick.

So to field the original question - parity is similar between the three because of similar pipelines, one is via draft and one is via minor league?

[Soko]

1 minute ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

By definition bad teams staying bad is a parity issue. 

Again, you can’t force a team to be good. If a team makes bad decisions in drafting, bad decisions in free agency, and bad decisions in coaches - they’ll be bad. That is unavoidable and no amount of fairness or parity-driven rules are going to fix that. The existence of those teams are not proof that parity doesn’t exist or things aren’t being done to help them.

[ramssuperbowl99]

5 minutes ago, ET80 said:

I think you said it better than I did, and it allows me to ask the following - wouldn't these two cancel each other out, in essence? Functionally, it's the respective pipeline for each league - player plays, player starts to decline, player is replaced by minor leaguer/draft pick.

So to field the original question - parity is similar between the three because of similar pipelines, one is via draft and one is via minor league?

The NFL equivalent to the minor leagues would be practice squad players and the waiver wire. Given that the teams start with 53 man rosters and at most like 35 players who matter, I don't think the roster churn underneath really matters.

[ramssuperbowl99]

4 minutes ago, Yin-Yang said:

Again, you can’t force a team to be good. If a team makes bad decisions in drafting, bad decisions in free agency, and bad decisions in coaches - they’ll be bad. That is unavoidable and no amount of fairness or parity-driven rules are going to fix that. The existence of those teams are not proof that parity doesn’t exist or things aren’t being done to help them.

No, but we're discussing the merits of the current system that you want to put in place to maintain parity. And if we don't see parity in the NFL that we aren't seeing in other leagues with a reduced version of this same system, and there are tons of holes by which this system allows bad teams to stay bad, why have the system?

[ET80]

8 minutes ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

The NFL equivalent to the minor leagues would be practice squad players and the waiver wire.

I would argue that it's a combination of this as well as their draft picks (which for the sake of uniformity, we'll call priority assets). I mean, when was the last time we saw a guy go straight to the big leagues? 

Granted, my baseball knowledge is limited to the Astros (NOT gonna talk about IT) but the core guys - Bregman, Correra, Springer - all brought into the fold after a minor league stint, which was their destination after the Astros drafted them.

[Soko]

Just now, ramssuperbowl99 said:

No, but we're discussing the merits of the current system that you want to put in place to maintain parity. And if we don't see parity in the NFL that we aren't seeing in other leagues with a reduced version of this same system, and there are tons of holes by which this system allows bad teams to stay bad, why have the system?

A) Because those “reduced version of this same system” don’t magically make the trash teams good. You’re essentially saying that there’s reason to believe that rookie-FAs (in place of the draft) would make teams that routinely make bad decisions, stop making them. Or at least, there’s a good chance that a FA pool would accomplish this, which is a stretch. The only reasoning behind it is “maybe, you never know”. Bad decision making in a franchise is 100% unavoidable in any sport. 

B) You can’t use other leagues as examples. None of the other teams allow for rookies to sign anywhere they please. The MLB is also a playoff series league, where the best player may only play in 20% of the games, in a 162 game season, in a non-contact sport which I would imagine is much less injury prone. They also have a minor league system (that is very different from the NFL practice squad). 

 

[mse326]

1 hour ago, Shanedorf said:

NFL players have both an agent AND a union to represent their interests - that's pretty effing awesome
There really is no aggrieved party here.

I think you'll find the people most impacted by the draft don't have a union representing their interests and don't have an agent until it's too late to do anything about it.

[ramssuperbowl99]

1 minute ago, ET80 said:

I would argue that it's a combination of this as well as their draft picks (which for the sake of uniformity, we'll call priority assets). I mean, when was the last time we saw a guy go straight to the big leagues? 

Granted, my baseball knowledge is limited to the Astros (NOT gonna talk about IT) but the core guys - Bregman, Correra, Springer - all brought into the fold after a minor league stint, which was their destination after the Astros drafted them.

Yeah what makes baseball and hockey different is the capacity to essentially store future assets in the minors, which you don't have in football. So you can effectively cram multiple years worth of talent acquisition into a few years by stockpiling, then going full out.

If I had to guess, this would actually reduce parity because you have this secondary market almost. Teams who want to prioritize the future get worse now and teams who don't get better now, which widens the talent gap and makes things more predictable. Taking that forward, between that and the lack of salary floor/soft salary cap in baseball, versus hard spending in football, I think you could argue that the draft is more necessary in baseball since you would have greater variance on what constitutes good and bad.

But that's not what we end up seeing. We see the same amount of parity in both.

My take is that this has to do with the high rates of injury and rapid turnover of players. The average NFL career is like 3 years. Baseball is a little longer, but not much. The average starting pitcher is like 30% to have some major injury (month+ DL time) in a season. I don't know what the NFL's injury rate is, but it's high. Compare that to soccer or basketball, where major injuries aren't as common and careers are longer, and there's less parity.

[mse326]

2 minutes ago, Yin-Yang said:

You’re essentially saying that there’s reason to believe that rookie-FAs (in place of the draft) would make teams that routinely make bad decisions, stop making them.

@ramssuperbowl99 can certainly speak for himself but I believe he, and I in my posts, are suggesting that if it isn't bringing those parity benefits then there is no reason to remove the freedom of choice. Not necessarily that said choice will bring more parity.

[ramssuperbowl99]

Just now, mse326 said:

@ramssuperbowl99 can certainly speak for himself but I believe he, and I in my posts, are suggesting that if it isn't bringing those parity benefits then there is no reason to remove the freedom of choice. Not necessarily that said choice will bring more parity.

100% correct. I don't see any tangible difference in NFL parity as a result of the draft, and that begs the question: why have a system in place if the system do the thing it was designed to do?