Football Outsiders Career forecast: R.Wilson highest ever

[lukerguy]

Actually you are incorrect. The asterisk is twofold: 1) Transfer 2) Height. The transfer one is ridiculous to me: NC State and Wisc are both big team school who face top teams on a regular basis.

The LCF calculation doesn't include height. I took the article's mention of height as an aside about why Wilson might be drafted lower than his LCF number suggested he should, but it was not a factor in his number being inflated like transferring was.

The original argument was that the asterisk was solely to do with the fact that he transferred school. I disagree. If that was the only reason, then they wouldn't have started the part regarding his height with

There's also the issue of height

. The words ALSO and ISSUE do not lead the reader to believe that this is an issue "aside about why Wilson might be drafted lower than his LCF". Rather, they lead the reader to believe that the entire LCF score has an asterisk for two reason- one of them being transfer, and the other being height.

 

[bmorepunk]

There is a limited data set for quarterbacks to try and do this level of analysis, so this rating system is not well thought out in the first place.

 

[Scottemojo]

He still was at a major college program and increased his production tremendously. Moreover, his production was amazing in absolute terms. You might be able to make the case that the model's predictive ability is somewhat diminished, because it hadn't been tested for this scenario, but to discount it entirely? That's bizarre. Not even a sleeper? Before this result, you could have said Lewin was unpredictable for this case. Now we have more information. Now we know that you COULD NOT throw out Wilson's results. We now know that the rationalizations to do so were absolutely incorrect. They were laughable on the face of it and now empirically wrong.

The thing about height is important because you have to understand why the author was so eager to rationalize away an unexpected result. The rationalization (transfer) was poor, so there must be more to it. And, of course, that's the height and especially the loud "expert" opinion regarding height's impact.

I went back and looked at public comments on the draft cards for Wilson, and it was incredible the things NC State fans and Wisconsin fans were saying. Someone said, right after he was drafted, "Wilson will be the opening day starter for Seattle." The people who watched him week in and week out knew exactly what Wilson was capable of...and they've been proven irrefutably right.

You should post more.
The interview of Wilson's college coach right after he was drafted was like those public comments. He said that in an open competition, Wilson would win the job straight up over anyone else, but that the first time he met Wilson, he wondered where the rest of the guy was. It took all of one practice before he forgot about the height.

Russell says it all the time, "My height does not define my skill set".

 

[Evil_Shenanigans]

I would think that his transfer would be more heavily (+) weighted in their equation(s). The ability to move from one system to an entirely different one would lead me to believe that its a pretty good indicator of that players ability to adapt to the pro game in general, and a particular teams personnel and offensive scheme in particular. Interesting article though.

 

[Navyhawkfan187]

Wilson isn't called "The Asterisk" in the Lewin Career Forecast because of his height. It's because a huge part of the LCF is the change in production between the players' junior and senior seasons, and Wilson transferred schools between those seasons. I remember this article from before the draft, and it's cool that Wilson had a higher score than anyone else, but when one of the main factors in the evaluation is improvement in stats between junior and senior seasons, that evaluation won't say a whole lot about someone with a variable like transferring schools after the junior year.

Actually you are incorrect. The asterisk is twofold: 1) Transfer 2) Height. The transfer one is ridiculous to me: NC State and Wisc are both big team school who face top teams on a regular basis.

There's also the issue of height, another data point where there's nobody in our data set that can be compared to Wilson. At first, it seems strange that LCF doesn't include a variable to discount short quarterbacks, but when you look at the data set that went into creating LCF the reasons are pretty clear. There's no penalty for being 5-foot-11, like Wilson is, because there are no quarterbacks in the data set who are shorter than 6-foot-0. There's no penalty for being only 6-foot-0 because the two quarterbacks who are 6-foot-0 are Drew Brees and Michael Vick.
Quarterbacks who are Wilson's height simply don't get drafted in the first three rounds of the draft, period. The FO master database only includes three quarterbacks who are below six feet tall: Seneca Wallace, Joe Hamilton, and Flutie. That's a fourth-round pick, a seventh-round pick, and an 11th round pick from 25 years ago. Even if we go all the way back to 1991, the only quarterbacks taken in the first six rounds at 6-foot-0 or shorter were Vick, Brees, Wallace, Joe Germaine (fourth round, 1999), and Troy Smith (fifth round, 2007).

It's also based on the fact that they figured he wouldn't be in the top 3 rounds. LCF only accounts for guys that were taken in rounds 1-3. They had Wilson pegged as a 4th or lower. If you go through and read the comments on the article there were a lot of people asking if Schatz was going to update the list to include Wilson since he was a 3rd round pick.