This thread falls into the common trap of judging decisions based on outcomes. Deterministic thinking is the wrong way to evaluate things because it fails to take into account the role that fortune plays in our lives.
If I bet you even odds that a fair dice will roll a six then it is a good decision for you to take that bet regardless of what I end up actually rolling. So what happens if I do roll sixes after all? You would lose the bet, plenty of people would make posts labeling it a bone-headed move on your part, and some of them could even leverage that sort of analysis into a job in sports talk radio.
The only rational way to evaluate decisions is to look at them probabilistically. Compare the entire distribution of outcomes that we could have gotten from the Percy trade with the price that we paid. We only saw one of the dozens of possibilities (some could have been even worse) and so this isn't an obvious answer. And that's the important point: it's difficult to evaluate single decisions without the benefit of a time machine where you can see what all of the possible outcomes would be. You have to look at the overall body of work. It's easy to say that Percy was a bad outcome but there is a huge amount of guesswork that goes into deciding whether he was a bad decision.
Osprey12":2o8omjh4 said:
Charlie whitehurst, Matt Flynn, Percy harvin, Cary Williams, and the jury is still out on graham.
Those go in on one side of the balance sheet and you could throw in a few more: Moffitt, Howard, EJ Wilson, Durham, CMike, etc. However, even with a 90% chance of getting a hit on a player (great decision) there would be one in every ten that just busted out anyway. You can't say that these X players did not work and were therefore bad decisions.