[RyFo18]

Originally Posted by Prison Bitch

I have no idea what the hell you're talking about here. I assume "EV" is expected value? If it is, how on gods earth would anyone be able to determine any "EV" for Chase Daniel who's never evne played? There's no way to ascertain if he can provide anything or not at this level. 9/10 when that's the case, it's because the guy sucks.


And who cares about keeping a damn draft pick anyway? We obviously didn't care about the #34 overall. This newcomer is chewing up valuable payroll space that we could be directing towards actual needs on the team. Guys who will guarantee to play. This move is really stupid. Insane in fact.

Originally Posted by Ebolapox

WTF is EV? _______ Value?

Yeah so EV is expected value. Gambler's who do +EV things are long-term winners...one example.

So this FantasyDouche character I've talked back and forth with a lot. I've had him on my podcast, he's written a book, and he's a highly analytical guy. Basically his premise is very much stats based and he's essentially shown that you can take all of the data that's readily available from past players and use it to find how similar players will perform in the NFL. It's not perfect, but it's basically shown that it's as good, if not better than just watching lots of tape.

Before I go any further though, his real contention is that teams should be using analytics along with scouting to analyze players and yield the best possible outcomes...i.e. be even more +EV.

Anyway, he elaborated more. I won't post the fancy tweets just since they take up a lot of room, but here's what he had to say:

The Chiefs got a guy who has a pretty similar resume to Geno, has NFL experience, they didn't give anything up

Here's an explanation that I'm not saying is necessarily true, but fits all the facts.

The Chiefs liked Chase Daniel and felt like there was a chance that he might be their guy. But they're not 100% confident.

So they pick up Alex Smith as a hedge and give up a 2nd. and some other stuff that's conditional. But, if Daniel outplays Smith...

Then the conditional picks go away, and the Chiefs still got a starting QB for only a 2nd round pick and salaries.

And then even Alex Smith's salary is probably something that they could get away from after this year.

Like I said, can't say that's what happened, but it does fit all of the facts.

Also, Chase is almost as big as Geno, and they have similar college resumes (Geno threw less INTs though to be fair).

He also did an article on his site about Chase Daniel's NFL comparables.

Just a quick note here on the news that Chase Daniel is going to be backing up Alex Smith in Kansas City. I remembered that Daniel’s name had popped up in a QB screen with some other guys who had all started multiple games in the NFL, so I thought I would publish that information on the off-chance that it’s interesting.
When I was running QB comps for Geno Smith, I saw Daniel’s name in a group that was pretty impressive for a college QB similarity set. Trying to project QBs to the NFL is a difficult task whether you’re a scout or a spreadsheet jockey. The NFL hasn’t been very good at figuring out how to draft QBs, and even algorithmic projection systems like Football Outsiders’ Lewin Career Forecast only even tries with QBs chosen on the first three rounds of the draft. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be interesting to look anyway. Also, half of the reason that I continue to look at college QBs is because I hope that I can eventually figure out a system for projecting QBs. Based on the velocity information that I’ve seen at Ourlads, I do think that if we had velocity information for every prospect we would be a lot closer to having a serviceable QB model. If you follow that link you’ll see that Daniel was recorded at 57 MPH, which is the upper end of the range.

In any case, here is Chase Daniel’s name with some guys that he was pretty similar to in terms of college numbers. The common threads that run through this group are as follows: high completion percentage, high number of career college starts, great TD/INT ratio both in their final year and throughout their careers, high number of yards/game in their final season. One area that you’ll note that Daniel is different from these guys is that he’s quite a bit smaller. Also, he doesn’t like hot tubs nearly as much as one guy on the list.

I can't paste in the table, but you can see it here. The names on the list are:

Ben Roethlisberger
Andrew Luck
Kyle Orton
Philip Rivers
Matt Leinart
Kevin Kolb
Geno Smith

So there's good and bad names. Basically what he's getting at is that the Chiefs got a similar player to Geno and just had to pay him some money. Most people will understandably call that outlandish, and remember, this is only based on what they've done statistically for the most part. Nevertheless, based on this analysis I think you can definitely call the move +EV and I understand why the Chiefs did it. We have no idea who will be the better pro, Geno or Chase, but they sacraficed much less to find out.

(This post is going to get laughed at so hard, but it makes sense to me so rip away!)

Originally Posted by King_Chief_Fan

good question....we could have paid Orton that much to stay last year (Dallas paid him that I think) and he would make a better back up than Daniel....shoot, he probably could have been the starter

Orton is making $5M a year.