Why is everyone looking at me on this?? Lol.

Fwiw, I did make it halfway through the third quarter of my 86 game .. lol

I don't see how you learn much about what works and what doesn't if you don't watch the games.

To me, it's vital if you want to improve.

That said, you (parsh) have obviously done well without it.

Exactly, sometimes a back up player actually plays better than a starter and the stats don't reflect this. Or you find there are players that don't suit a style of play, how can you tell that from Stats?

Just curious on this. How would the stats NOT reflect better play?

Sure, he might have less Attempts, being the Back Up and all, but his Average should be better. That's directly noticeable in the Stats.

I see my Starting CB was Targeted 12 Times and allowed 6 Receptions, and my Back Up was Targeted 3 Times and allowed 0 Receptions. Leads me to believe my Back Up CB might need more Snaps to see if this continues.

My Starting RB has a 4.2 YPC, my Back Up has a 5.3... so I go to PBP and see what Runs they were called to Carry on.

Through Stats and PBP you can get most of the Skill Position Info you'll ever need to know. It's OL really where you need to watch the film... and even then PBP might (might) be enough to figure it out.

With that said, I watch the games because I enjoy it. :D But since I can't just hover over some one to see their Name it's really time consuming to use it as a scouting tool. And since it doesn't overlay Assignments on the Game, it's hard to tell if some one missed an assignment and the like.

I'd LOVE their to be a Play Overlay Option where the Field would show the Routes and the Defensive Assignments.

some ideas on scouting:

- Don't show any concrete numbers for ratings.

- Show combine and pro-day numbers. Yes, both.

- Add a scouting department. This department will take orders throughout the season and scout players/positions/teams/conferences. Each scout will be better at different aspects of the job. If they are scouting specific players, then they come back with number ranges on specific attributes. e.g. 55-80 tackling. Depending on the skill and how much the team has scouted that player, the range becomes smaller. Every player scouted could also get an analysis that tells us stuff like their work ethic and frame and a sentence or paragraph describing their potential. And with that info, we get rid of volatility (and maybe even the max potential ratings).

- It would also be cool to have their college stats where we can view them.

Again, just thoughts. I realize the amount of work and resources to add this to every league is enormous.

I've been thinking a lot about this, and here's an idea I'd like to float:

1) Mask player ratings. Each player will be assigned an independent 'error' range that determines the size of the scouting error. It would be from 25% of the bar to 60% of the bar. On the player card, you would see this bar for each attribute, and each attribute's max value would be somewhere inside that range, but there would be absolutely no indication as to where within that range it might be.
2) Scout points - I've been leery to implement something like this because of the potential for encouraging multis, but what if when you scouted a player it unlocked it for everyone? So, basically, each team has, say, 5 players that they can scout. If every team scouts their 5 player allotment, 165 players would get scouted. (That might be too much, maybe it should just be 2 scout points per team) Scouting a player would reduce the scouting error by half - so if the player's unscouted range was 30%, it would reduce it to 15%; if their range was 50%, it would reduce it to 25%.
3) As soon as you draft the player and he appears on your team, the scouting rating is removed and replaced with the regular ratings.

This would make high draft picks even more risky - do you take that player that could be rated anywhere from 50 to 100, or do you take the one who is between 70 and 85? - and would hopefully make later round draft picks more interesting - ideally this would improve the quality of picks in the later rounds by increasing the likelihood of less quality picks in the early rounds. Of course, once the draft is over, all remaining rookies would have their scouting masks removed (which would also possibly make late free agency more interesting as there would be more likelihood of good players having gone undrafted).

Thoughts?

I like #1. It would definitely affect how I would approach rounds 1 and 2.

I suggested something like #2 above, but I think that you're right in that it would encourage nefarious behavior among players. Or it would produce hilarious behavior for leagues where all the owners just decided to collude together and post all of the players they had scouted.

I like #1.

#2 is less appealing, but I understand the reasoning. I just would prefer everyone use their own scouting, but I do see how that would give people more reason to create multis.

Also on #2, will the scouting take affect immediately or at a sim time? If they happen at a sim and two owners select the same player, will one of the owners get that scout point back or will a different player be scouted at random or something else?

My thought would be that the scouting would unlock it immediately - maybe you could only do it during early free agency. Then, at the end of early FA any unused scouting points would be randomly distributed among any unscouted players, so all scouted players would be available to everyone from the end of early FA to the first draft pick which normally is at least 24 hours.

SO...... potentailly we could get a Tom Brady in round 6, cause this is whats wrong with the latter rounds