ESPN is officially garbage

espn sucks. they're showing dipshit fans acorss teh nation, and asking dipshits 1-1000 who they chose for theri first pick, and why. does anyone care? this is what's wrong with fantasy. all of a sudden, people think they know shit just because they pick the obvious choice. please. if you dont pick TO, that's fine, i dont care why. if you let your emotions run your decisions, go shopping with some girls then. i dont care if you dont like him. and if you do pick him, big deal. you'd have to be an idiot not to. lets go round up some madden dipshits and ask them why they decided to run on 3 and 8 instead of pass. we're one step away from ultimate homoness.

lets get real.

fascinating article at msnbc about how #1 picks are of less value than #2 picks. There's some serious insight from Belichick also.
Get it Here.
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No. 1 picks are poor value, study indicates
It might be years before 49ers get value out of top draft choice Smith


RALEIGH, N.C. - The San Francisco 49ers spent weeks studying their choices before picking Alex Smith with the No. 1 selection in this year’s draft — a decision that will cost the team $49.5 million.

It might be years before the team knows if that six-year deal with Smith is money well spent.

But a pair of economists say the Niners would have ended up with a lot more had they spent the money in the second round.
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In a study under review for publication, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler and Yale University’s B. Cade Massey applied their science to the annual task facing general managers in the NFL. Using statistics such as “yards gained per dollar of compensation,” the pair concluded the NFL’s top draft picks are overpriced — an insight they shared with NFL teams this spring and summer.

“We’ve been contacted by a number of teams. In fact, we’ve spent some time with one team,” said Massey, who left a position at Duke this summer. “Whether any decision makers are buying it and are going to act on it, we don’t know yet.”

He and Thaler admit when they tell team executives they’d be better off with “the middle pick of the second round rather than the middle pick of the first round, some of them think we’re crazy.”

“We’re not saying that (lower-valued) player’s better, but he’s paid so much less that the team does better on him than they do on the top guy,” he said. “It’s not necessarily that players are overvalued or draft picks are overvalued, it’s that high draft picks are overvalued relative to low draft picks.”

The difference is so stark when salary is considered, Massey said, that the value a team can expect from the top pick in the second round is better than the top choice of the first, such as Smith.

“We thought that the value of the draft picks would decline gently, but instead they actually increase into the second round,” he said.

The pair’s research comes in a field of study that examines how people make economic decisions and the point at which using reason and the evidence of past results breaks down to relying on intuition and chance.

Economists say humans are often overconfident about their own abilities and knowledge, and they fail to consider a wide enough range of possibilities before making an important choice. That’s why many people believe they’ll buy and sell costly technology stocks or resort homes at just the right time, or that a player selected in the first round is inherently more valuable than one picked in the second.

In their study, Massey and Thaler single out the New England Patriots as a franchise that understands that buying expensive stars imposes costs elsewhere on the roster.

The Patriots have won three Super Bowl titles in the past four years, led by quarterback Tom Brady. The sixth-round draft pick who was a fourth-stringer as a rookie might be the poster boy for the economists’ research: Brady has the best record as a starter of any quarterback with at least 40 starts in the game’s modern era.

Until he signed a new contract in May, Brady was a financial bargain. His previous contract had a total value of about $30 million; it was worth less than the signing bonus alone given to Indianapolis quarterback and two-time league MVP Peyton Manning when he signed a new contract last year.

But Patriots coach Bill Belichick argues teams don’t have much choice about how much to pay draft picks. First-round picks may be overpaid, as the economists suggest, but the league has a pay scale that largely predetermines how much rookies can expect.

“The 10th guy makes more than the 11th. The eighth guy makes (less) than the seventh guy. The 15th guy makes more than the 16th guy does,” Belichick said.

“Wherever a guy is picked, that pretty much represents where his contract is going to be as a rookie. So, in terms of overpaying or underpaying those guys, you have a rookie pool. Every team pretty much has that money allotted to sign the picks that they have based on the slots they were taken in. It comes out pretty, pretty equitably.”

And there are other reasons than on-field performance for drafting early, said Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and an expert on sports economics. The fans, just as much as the executives in the front office, want the stars of the college game to play for their team on Sundays.

“It may be that teams opt to go for high-round picks because it generates more fan excitement and strengthens the fans’ perception of the legitimacy of the owners’ competitive effort,” Zimbalist said.

Massey and Thaler wondered the same thing, but concluded there just aren’t that many players capable of making up for their high salary with what they bring to the team off the field.

“In any case, if high draft picks had more fan appeal this should show up in their (veteran) contracts, and we find no evidence for it,” they said.
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.