*Mocking the Mockers Debrief - Printable Version +- International Simulation Football League (https://forums.sim-football.com) +-- Forum: Community (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=5) +--- Forum: Media (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=37) +---- Forum: Graded Articles (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=38) +---- Thread: *Mocking the Mockers Debrief (/showthread.php?tid=29680)

*Mocking the Mockers Debrief - Gragg9 - 01-26-2021 Welcome back to another bit of light analysis into the S28 DSFL draft! Previously I did a mock draft, found here, and a summary/analysis of all the DSFL mock drafts, which can be found here. I know you’ve probably all read several draft summaries or critiques already, but I strove to make this one unique and interesting even so. This will include my own mock draft review, a review of every mock draft, including some stats, and finally a draft grade for every team. If you have any questions or specific data you’d like to see, let me know in the comments and I can probably dig it up. Let’s start with tearing apart my own mock draft. First Pick  My Pick - Bayley Cowabunga (WR, Pick 12, ) Actual Pick - Luke Quick (WR) Bayley Cowabunga may not have gone in the first round, but I think this pick was damn close. I correctly identified the position the Coyotes would take and put one of the top TPE earners and most active users here. Instead they went with Luke Quick, who I had going to the Birdogs in the first round. As it turns out the Birdogs picked up Bayley just a few picks later. I’m not super familiar with the user, BigRed1580, which may be a big part of the reason I missed this pick. Second Pick  My Pick - IsHe...ReallyInvisible (QB, Pick 2, ) Actual Pick - IsHe...ReallyInvisibile (QB) My first correct pick. This one I was feeling pretty confident in, as I said in my original mock. QB was a position of need, Jpach is an active use, and there is a good history between the user and the Tijuana team. Not a lot else to say about this, except for one thing. For as long as we are both in the league I can not allow IsHe...ReallyInvisible to live down this play https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/797853259326029853/801273515424743444/Prospect_Bowl_Day_3_of_3_and_Championship_Game.gif Third Pick  My Pick - Busch Goose (RB, Pick 41, ) Actual Pick - Anton Bruckner (OL -> CB) I don’t think it’s from a place of self-importance when I say this was the biggest curveball in the first round. I’ll show some data to support that later in this article, but suffice to say no one (who spoke up anyway) saw this coming.  The difficulty of getting this pick right does not excuse my awful mock prediction however. In my mock I identified RB as a position of need for the Grey Ducks. This couldn’t be less true. One of the top players on the team is Madison Hayes, MVP nominee and one of the top earners in the S27 class. At RB I should have realized that a call-up would not be immediate, so it would make no sense for Minnesota to take a RB in the first round, or at all. Busch Goose, my mock pick, would at first glance look like a first round prospect at RB. I learned after the draft that an immediate call-up clause tanked their draft position all the way to the 6th round. Clearly the player will accomplish great things, but that’s not a good deal for DSFL teams. Not to go on and on about my own pick, but since I have some inside knowledge about this pick I might as well. I made it clear to every GM that asked that I was willing to switch positions to anything but QB or K/P. As soon as I went 3rd overall I knew that a position switch was probable. Due to the free cost of switching for rookies and the greater TPE able to be shifted, a rookie OL who is flexible becomes a wildcard in terms of position. (sorry my OL brothers. I’ll always be an OL at heart). Also, I want to assure everyone that a position switch was not forced. The GMs in Minnesota made it abundantly clear that I was free to stay at OL and do whatever I had fun doing in terms of position. A few options were presented and I picked CB based on team need and depth at the position in my draft class (and because it sounds fun). Fourth Pick  My Pick - Luke Quick (WR, Pick 1, ) Actual Pick - Chunt the Badger (WR) This is another one I’m kicking myself over. Once again I correctly identified that the Dallas Birdogs would be taking a Wide Receiver. Obviously with Luke Quick going first overall I could not get this one correct. I completely overlooked Chunt the Badger while putting together the mock though. Somehow I didn’t notice the second highest TPE player of the entire class. Whoopsie. I’m not sure how that would have changed things but I probably would have him in the first round somewhere. I’m not familiar with the user but that is probably more a symptom of my newness rather than a user lack of activity. Just means I’ll be cooking up some nifty mock drafts next season when I get my footing. Fifth Pick  My Pick - Raeni Clarke (QB, Pick 5, ) Actual Pick - Raeni Clarke (QB) Second correct pick!  This one I got for many of the same reasons as pick number two. Quarterback was a position of need for Norfolk, the user is literally the league commissioner, and there is a good history between the team and Bex. The only doubt here is if Norfolk could have waited until the second round to get her. That is something I considered but I don’t think Norfolk would take that risk. Looks like that was the correct call. Sixth Pick  My Pick - Glenn Smart (DE, Pick 6, ) Actual Pick - Glenn Smart (DE) Forget Ultimo, Ultimini, draft position, or possible career awards. Getting this pick will probably be my crowning achievement. Pib (the user), was active in the locker room quite a bit in the lead up to the draft. I don’t think I would have gotten this pick without also being a rookie and noticing that. Glenn Smart also banked up a good amount of TPE with a good position fit. It may seem like a silly thing but their pfp being the union jack was even mentioned during the draft stream, so perhaps it was actually a factor like I mentioned during my mock. I haven’t talked to Pib a lot myself but I think London got themselves a solid rookie here. Seventh Pick  My Pick - Prof. Godfrey Gravity (DT, Pick 17,  ) Actual Pick - Xavier Walls (LB) Xavier Walls absolutely earned his place in the first round. Great TPE, good position fit, and presumably a good user (not super familiar with them). All that being said, #TheProfWasSnubbed. Instead, the top earner of the class so far ended up going to the Coyotes, who drafted 3 of the 8 players in my mock draft. That is not to say this was a bad pick. The subtleties of which defensive positions to prioritize are over my head however, so there’s not a whole lot else I can say. Pythons had a few decent LBs and a few decent DTs. At the end of the day they went with the LB. In the stream they even expressed surprise that Xavier even fell down to pick number 7 in the draft. Eighth Pick  My Pick - Dexter Zaylren (QB, Pick 8, ) Actual Pick - Dexter Zaylren, QB I’m 3 for 3 on Quarterback picks in the first round. Same ol’ story for all three of them. Qb was needed by BBB, good user, history between team and user. I could nearly copy paste the writeup for all three of those picks. I guess it just goes to show how important it is to be friendly in your DSFL locker rooms. Let’s be real though, the real reason for this draft pick is so that BBB can get exclusive Laser predictions™ to boost their TPE. Moving on from reviewing my own mock, let’s make fun of everyone else's. (If you submitted a mock I love you, please keep writing them for future seasons. Doesn’t matter if they’re even right because they’re fun to read and impossible to perfect anyway). Anyway, let’s start with a table showing everyone’s picks with some color coding. There was no Laser quality mocker in this group, but a surprising amount of correct guesses for a DSFL mock. I think the abundance of quality QBs with team connections contributed to a fair amount of those, with CLG and I nailing all of those picks. Interestingly enough the biggest misses came in the first round, with only two of us even picking someone that went in the first 16 picks, and no one picking correctly. Busch Goose is partly to blame with this, but also #TheProfWasSnubbed. As I mentioned before, Luke Quick going first overall is far from the craziest thing that’s happened this draft.  We all just had other (wrong) ideas of who would go there.  Before we go any further, let’s take a look at another table. This one displays how far off each mock pick was. For example, if the mocker said someone would go first but they went 7th, they were 6 picks off. As you can see, even the best mocks were off by an average of an entire round’s worth of picks (bottom row). You may also notice what I mentioned about the first round being tough to predict. If you look to the right side of the table you’ll see that the average first round pick was taken a full 25 picks later. This is only topped by round three which really was a curveball (sorry). Speaking of which, I (Anton Bruckner) was the only player not to be guessed by anyone. I don’t blame anyone because the reasons I was picked are the reasons that DSFL mocks are so difficult. One of those reasons is positions switching. Which segways nicely into the next thing I want to discuss. A huge part of mock drafting is identifying what positions teams need and which they will fill first. With that in mind I wanted to provide a quick visual on who correctly picked positions, regardless of if they picked the right player. Round 3 is a little funky for aforementioned reasons. To be honest there’s not a lot to say here. It’s pretty self explanatory. Perhaps in the future I can look at which positions are taken in the first round over several seasons. Moving away from the mocks now, I want to look at some more general draft tidbits. We’ll stick with the first round for now with a look at the total TPE by all players as of the first update (1/23). These figures should be taken lightly as there are a lot of claims that are pretty flexible here in the offseason. For example, some have had their wiki pages while others have not. Equipment purchases are a little inconsistent at the moment as well at this point in the (off)season. It pains me to say but the big takeaway here is that all but one player is above 140. To be fair, I think I’ll close that gap as things get approved and so on. Chunt the Badger is the second highest earning in the whole class way up there at 170. Again shocked they didn’t get more attention by the mockers. Prof. Godfrey Gravity is the top earner at 172, picked in the third round. (one last time, #TheProfWasSnubbed) Speaking of TPE leaders, let’s take a look at those. You guessed it, more tables (one of these days I’ll mix in a graph if you’re lucky). It’s ok if you don’t count these reiterations as part of the word count, but please keep in mind the draft TPE isn’t super important. Timing of gradings and equipment buying can move these numbers around quite a bit. Anyway, a big point made by this image is that TPE isn’t everything. Far from. Sure you don’t see anyone with 50 TPE up here but half of the top 8 earners were drafted past 30. There are also users that ‘should’ have gone 4th round according to TPE alone being taken in the first. If you want the google sheet that I used for this it can be found here. There will be a few things I haven't shown on it that may come into play when I get my draft grades out in a day or two. Plus you can have a more complete look at the draft class and their stats at time of first update. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about anything above! Let’s end off with a bit more of a lighthearted draft analysis. To bring the fun, I’ll hand off to fellow Grey Duckling, Skorch (aka Andrew Warthol - DE)! Grading the Renders of the S27 DSFL Draft First Round Hey guys, Skorch here! Today I will be grading the renders from the first round of my DSFL Draft class! Full disclosure, these are all my opinions, and if your render is not graded as highly, I mean no harm by it! I am using a regular college grading scale -  C is average, anything above is better than average. None of these players got lower than a C, since no render is particularly below average. Pick 1 - Luke Quick, WR Render: Shaquem Griffin I actually love this render and there is absolutely no bias (I’m a Seahawks fan). This also is a unique render, being the first to use this player as their render. However, some may question his ability to play wide receiver since… well… he only has one hand. But to this I say: Screw the haters Luke, prove them wrong! Grade: B Pick 2 - IsHe… ReallyInvisible, QB Render: Invisible Man This is another excellent render! Completely fits with the player’s name, and using the Scrambler archetype, defenders on the field will have to deal with one of the slipperiest quarterbacks in the DSFL while literally being invisible. I guess you could say they will never see him coming! (I’m really sorry for that one) Grade: A Pick 3 - Anton Bruckner, CB Render: Quenton Nelson Initially, Gragg was drafted as an offensive lineman. So yeah, the Quenton Nelson render was good, but had been used two other times by other offensive lineman. However, he recently switched his position to a cover corner archetype cornerback. And I have to say, seeing a man the size of Quenton Nelson line up against the likes of Eleven Kendrick-Watts or Mike Hunt will definitely be a sight to behold. I was lower on this render before the position switch, but the sheer fear that Bruckner will generate against opposing wide receivers at cornerback is enough to bump him up for me. Grade: B+ Pick 4 - Chunt the Badger, WR Render: A Badger This is another amazing render. Obviously as the name entails, Chunt is literally a badger. He has another completely unique render which fits with the player and generates a few laughs out of me, so he checks all the boxes for me to be highly graded. With the archetype of speed receiver, he will be a nuisance to any cornerback around the league for seasons to come. Grade: A Pick 5 - Raeni Clark, QB Render: Toni Harris I may sound like a broken record at this point, but another great render! Clark uses another completely unique render in Toni Harris, who happens to be the first female to get a college scholarship to be a position player on a college football team. Great render, great story, checks the boxes for me. I’m sure Bex will do great with this one! Grade: B+ Pick 6 - Glenn Smart, DE Render: Damontre Moore or Spencer Nealy? So, this one is a bit more difficult for me to grade. In doing research for this post, I wanted to make sure that I got everyone’s render correct, so I looked at what they posted in the player likeness thread. However, it seems like Pib did not pick a render in that thread! I had to do some sleuthing around to figure out who the render from the draft was, and ended up on Damontre Moore. However, on his wiki page it seems like he has an image of Spencer Nealy. Either of those are fitting renders that also matches with the position, but sadly I am going to grade this one a bit lower because of the inconsistency of the renders. If I am wrong in that assumption, please feel free to correct me! Grade - C Pick 7 - Xavier Walls, DE Render: Anthony Barr Not much to say about this one, pretty solid render. Walls recently switched from linebacker to defensive end, so the position doesn’t exactly match but it is close enough! The only thing to dock this render a bit is the fact that another player in our class also is using this player likeness. Grade - B- Pick 8 - Dexter Zaylren, QB Render: Will Grier Pretty solid, however oddly specific render! Fits the player and archetype that Zaylren is, while also being a unique render. Hopefully Laser can have a better DSFL and ISFL career than Grier’s NFL career! Grade- B Word Count ~ 2850 Split 50/50 between Skorch and Gragg9