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+---- Thread: *The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) (/showthread.php?tid=46099)
*The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - ztarwarz - 07-26-2023
The ISFL has well over 100 Hall of Famers and a bunch of other great players besides them. So after going over the all time greatest teams, all time greatest players seems like a good next project. And doing it in draft format seemed like an easy way to switch things up a bit!
Note, this draft was a 10 team snake draft. The 10 people who participated, in order of draft position, were Negs, MobiausGrander, Simo, Frost, ModernDuke, Infinite, Rusfan, Zayn, DarknessRising, and myself. I will add in their comments on their picks where it's appropriate.
Pick 1.1: Negs picks the Best QB of All Time, Wendell Sailor, QB
"I like the ocean"
I think the first person to draft is a little unlucky in this alternate reality, as there are 2 players you can't really go wrong with at the QB position, 2 players well above the rest of the pack even among the Hall of Fame roster. Mike Boss and Wendell Sailor are almost definitely going 1st and 2nd in any all time draft, as even in this league QBs are extremely highly valued. It's somewhat funny that among the 13.5 QBs in the Hall (don't know how to count Avon Blocksdale, and Micycle is not in the hall for his HOF QB contributions) a good portion of the best are going to come from outside of it; currently missing from the Hall are the 2 greatest QBs of the last generation, a very efficient and championship winning QB, and the most efficient QB of all time.
In my mind, there's not really a contest here, though. Sailor is easily better than Boss. Sailor threw 7 more Touchdowns and 24 less picks in over 500 less attempts than Mike Boss did. By yards per attempt, Boss is 2nd all time and Sailor is 8th, but by passer rating, Sailor takes the top spot all time and Boss is 14th, ignoring the just started career of Willier Miller for both. Sailor was also a better and more prolific QB in the playoffs than Boss; Sailor falls a bit to 11th, while Mike Boss falls all the way to 40th out of 57. So Sailor's number 1, he's the best QB of all time.
Pick 1.2: MobiausGrander makes the first mistake of the draft, Carter Knight, QB
"Cause I don't know the best QBs and recency bias"
"Welp. I sold didn't I"
Of course, Mike Boss is no slouch himself, he's one of the most prolific QBs ever, has the most passing yardage, the 2nd most TDs, and is actually 40th in completion percentage, really high for the era he was in. As the 2nd team in the draft, you're perfectly fine with Boss here.
The problem is that Mobi didn't draft Mike Boss. Or even the guy most people consider the 3rd best QB ever. He drafted Carter Knight. While this is a mistake and admitted recency bias related, it's not as big or anywhere near as bad as it could have been. Knight is a powerhouse; 5th all time in yards, 9th in y/a, 3rd in TDs, 10th in INTs, and the 2nd highest passer rating of all time, as well as being one of only 4 QBs with a completion percentage above 65%. He also wasn't half bad in the playoffs, at 18th in passer rating and over 7 y/a. I think Knight is a top 5 QB of all time, one of the most efficient QBs ever, the only hole on his resume is the lack of a ring and the fact that he didn't vote himself for MVP. Still, this is at least 2 picks higher than I would have expected Frost's greatest player to go.
Pick 1.3: simo picks the first non QB, Jay Cue Jr, RB
"Undisputed best at his position"
I feel like I might actually dispute that; Tatsu Nakamura at least has an argument with a better ypc and more touchdowns. That being said, if your choice for the best running back ever is the guy with 2000 more rushing yards than anyone else, 3000 more scrimmage yards, 145 touchdowns, 3 MVPs, more major awards than anyone else in league history, and a 4.48 ypc, you won't get that stringent of an argument from me. My only question is, was Running Back the right position to go with? There are a LARGE number of excellent Running Backs in the Hall, 15 in total, and they're not the most important position on the football field anyways. That's really the only possible argument you can have against Jay Cue Jr as a pick.
Pick 1.4: Frost cleans up, Mike Boss, QB
"(Pick 1.5) was my pick until Boss fell"
Boss was widely regarded as the GOAT for most of the ISFL's history. That he has been surpassed by one player does not stop him from being the 2nd best QB. There's not a lot else I can say; he's one of the greatest of all time at the very least and was unfortunate to not be drafted 2nd at the very least. At most, it'd be funny to see JBlaze's reaction to fall all the way to here.
Pick 1.5: ModernDuke picks the biggest outlier, Dermott Lavelle, CB
"Undisputed GOAT"
Yeah, pretty much. Lavelle has 11 more INTs than anyone else in ISFL history, is still 5th on the all time PD charts despite the change to the new sim leading to a boom in PDs, and you also get the guy with the most defensive and special team TDs in league history on top of that. Lavelle is the greatest CB of all time up to this point and doesn't really have competition among the 12 DBs who are in the Hall, or anyone outside of it for that matter.
Pick 1.6: Infinite picks the Best Dual Threat QB, Franklin Armstrong, QB
"OK so 79 speed is a legal hack then, got it"
Armstrong is in the bottom half of passers in the Hall of Fame, or even anyone likely to make the Hall, at least in the regular season. He's 39th in yards, 19th in y/a, 35th in TDs, leading to a 29th place passer rating despite only being 52nd in INTs. But looking at Armstrong as merely a passer leaves out half his skillset. He also had 37 touchdowns and over 4000 yards on the ground. He ran the ball nowhere near as much as any top tier running back, but he ran it enough (over 700 times) and did so to a higher yards per carry than anyone else in the league, in part due to the broken speed stat in the old sim. At 5.7 ypc, Armstrong is over half a yard better than any other player in league history in that stat. Armstrong also turned into a monstrous passer in the playoffs, with the 8th best passer rating and the single best y/a of all time at 8.2; he had a 22-4 TD/INT ratio in the playoffs as well. Getting the consensus 3rd best QB ever as the 6th pick of the draft, Infinite did a wonderful job filling in before we could get a replacement. Such a wonderful job that eventually he got committed and stayed on the entire way through.
Pick 1.7: Rusfan goes for QB5, Cooter Bigsby, QB
"Good QB"
Bigsby, as one of the nearly half dozen Hall of Fame QBs from the old Sim, has a good amount of stats behind his name. He's 10th in yards, 11th in touchdowns, and T-13th in picks. In terms of efficiency, he's a bit worse; 35th in y/a puts him in the bottom 5 of all QBs in the Hall, he's in the bottom 20 all time in completion percent at 57.2%, and his passer rating is 42nd. By my estimation that makes him the 6th worst QB in the Hall in that stat, and that is counting one dual threat QB and McCormick. Then again, Bigsby was also a bit of a dual threat QB; he has the 2nd highest ypc of all time at 5.19. Still, not sure I'd count that for much considering he has only 757 career rushing yards and 4 touchdowns. From my estimation, Bigsby might end up being one of the worst QBs drafted for this draft and will almost definitely be the least efficient. Bigsby does have a couple positives to his name: he went to 5 different Ultimus, won one, and has the 3rd most yards and 4th most touchdowns of any QB in the postseason. He still wasn't very efficient, though; he threw 10 picks, tied for 5th most, is 32nd in y/a at 7.14 (this is out of 57 QBs to play in the playoffs, as a reminder), and his passer rating was similarly low at 30th. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of him, especially as the 5th QB off the board.
Pick 1.8: Zayn picks the Touchdown Machine, Tatsu Nakamura, RB
"still got the touchdown record :triumph:
And is 2nd in everything else and has a good chunk between himself and third
And the rushing TD record would be pretty insane if someone beat it considering Cue Jr needed another 11 to tie"
Nakamura has another claim to be the greatest Running Back of all time; sure, he doesn't have Cue Jr's award Cabinet (there are like 3 people who do) but he does have more TDs than anyone else in league history. Nakamura on the Outlaws in particular has a jawdropping 6 year peak; his lowest ypc total was 4.68, his lowest TD total was 14, and had 3 straight seasons with over 1900 scrimmage yards, topping 2000 in S29. He also has a better YPC than even Jay Cue Jr, at 4.5 exactly he reaches the top 50 all time while being a RB and having a 13 year career. Similarly to Jay Cue Jr, the only possible issue with Tatsu Nakamura as a pick is that there's a lot of good RBs all time.
Pick 1.9: DarknessRising goes a tiny bit homer, Colby Jack, QB
"consistently amazing seasons with top 10 stats in major categories, 6th QB off the board seems fair"
Colby Jack is a player I did not expect to see going in the 1st round, he's just not a player I think about in terms of All Time Greats that highly, but this is still a reasonable pick at the very least. He is almost definitely the best QB of the new sim boom generation, and even with a good portion of his career coming pre-sim change, is still high up in basically all categories you could possibly care about, no matter what exactly you care about. He's 6th in yards, 5th in TDs, T-20th in INTs, all on the 8th most attempts in league history. He also has the 7th highest y/a and passer rating, even counting the still in progress and likely to fall off careers of Willier Miller and Donovan Winters III. While he doesn't have the highest playoff volume, with less than 250 attempts, he does have a decent amount of efficiency over that period (14th in passer rating with barely a falloff, 19th in y/a). He also got a couple rings in the process. There is, however, one thing I'm very much dancing around. There probably has never been a QB who was handed better weapons at the WR position than Colby Jack. One of the best WRs of all time was his WR1, and his WR2 was so good at being a WR2 that he made that into a Hall of Fame career. That being said, when your biggest issue is "his supporting cast was too good", that's something that an All Time Draft isn't likely to make WORSE.
Pick 1.10: Let'splay does a strategy pick, Big Slammu, LB
Pick 2.11: Let'splay continues the strategy picks, Melvin Murder Moose, LB
Big Slammu and MMM are the top 2 LBs of all time by stats, and there’s a big drop off from them. I could have gone with different positions, but as the 10th person in line, you have to do something like this, and staking my claim to both top tier LBs was the way that came to mind. There's also a couple other things; you're almost forced into drafting 4 LBs due to DLine being so thin in ISFL history that you almost have to do a 3-4 defense for maximum effectiveness. I'm not 100% sure this was the best position to do this with, but it was at the very least a move, and I had to do a move of some sort after my randomization gave me the 10th spot.
Pick 2.12: DarknessRising continues the Homerism, Kai Sakura, WR
"biasly, best WR of all time, minimum top 2, only WR in last 25~ seasons to win OPotY"
At absolute worst, I think I could finagle a reason to put both Westfield and Lim above Kai Sakura, but I don't actually believe that and don't think there was anything wrong with Sakura being the first off the board out of the 3. The OPOY, top 5 in all the volume stats for receiving, rings to spare, basically the only thing you can possibly ding him for is that the new sim boom led to a big explosion in WR stats and there are literally a half dozen players from his generation that made the Hall as a result. Even then, though, Sakura was the best of them.
Pick 2.13: Zayn picks the other infamous cheese strat, Danny Grithead, S
"Grithead is a Monster, and is the ONLY DB to win MVP"
The infamous cheese strat here was the "Safety at LB" trick; a lot of great stats came from that until it was banned. Still, in terms of people listed as safeties, there's not a lot of competition to Grithead's claim as the greatest ever. By my count, there's 45 picks until the next Safety is picked. That's one of the largest gaps between picks, and one of the larger ones is the fact that no QB was picked after the first round for over three quarters of the draft. Grithead has over 200 more tackles than any other safety, was just tied for Pass Deflections with a guy who spent a significant amount of time playing at CB and played 48 more games, is 2nd in sacks by 3 and has a gap of 10 to anyone else, and even managed to put together one of three 10 INT seasons at Safety despite not getting that many for his career.
Pick 2.14: Rusfan picks the 1B to Darkness' 1A, William Lim, WR
"One of the best receivers to ever do it it will be hard for any team to matchc him defensively"
Lim in my opinion is an easy pick for the 3rd or 4th best receiver ever, and as such I think Rus might have been a tiny bit Colorado homer to pick Lim, who played at the same time he did on the Yeti. But what Lim did makes him an easy top tier receiver, and while others do beat him on peak in other ways, it's still hard to argue with a guy who got to 8 pro bowls, won 3 positional excellency awards even if I disagreed on a couple of them, has 3 seasons in the top 10 all time for yards, and even got a 1st team and 2nd team all pro on the inaugural lists; most of his best days were behind him by the time we started or he would have been on more.
Pick 2.15: Infinite continues to be the League Boomer, Owen Taylor, RB
"didn't realize taking the best RB of all time was gonna be so controversial"
Perhaps this is being a bit unfair to Infinite, except that it's a joke he made himself later on. Owen Taylor is easily a candidate for the greatest RB ever, albeit efficiency in the old sim makes that stat really hard to judge. But he played until S15, managed to amass 9 pro bowls, 6 positional excellency awards, and 2 OPOYs. He reached 23 touchdowns in 2 seasons, a total that ties every other running back in league history combined. He's 7th in rushing yards and 3rd in rushing touchdowns, and is at bare minimum one of the 3 best running backs from the days before the sim switch.
Pick 2.16: Modern Duke picks another complete outlier, Paul DiMirio, TE
"Positional value baby"
Speaking of positional value, that's the only reason Paul isn't a good argument for the best ISFL player ever. He played TE, and did so via the WR loophole. This was the early days without a lot of players, meaning it was much, much easier for Paul to garner awards in the way he did. But nobody in the history of the ISFL has been better at getting the 2nd tier of awards. 12 pro bowls over a 12 year career. 7 straight positional excellency awards, setting records for both most awards and most awards in a row for those awards over the course of their existence. In terms of raw stats, he has more than 2000 receiving yards of lead over the next TE and is 16th including WRs, has the most receptions ever not just among TEs, has 10 more TDs than the next most TE, and even has a good number of pancakes for the 2nd most in the old sim. He didn't get any major awards, but I don't think any TE has. There's no real question that DiMirio is the greatest TE ever and as such, deservedly goes 1st among that position.
Pick 2.17: Frost goes for the greatest DLine from the old sim, Dan Miller, DT
"The Goat of DLine, has some crazy statistical seasons at DT"
Miller only played for 9 seasons in a 14 game season. In those 126 games, he put together more sacks than anyone else has at DT by 25, enough to be ranked 5th for sacks overall. He had a 19 sack season and a 24 sack season, got 2 DLotY awards, 6 pro bowls, and a DPOY. He managed to get 9 sacks in a single game once. So what's the mark against him? TFLs, for one. He only got 17 over his career, which is 50 behind the current record, and that's not just an Old Sim vs New Sim thing, there are a number of players who played even less than he did, all in the old sim, with more TFLs. Still, if you're looking for a sack machine in the days in which DTs were sack machines, Miller's the best choice. That being said, there are a few players with really good arguments against him for the best DT or DL ever.
Pick 2.18: Simo picks one of those with a really good argument argument, Chuck Roth, DT
"Insert picture of Roth's 5th straight positional excellency award"
Roth manages to have the 2nd longest stretch of straight awards, winning DTotY every year from S31 to S35. He got 8 pro bowls and 7 1st team All Pros, and I wouldn't be surprised if that second mark was a record considering the comparative lack of history for the All Pro teams. He wasn't a sack machine compared to Miller, but he's 6th all time with only one guy above him since the sim switch, has 67 TFLs, 17 more than anyone else at the position, and has 20 more tackles than anyone else, though that one is nowhere near as much of an outlier as he is with TFLs. He's also high up on the forced fumble list with 18, which might have been a record before S42. It's still tied for 3rd, and he has the most fumble recoveries ever with 12. By my count, he's the best DT ever, and only doesn't have the major awards to back it up because the position has changed. He was either the best or 2nd best DT for 7 of his 11 seasons, and that's something matched arguably only by DiMirio in league history, and the league was much more developed in S26 than it was in S6.
Pick 2.19: MobiausGrander gets a record holder with a weird stat, Bender Rodriguez, LB
Mobi didn't leave a comment for this one, so I get to talk about it. And all I can really say is...this is a pretty good pick! Two 2nd team all pros, 2 first team all pros, somehow only 3 pro bowls, the most tackles and TFLs ever for a linebacker, leading all players in tackles, is 6th all time in LB sacks, and also is high up in other stats. 9th in INTs, 12th in PDs, and T-4th in Fumble Recoveries. He's not exactly high up in peak, all of those stats came in over 200 games played, but this is a pick I can't complain about, neither in player nor strategy; in total 35 linebackers ended up being drafted and Rodriguez is at least not an awful choice as the 3rd LB off the board.
Pick 2.20: Negs wraps up the round by getting an old GOAT, Bradley Westfield, WR
Negs also did not have a comment, but in this case it's not as if he needed one. The first player of a legendary user in bWestfield, Bradley managed to gain 4 WRotY awards, 9 pro bowls over a 10 year career, and is still 6th in receiving yards and 2nd in touchdowns. He's 9 touchdowns behind the leader with 40 less games, and is only 2000 yards behind the leader in 52 less games. He's even 6th in yards per reception. While he doesn't have the major awards, he's arguably the greatest WR ever. Pairing him with Wendell Sailor will make for a great offense.
RE: The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - zaynzk - 07-26-2023
Grithead >
RE: The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - Big Edd - 07-26-2023
"2nd best DT for 7 of his 11 seasons" but still gets chosen over that other guy
RE: The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - ztarwarz - 07-26-2023
Edd you cannot read. Or at best are selectively reading. It's either the best or second best. And if I go by positional excellency awards he was the best for 5 of those 7 seasons.
also it's not usually the same guy
and it wasn't you anyways
RE: The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - 37thchamber - 07-27-2023
Positional shenanigans and sim cheesing in the old days definitely skews things for some of these picks, but even then, the players mostly had the attributes to do well in their "proper" positions/roles anyway.
Some interesting draft strategies on display though.
RE: The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - Big Edd - 07-27-2023
(07-26-2023, 05:48 PM)ztarwarz Wrote: Edd you cannot read. Or at best are selectively reading. It's either the best or second best. And if I go by positional excellency awards he was the best for 5 of those 7 seasons.
also it's not usually the same guy
and it wasn't you anyways
jokes on you i own every DT from my era
RE: *The All Time Draft (Rounds 1 and 2) - shrub02 - 07-27-2023
(07-26-2023, 02:56 PM)ztarwarz Wrote: Rodriguez is at least not an awful choice as the 3rd LB off the boardbest compliment I've received all week
