We've opined re: the relative merits of trading up to draft Georgia's A.J. Green. Heck, according to D-Led, it's a real possibility if we're willing to pay the price. My criticism is and always has been twofold: (1) it'd take too much (i.e., too many draft picks) to make it happen and (2) there's no guarantee he won't bust like my pants seams on Turkey Day.
ESPN recently devised what they're calling Playmaker Score 2.0. It's basically their formula-driven method for predicting how successful certain NFL prospects will be. Can't get you the full results/rankings because I don't have Insider. But Football Outsiders shared this little nugget:
The new Playmaker Score does more to account for players who go deep with a high yards per pass figure, and it adjusts based on the historical record of receivers coming out of each conference. The resulting system has A.J. Green as the top receiver in this year's draft, but wonders why Julio Jones had so few touchdowns at Alabama.
Curious how the formula works? Something like this:
The formula starts by multiplying four factors together:
* Career yards per game.
* Career yards per catch.
* Career touchdowns.
* Team yards per attempt.Divide that product by team passes per game, and divide THAT product by 20. Then multiply the result for a conference factor to adjust for quality of teammates/opposition/weather:
ACC 2.087
ND/Big Ten 1.463
SEC 1.331
NAQ 1.088
Big 12 0.853
Pac-10 0.807
Big East 0.736
To be honest, I still think we'd have to give up too much to land Green, though this does make me question the whole he-could-be-a-bust argument I've been pushing. In my defense, they seemingly give a lot of credit to ACC receivers, and that hasn't worked out well for Al Davis. Curious what y'all think. Discuss!