Evaluation of Talent

Hi, I was just wondering what stats or advanced stats were used to judge how good a player will be in the next season. For example Tony Pollard, he only has like 700-800 yards which he was ranked like 26th but averages 5.5 yards per carry which is 4th and he is behind a top RB. Is he someone that would be considered good, mid tier, or bad and what would that be based on? I know it also depends on the other players around him like OL and such but just as a base player to player rating. I believe it will help me better evaluate the talent I will be picking in the initial draft if I know what everything is being based on. Thank you

Good question. Without going into too much detail, I will say that we consider both the per play production and how often they are used on their NFL team. So in the example that you cited, if you use him at a similar rate as is used by Dallas, you can expect similar yards per carry. The question is, what would his production be like if he were used for twice as many carries, for example? As the sample size of performance increases, we expect some regression to the player's true mean ypc. We do our best to extrapolate that performance realistically, but in the end it involves some guesswork. Pollard has 130 carries, which a fairly decent sample size, compared to someone who had like 50 carries. So while we may not expect him to be able to sustain 5.5 ypc for 300 carries per season, the drop off may not be too great. There are a lot of other factors involved, but this should give you some hints about how we look at performance.

Yes, thank you for the response, I didn't want to seem like I was trying to get a cheat sheet to winning just wanted to make sure I was trying to make sure that maybe I or someone else couldn't get away with drafting someone who doesn't really play and isn't really good but maybe has a high ypc or something like that. Thank you again