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+---- Thread: Things I wish I knew before I was a Manager 2 (/showthread.php?tid=1111)
- Sermokala - 2022-04-03
Diagonal drafting. To understand horizontal drafting you have to get into the two main philosophies of who to draft when you're on the clock. You either want to draft for the position of need for the team or draft what the best player on the board is. For those playing at home these are all done in spreadsheets. For SSL I'm just going to go out and assume every team is making google doc spreadsheets. Its the only thing out there worth mentioning for it being free and so shareable.
A verticle drafting board is very simple the concept of "Best player available" formated in a single list. Various weighing procedures for what the team values and the various value of the depth of the draft goes into it but from the onset of the draft, the list becomes sacred. If the first 20 players on the list are taken, you take number 21.
A Horizontal drafting list separates players by position and then lists them in order of ranking by the team in those columns. What this allows a drafter to do is to see what the team needs and then draft the most highly rated prospect in that need. You judge what position you need the most and then select from the list.
See what the problem with both of these previous concepts is that they don't take into consideration the more dynamic nature a draft can develop into. A common feature is when a "run" develops. This is commonly referred to when teams start drafting players at the same position. When a team comes up to draft a GM has to decide to either stick to their draft board or risk not having any players at that position to draft. This happened to me as when I selected Sky Ryze as my first pick as a manager by the time the order came back to me there were no more Center backs available when it came time for me to make my second pick as a manager.
Now what the Patriots did at some point was create a system that combined these two and called it "diagonal drafting". With this system you start with the horizontal drafting board but then use a system to express the degree of need of each position, more than the common degree of ordering them in order of need in a horizontal system in, such as +'s or -'s. Then below the position groups are listed, but also labeled with their relative value such as an being an upper first, lower first or mid second rounder.
Now this seems like a wildly complex system but out of all of them it yields to the development of a draft more than others. As names come off the board players that are rated highly, even not in a position of need will appear. It also exposes when a position of need is about to experience a large drop in relative value compared to the rest of the class, as well as if a position of need is not about to experience a drop in relative value.
Next week I'll do player activity. Or something else if I can think of something better.
As always suggestions or ideas are welcome. If you want me to explain something more just shoot a question and I'll try to help if I can.