LOBBS Roster Rating System

LOBBS
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LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby LOBBS » Fri Mar 29, 2019 1:37 pm

Some of you may be familiar with my methodology behind this system that I outlined many moons ago in the M08 Roster section. I won't rehash too much of that here. Madden 19 inspired me to finally finish it though and push out a first release.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/omb7g1he3aumwu3/ROSTER-LOBBS2018?dl=0

It's based on the Super Bowl week EA roster.

Long and short of my system is to adjust players to more closely match their combine/pro day stats. I built a massive database of player results from those drills and developed formulas that are pretty close to what EA uses as a base. From their 40 times with 10 and 20 yard splits, 3-cone and shuttle, vertical and broad jump I could predict their EA rating within a point or so. The problems with EA's rosters occur at the extremes of the rosters. There are countless mid to low round draft picks, undrafted free agents, etc. where it is obvious that EA just attempted to get a name into the game but didn't pay and mind to the real athlete's benchmarks. Or times where they purposely crippled a player's physical ratings to force them to slot in properly on a depth chart. This is fine and all for Play Now and Online matches but those mid to low players matter in franchise play. My method fixes them so that they have a reasonable opportunity to be productive players on a roster or possibly develop into starters. On the other end of the spectrum are the stars and superstars that EA over boosted their physical ratings to drive their OVRs and desired improvements relative to the pack up rather than skill ratings. Admittedly, EA has added many more skill ratings over the years and has improved a bit on those but they'd already set the baseline for an elite player's physical ratings prior to doing so and chose not to revisit them when they added the additional skills. My system also adjusts for that and moves players back closer to their combine/pro day numbers. The "points lost" when downrating physical traits were moved to the appropriate existing and newly added skills ratings.

The other big thing is strength ratings. It annoyed me it M08 and still does to this day. Lineman with strengths in the upper 70s/lower 80s, RBs as strong as lineman, weak TEs, etc. are all gone. I built a new method based on height, weight, BMI (are they built like a brick shithouse or long and lean?) and athleticism (based on combine/pro day data). I get way more in depth of my reasoning in the M08 roster thread though I've tweaked a few things since then.

For those that want to dig into the math I've posted my spreadsheet below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jpd9y6qnc3pg2cf/LOBBS2018.xlsx?dl=0

The bulk of the player's OVRs don't change much but a point or two in this roster compared to the EA roster it's built from. Some of the player's that EA just threw together do jump several points up or down on their OVR. I've blended my data to varying proportions with the original EA ratings to simulate how a player looks in pads versus in shorts at their combine/pro day. But in the end, my goal was to fairly rate every player across the board by tying their physical traits back to the most consistently gathered and widely accepted set of data.

LOBBS Roster Rating System

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rogerjinx
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Re: LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby rogerjinx » Fri Mar 29, 2019 9:42 pm

Hey mate. Love your work. Can I ask your permission to use your system when I translate M19 ratings to M08 for the upcoming roster for Madden 08?

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Re: LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby LOBBS » Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:35 pm

rogerjinx wrote:Hey mate. Love your work. Can I ask your permission to use your system when I translate M19 ratings to M08 for the upcoming roster for Madden 08?


No problem at all. I posted the spreadsheets so the community could use it whichever way they saw fit.

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jose21crisis
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Re: LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby jose21crisis » Fri Apr 12, 2019 8:05 pm

These definitely look interesting. There are some changes that look a bit odd (Never though of Drew Brees as a "fast" guy, for example, or of Ben Roethlisberger as an agile guy, but, hey, if the combine proved that), but on the whole, they look promising. Something I'd like to ask is if you have planned to expand the spreadsheet to more ratings, like the Catching ratings, the Route Running ratings and so on. Additionally, I would also ask if this could possibly work on M08, because if it could, it could really help to create draft classes, not just rosters (It'd like to see how the base M08 roster when it goes through this system).
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Re: LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby LOBBS » Mon Apr 15, 2019 1:17 pm

jose21crisis wrote:These definitely look interesting. There are some changes that look a bit odd (Never though of Drew Brees as a "fast" guy, for example, or of Ben Roethlisberger as an agile guy, but, hey, if the combine proved that), but on the whole, they look promising. Something I'd like to ask is if you have planned to expand the spreadsheet to more ratings, like the Catching ratings, the Route Running ratings and so on. Additionally, I would also ask if this could possibly work on M08, because if it could, it could really help to create draft classes, not just rosters (It'd like to see how the base M08 roster when it goes through this system).


I originally started working on this for Madden 08 so it'll work with both. The physical ratings between the two games are the same. I did at one time plan to do much, much more with this. Dig into some advanced statistics from Pro Football Focus and such. I got started down that path, would get frustrated with how long it takes to gather and transfer the data to a spreadsheet and digest it into something useful for Madden then step away from it for awhile. Madden 19 kinda re-lit the fire to at least finish the physical ratings side of things. The skill ratings in Madden 19 really aren't too bad. EA has gotten a little better in that regard over the years.

I'm actually finishing up a Draft Class Fixer spreadsheet to reshape the Madden 19 generated draft classes to work with my roster and to bring the ratings of those to be more in line with the rosters based on real life players. Basically, looking at the ranges for each position and each trait and comparing them to the matching ranges of the base roster. Trying to make the generated rookies feel less like the template formulated guys they are and more like the players you start a franchise with.

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Re: LOBBS Roster Rating System

Postby ianjones » Thu Aug 08, 2019 12:23 pm

I think BMI is a good place to go if you don't have the combine data, but combine data should trump any algorithm created by BMI. You've got workouts and mechanics that make up the difference, so it's perfectly legit to have a LB or HB that's as strong as a DL or even an OL sometimes, or as fast as a WR or CB, even though the BMI difference is pretty great. I'll use myself as an example with speed. I played baseball and soccer growing up and was fortunate to learn really good running mechanics. while, yes, everyone can run, there are certain mechanics that make you much faster than another person regardless of their leg development or BMI. So, as an adult, at 6'0" 165lbs I could outrun my Texas Heeler in a 40 yd dash even though i had never worked out a day in my life outside of a few push ups and sit ups and my legs were shamefully skinny. In fact, i was so fast that when i joined a slow pitch softball league, they banned stealing bases the next year because by the time the pitcher lobbed the ball to home plate and the catcher picked it up, i could round second and be close enough to third that i could'nt be thrown out in time. Now fast forward a few years later, i'd gotten my own weight machine and started working out and my weight was up to 180. Even though my BMI had changed, my speed had not. I was just as fast at 180 as i was at 165 and now, thanks to some leg workouts, i could dunk a basketball. Fast forward a couple more years and I'm 35 years old and something has happened to me...my metabolism has slowed...life got busy so i wasnt working out as much, and now i'm 200lbs and for the first time in my life i've got a bit of a belly. I've never been this weight before and i'm considerably slower, to the point where i'm having to relearn what my body can do on a ball field because it's taking twice as many steps to get where i'm going and my speed is nearly cut in half. There's a guy on my team that's 5-9 and maybe 140-150lbs. By any BMI algorithm, he should be able to beat me to first base. But even though i'm slower now, i still have my good running mechanics. Combine that with his poor running mechanics and my fat ass smokes him to first base. If our running mechanics were the same, our metabolisms were the same, and we both worked out an equal amount and focused on leg strengthening equally, then BMI would be a perfect gauge of who was faster. But each of those differences skews the BMI translation more and more, to the point that no algorithm you could derive from BMI alone could possibly predict that I would be able to dash 70 feet faster than a guy who is 5-9 and light af. If a BMI algorithm could accurately provide for any Madden rating, I'd guess that the most accurate would be stamina because then the only thing throwing you is muscle weight vs fat weight, which could then be accounted for by combine results


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