NFL Draft
+ David Epstein, Richard Thaler, Cade Massey, Wizards
“It’s easier to act your way into new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting.” — Millard Fuller
Hey Coaches,
Here you go!
✍️ Articles
How the Wizards’ front office tuned up the franchise while tuning out the noise: Tom Friend explores the Wizards’ rebuild, culture-building, and why the organization is betting patience will eventually turn into wins.
At the Las Vegas summer league of 2023 — in their first bird’s-eye view of the operation — Winger’s and Dawkins’ jaws dropped at the disorganization. It was 100-plus degrees outside, and there was no water, snacks or Vitamin D for the players and staff. “Things you need to survive in Vegas,” Dawkins says.
Some player hotel rooms weren’t ready, either, or their names were misspelled — so they couldn’t check in. Staffers carried gear in Home Depot bags, and before the first meeting, players were served hot dogs and hamburgers.
🎙️ Podcast
Wharton Moneyball: Behavioral Biases and Data Models Shape NFL Draft Strategy: Richard Thaler and Cade Massey wrote one of the most famous papers on the NFL draft years ago. This episode is with the two of them discussing the persistence of inefficient trade values over thirty-five years, and the psychology behind why front offices refuse to deviate from outdated data. This is an awesome episode and pairs well with the one below (which Massey is a guest on). Note: Listen to the first 33 minutes (Thaler drops after that). [4/29/2026 - 68 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube
“You never want to look like the sucker. And the safest way not to is to not deviate from what has gotten that deal done before.”
Bet The Process with Cade Massey: Massey is a professor at Penn that focuses on focuses on judgment under uncertainty – how, and how well, people predict what will happen in the future. He and Jeff Ma discuss NFL draft strategies with tangible examples from the recent draft, and the role of AI in sports analytics. Note: listen from minute 5 to minute 42. [4/28/2026 — 45 minutes] Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Base Rates vs. Judgement - “Every one of these prescriptions—trade back, pick high-value positions, go with the big board consensus—it’s basically: don’t exercise expert judgment about player evaluation. It’s like, ‘Defer expertise in the interest of more picks.’ It’s hard to do because it flies in the face of guys who spent their lives getting better at evaluating individuals. Each one of those prescriptions says, ‘Don’t bet on individuals. Just play the base rates.’”
Base Rates vs. Judgement -“If you look at every two-for-one trade you could have made to come down out of a position in the first round... between 60% and 70% of the time, you are more likely to do better on that stat if you take two lower picks instead of one. You can overcome a 60% base rate if you are 65% diagnostic that a player is better, but you have to have a track record that justifies that kind of confidence.”
The Rarity of Skill - “There are individuals who actually can pick stocks better than the market. It’s just that they’re very rare. General managers who are very sure of themselves think they can discriminate like that. But the question is: what’s the track record? Are you keeping score?”
AI vs. Analytics - “AI has better branding than analytics and data science used to, and it’s got a better user interface for the world. People are listening to models more because they’re in the guise of ‘AI’ instead of a geeky guy with a spreadsheet.”
💭 Miscellaneous
Great Segments from Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein:
“The popular concept of genius and breakthrough is wrong. We want to believe that great new ideas come from non-obvious leaps of creativity; that genius means one individual seeing what no one else can. But the true history of innovation suggests the opposite. Great ideas start to become a little bit obvious when the problem is framed in just the right way.”
“This is what the history of multiple discovery is actually telling us. The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found.”
“You don’t need the right answer to unlock a breakthrough. You need a frame precise enough that the right answer becomes findable. As Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate, put it: ‘It’s harder to come up with a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.’ The unsung heroes of intellectual history are the Malthuses, the ones who were wrong about the answer but right about the frame. Perhaps every brilliant idea is just that: an ordinary answer to an extraordinary question.”
“The pioneer of cognitive psychology and AI Herbert Simon recognized the burgeoning challenge two generations ago. In a lecture in 1970, Simon said: ‘In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’”