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L-Jimmy
my tv broke wrote:On the topic of PODs, I don't particularly like the term, and a player won't be a POD for very long if he's scoring well. There may be some merit to picking a "POD" towards the end of the year, but IMO, its more about getting lucky and avoiding an injury, or a guy who gets rested, more than pure scoring. Here are the top players by "last 5 average" from 2018 (just gonna have to ignore aitkens/drinkwater.) + some analysis, which I've hidden behind spoiler, as its dribble.
- Top last 5 averages:
Halves - DCE and Cleary were the best halves to have in the run home, and behind them are Milford, and SJ. So, Milford was a "good" "POD", but having him over the other three more popular players wouldn't really net you any benefit.
Hookers - Cook and McInnes, followed by Friend and Smith. I guess Smith was a little quieter than people would have hoped, so if you went Mcinnes instead, you could of netted an extra 20 points over the last 5 rounds...
WFB - Teddy, Tommy T, and RTS were owned by most. Valentine Holmes came home strongly, and if you jumped on him from say, RTS, you would have done quite well for yourself.
FRF/2RF - Josh Papalii averaged 59, the second highest in the last 5 rounds of all FRF/2RFs, behind only Jakey T. Beyond those two, we had Crichton, Tapine, N Brown, Frizell, Taupau, Lane, Ah Mau, Fifita, Harris, Guerra, Taumalolo, Cooper, Ma'u, James and JDB, in order of average.... Jake T was an absolute standout, but after that, there was only 7 points difference in average, between Crichton and JDB, at either end of the above list.. its hard to say there would have been any benefit in picking a POD over the high ownership guys in frf/2rf
Centres - there aren't even any pure centres in that list. What a junk position.
In summary, I don't think PODs would of really made much difference to your team. If anything, you probably were worse off. The key was having trades, and being able to get all the best scorers in at the right time in the run home.
There are other competitive systems where multiple buyers compete to maximise earnings over volatile and discrete inputs. Finance is likely the most heavily studied of these.
The POD/max return debate we’re having here in finance is studied as ‘portfolio theory’. THis is a large and dense field, but a typical analysis would talk about putting together a portfolio of players (or shares) that had a high return. But in finance theory when we’re discussing return we also need to discuss risk. Risk in NRLFF can be thought of as the likelihood of a player returning his average - in portfolio theory you would think of a portfolio of assets returning the same as the rest of the market. If your portfolio has a different variance to all the other portfolios, then your are negatively correlated with market volatility. This is what hedge funds seek to do.
This is all a bit wanky and long winded, but the key insight is that market participants seek to maximise return and minimise risk. So do we. If PODs are owned by few other teams but have the same return, then finance theory would recommend the be bought in preference, as their individual volatility will differ from the heavily-owned players, and so therefore will your teams.
So, yes. Reseach says buy the players who will return the most as a first guide. Then preference those least-owned by other teams. These preferences will overlap at the bottom and top of the distributions, so someone we think will do really-kinda well and is owned by sub 1% could be preferred to player with 20% who will do (probably) only a tiny little bit better.
TL:DR - PODs are good. Good scorers are better. Undervalued good scorers who are little-owned are best.
Edit: This screed was bought to you by the society for the blatantly obvious delivered in overly complex academic language.
Was driving myself mad on Friday thinking about it! I still remember how impressive he was, but yeah, just a trial I guess. Playing Centre for Catalans.
