After reading a remark someone made about being disappointed that they hadn't really seen any concrete test results on mentors, I decided to give it a try.
Here were my general assumptions going in:
1. Mentors help a player (who is receiving playing time) develop more quickly
2. It does not matter whether a mentor is active or inactive
3. Player development is more or less at a set rate, based on playing time (basically, i'd expect it to be pretty easy to replicate results)
Here is QB Kendrick Ortiz of the 2113 Salt Lake City Raiders. This is him on the eve of the first pre-season game. He is rookie, selected in the 4th round out of Nebraska-Omaha:
He's rated 17/51 overall. At this point I decided to sim 1 season a number of times to see how he developed.
- Every player around him was the same in all seasons except for the backup QB in the case of the mentor being active/inactive.
- Kendrick's playing time was set to "9" in every season
- Injuries were OFF, so as to not interfere with anything
- Kendrick started all 20 games (pre and regular season)
- All "end" ratings are taken at the end of the regular season, so no additional playoff games have come into play in any of these years.
NO MENTOR
26/51
27/51
28/51
28/51
30/51
total gain:
54
MENTOR (INACTIVE)
24/51
27/51
29/51
30/51
31/51
total gain:
56
MENTOR (ACTIVE)
30/51
30/51
30/51
33/51
32/51
total gain:
70
Some observations:
1. The results weren't as straight-forward as I was expecting. The variance was pretty large (7 points in one group).
2. Either there are other factors at play in player development, or player growth is more random than I had assumed.
3. Mentors being on the active roster apparently greatly increases their effect. At this stage I don't think I can even definitely say if the mentorship works when a player is not on the active roster.
Some questions:
1. Is my sample size way too small? One player, run 5 times in each fashion probably isn't enough to draw definitive conclusions, although I think it may give us a general idea.
2. Have we been completely wrong about mentors not needing to be on the active roster? (that's definitely the accepted thought around here)
I have screen shots of every season-ending player ratings if anyone wants to see them.
