This year, we got an early start on the seventh edition of SPAM Poor Man’s Scouting System. It has been posted in the Whitepapers section.
George Wallace has been working on a “Cloud” interface as a means of disseminating the collected data more easily. Once he has it ready, he should be posting some notes on it.
This year’s game was a challenge to break down quantitatively, but we think we have some first pass Effective Score Coefficients that will allow the user to be able to compare and rank teams, although the predictability of match results is still rather nebulous.
Strategy and timing will be at least as important as functionality this year.
It should be an interesting year. May the best video gamer win!!!
Thank you for the compliment. I have never thought of it that way, but “raising the floor” is what this is really about.
Good luck with your week one event. If you decide to use this system to scout, we would love a copy of the results to evaluate the ES coefficients and any bugs you might find.
Thank you so much for once again posting this. We have been running some version of this since 2013 and we absolutely love it.
If teams are looking for quick way to upgrade your scouting this is a great way to do it. We’ll often modify or make our own scouting sheets for this system but the excel parts works great and a few our students have learned to modify the back end visual basic scripts when we need to add some functionality but it’s awesome as is.
I’ve posted version 2.0 of the scouting spreadsheet and the scouting sheet.
Kudos go to Katie_UPS for posting their modifed version of the original spreadsheet. I borrowed several of your changes and, based on input from George, updated the Effective Score coefficients.
Good luck to all teams who have regionals and district events left to play.
We’ll be in Houston, if you are there go look for SPAM in the stands. They’ll be the ones with the red and white scouting caps.
Yep. I no longer argue with George about his analysis.
Sort of makes you think, doesn’t it?
Remember, you have to acquire a cube (positive points) before you can deliver it to the exchange, so the sum total is slightly positive. If I remember the numbers correctly.
However, it might be that the cubes are more valuable elsewhere on the field.
Ahh, ok. I had forgotten that you give positive points for picking up a cube. That makes more sense now. So overall, placing in the exchange is worth 10, in the switch is worth 20, and in the scale 25. It’s interesting comparing these metrics to the ones we use. We definitely value the scale a little more than you guys do, especially in our first round list.
I agree the cubes can be worth more elsewhere on the field, depending on the time and state of the match. But that’s a little too much to keep complete track of for a poor man’s scouting
Also, thanks for putting these out there. The team I mentor in Norway used the scouting sheets, and we managed to scout with our motley 4 person scouting team. We did develop our own ranking of teams, as we had limited man power to input all of the data into an excel sheet. (It’s amazing how fast you can input data into google sheets with 5 different computers all working at the same time)
For those of you using the Poor Man’s Scouting, I want to share with you something we’ve been working on. For years we’ve had one major sticking point in our system: getting this wealth of data and analysis to the people who need it to make decisions. So, we started working on a way to more easily get our collected data and our analysis to the drivers, coaches, and strategists who need it. We call it SPAMalytics.
Above is the sheet we published for the Orlando Regional a few weeks ago. Anyone with the link had up-to-the-minute scouting data to help plan their matches or their pick lists. Based on the feedback from our limited release, we feel we’re ready for a wider release this time around.
So, if you’re competing at the South Florida Regional this weekend, or if you just want to follow along at home, check it out.
I’ve placed version 3.0 of the Poor Man’s Scouting System out in the Whitepapers. This update includes requested changes (reduced input items, and updated ES coefficients) and bug fixes on the Strategy sheet tab.
This will be the version used by SPAM while scouting in Houston.
