The Problem with Cherry Picking

[whosiskid]

Cherry Picking is more and more the preferred means for debating and proving your point. It is also the most worthless. Without becoming partisan at all, the same technique is used today in political debate. Instead of looking at real issues, which are invariably complex and demand intelligent discussion, people will cherry pick this odd economic report, that report about immigration, this bill that so and so voted for or supported or opposed, blend them all together, and voila! a case against this president / representative / candidate / senator / governor / mayor / dog catcher is the worst president / representative / candidate / senator / governor / mayor / dog catcher ever. In Cherry Picking, you decide what case you want to make, and then you look for a few items that will support your case, and then toss them all out. This method of analysis ignores items that can be Cherry Picked to prove an opposite case.

Cherry Picking doesn't require that you understand what you are talking about, though the quality of the items cherry picked will reveal experienced versus inexperienced Cherry Pickers.

I bring all thing up because we are getting an outrageous number of threads where people are saying all kinds of things about this current class.

Instead of cherry picking, why not take synoptic approach and view the class as a whole. What can we say? I think we have to conclude that we really don't know if this was a good or a weak class. There are certainly some truly outstanding prospects (in particular Agim and Whaley). We lost one of our most promising prospects (Pollard) on the last weekend. There are a lot of players that we believe have exceptional Division One potential that some other schools did not.

Without cherry picking, it is hard to take this all the prove much either for or against the current staff. You have to bring down each prospect. Some are criticizing the next to last weekend. But apparently we won over (at least for a weekend) the top CB out of Louisiana and the family of one of the top WRs in the US. The former had a father who was absolutely intransigent (who staged what seems to me to have be deliberately manufactured outbursts of anger intended to further manipulate his child from coming here) while the latter had the prospect just wanting to go back to the state where he got into some trouble earlier in life. We'll see later if the fears of the family are justified.

So the upshot? I think this year more than more is going to need to time to assess. We brought it a lot of defensive players we feel good about who are going to have to prove that they belong on the SEC level. Those claiming that this is the best Arkansas class ever obviously know absolutely nothing about the history of Arkansas football. If you don't have a developed sense of what happened in 1960 to 1975 in recruiting, you shouldn't make statements like that. But that is partly because this class is so hard to evaluate. We have, as I suggested, a lot of defensive players with potential, but also with some question marks. Is this one too short for their position? Is this one lacking in lateral quickness? Is this one ready to play at the SEC level? One or two questions like that and you can still make a good guess as to the quality of the class. 9 or 10 questions like that and you are going to have to wait and see. This could end up a very good class. We do have a couple of probable stars, in fact players who should make major differences pretty much the second they hit campus. Ordinarily a DE would not expect to play much given how many DEs we already have, but with the worst possible need for an edge rusher, he should play a lot almost immediately. And Whaley should prove huge next year. How huge will depend on RWill3's health. The doctors haven't cleared him yet, and working out generally won't affect your neck. I'm not saying that this isn't a good class or a bad one. I think that looking at it as a whole that the coaches did the best that they good, and we'll now have to wait and see how many have to kind of potential the coaches believe they have.

[DeltaBoy]

It is a solid Class !  :razorback: :razorback: :razorback:

[HOGINTENNESSEE]

Your post are getting longer

[bigdaddyhawg]

Cherry picking is a pretty standard way of supporting weak arguments these days, anecdotal evidence.

You're right, it doesn't really require much understanding or much research.

Fits well with jumping to conclusions and knee-jerking.

Also works well for those with an agenda to drive.

[Hoggish1]

kid, could I get the cliffs notes on this, please?  A for long, though...

[Nuttcracker, Sweet!]

The reality is: this is a good, solid class. The last thing fans will remember though is: that we struck out on Porter, Cleveland and Fulton in the last 24 hours before signing day.

Worse than that, we lost a commitment at the last minute at a position of dire need. Putu could have given us desperately needed speed and play making ability that we don't have at CB.

I hope we beat the brakes off the gheaturds this fall... and cheer for the kids we DID sign who wind up on the field in 2016...