EBF said:
I think a lot of FF owners are basically reactive. They don't have real opinions on players, so they just react based on whatever's happening at any given moment in time. These are the same people who said Ridley was garbage earlier in the season and who said Doug Martin sucked after the first few weeks of last season. Since they don't have opinions and just sway with the latest news, they can't fathom when someone sticks with a firm stance that contradicts current events.
This is the issue: when it's someone you like (TRich/Martin), it's reaction; when it's someone you don't (Ingram/Moreno/Tavon), it's foresight. It comes off as inconsistent when you're blasting Forte for his YPC and making excuses for Trent's.
It's fine to write off your 2011 top rookie, and not your 2012 version. But it's hard to take your "reaction, no opinions, latest moves" comments seriously when you do.
I don't think there's any great hypocrisy in being rigid in certain cases and flexible in others.
Some players who look good early in their careers are actually great. (i.e. AJ Green, Antonio Gates, Jimmy Graham)
Some players who look good early in their careers actually suck. (i.e. Steve Slaton, Julius Jones, Braylon Edwards, Roy Williams)
Some players who look bad early in their careers are actually great. (i.e. Roddy White, Reggie Bush, Marshawn Lynch, Aaron Rodgers)
Some players who look bad early in their careers actually suck. (i.e. AJ Jenkins, Jon Baldwin, Buster Davis, Donald Brown)
One of the absolute most daunting challenges for anyone who tries to navigate uncertainty is figuring out which pile to put a player in.
I was thinking last night about my rookie rankings for this current crop and how I've flip-flopped with players like Kenbrell Thompkins based on current news. In the preseason I thought he was a huge longshot with very little chance of becoming FF relevant. Then he kept gaining momentum and it started to look like he was a strong candidate for a top 10 rookie ranking in this draft class. At that point I moved him up considerably. Fast forward a few weeks and his stock is cooling off again. If I were making rookie rankings today, he would have dropped several spots from his early September ranking. Was my initial skepticism right? Was I wrong about him all along? I don't even think I know yet.
I've always said that it's really difficult to strike the right balance between being rigid and reactive. It's a case-by-case thing where you try to weigh the evidence and make the best decision possible. Sometimes you might look at a player who's achieving momentary success and determine that he's a fluke. Other times you might look at a player achieving early success and decide that he's legit. That doesn't make you a hypocrite.
One of the interesting things about FF and especially dynasty is how being "right" or "wrong" about a player can vary as a function of time. When Mendenhall was struggling in his rookie preseason and was lost for the season with an injury after just a few games, I was told that I was "wrong" about his talent. When he was ripping up the league the next season I was "right" about his talent. Fast forward a few years and suddenly I'm "wrong" again. Similar patterns have happened with guys like Lynch, Spiller, and Mathews. If you were high on those guys one year, you might have been "right" based on how they performed that season. Then the very next season you might have been "wrong" based on their performance. Mathews was very good in 2011 and very bad in 2012. Spiller was very quiet in 2010 and awesome in 2012. This season he's been more of a disappointment. So were the people who were high on Mathews as a rookie "right" about him? Were the people who were high on Spiller "right" about him?
What you'll probably realize pretty quickly asking yourself questions like these is that not every player comes into the league like AJ Green or AJ Jenkins and gives you a concrete and static yes/no answer that holds steady for the duration of his career. A lot of these players go through a constant rollercoaster of highs and lows where one season they're excellent and the next season they're extremely disappointing. When someone tries to make definitive statements about a player's long-term value when that player is either at an absolute peak or absolute valley in his performance, there's a big risk of watching him regress back to a more reasonable compromise between those two extremes. All of the people who wrote off Mendenhall as a bust after his rookie preseason were wrong just like all of the people who valued him as an elite asset after his breakout 2009 season were also wrong. The true story of his career was somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
We've got a similar challenge right now with Trent Richardson. Is he the guy who dominated at Alabama, drew raves from every scout, went in the top 3 of the draft, and posted a top 10 FF season as a rookie? Or is he the guy who averaged 3.4 YPC through his first 20+ NFL games? Anyone who's trying to put a ballpark figure to his value has to try to make that assessment. Different people are going to look at the same data points and draw different conclusions. Someone who's more reactive is going to look at the most recent stuff (the NFL performance) and probably use that as the main guiding principle. Someone who had an independent evaluation that Richardson is a very good talent is far less likely to be swayed by his immediate results.
With some players the reactive approach ends up being correct. With others the rigid approach wins out in the end. I try to look at each case and make a call, which is why sometimes I might appear to be in denial over a guy who's performing while other times I might keep banging the drum for someone who isn't delivering results. There's actually nothing inconsistent or hypocritical about that since we know that all four groups of player listed above are recurrent phenomena. There will always be players who come out of the gates looking promising and then totally fall off a cliff (anyone seen Keary Colbert lately?). On the other hand, there will always be players who look like quite bad right off the bat only to become forces of nature in time (Drew Brees, Roddy White, Thomas Jones, Tiki Barber).