On one hand you say you try and follow the odds. But I see a huge flaw in that you never change your mind on players and you cherry pick your stats badly. You'll look for any facts at all to support whatever preconceived idea you have (cough Mendenhall, Mathews). But the fact is, It doesn't matter what he looked like running through huge holes at Bama, what the scouts said or where he was picked. What matters is how he has played against real competition in the NFL. The rest is all irrelevant.
Like I said, I don't agree with that. The draft gives you an objective indicator of how a prospect is rated by the NFL. When a guy is a former first round pick, that means that at one point or another scouts rated his ability very highly. Guys like Benson, Jones, Lynch, Bush, and Moreno all had extended stretches of their career when people thought they were basically garbage. You could've looked at their struggles and concluded that those players sucked, or you could have looked at their background and realized that they had some talent, but weren't put in a position to succeed.
Marshawn Lynch in Buffalo was a pretty average back. He wasn't horrible, but he wasn't all that amazing either. When he was losing his job to Fred Jackson, most people thought he was probably done as a starter in the NFL. His startup ADP around that time was in the round 8-10 range of a 12 team league. He was the 31st veteran RB chosen in
this 2010 startup that I did. The justification was mostly the same as the one you're using. "Who cares if he was a top 15 draft pick? He has been totally average in Buffalo. He sucks." The catch is that the talent that made him a top 15 pick in the first place was all still there. It just hadn't been fully realized in Buffalo. Last year in Seattle with a good coaching staff and a superior supporting cast, Lynch became a 1600 yard 5.0 YPC runner. Nobody predicted this when he was RB31 in dynasty leagues.
It was basically the same story with Thomas Jones, Reggie Bush, and Cedric Benson. At one low point before his good years with Cincinnati, Benson was offered to me for a 2nd round rookie pick in a 14 team start 2 RB league with a diluted rookie pool (dev players). That's about the lowest price tag possible for a player who isn't on waivers.
Here I am taking Thomas Jones as the 45th RB off the board in a 2004 startup draft. He now ranks 22nd on the NFL's all-time rushing list, right between Jamal Lewis and Tiki Barber (another late bloomer BTW). This past year I won one of my money dynasty leagues. I can safely say that I would not have claimed the title if I hadn't traded for Moreno in early November (before McGahee's injury) under the reasoning that, "Hey, maybe this guy doesn't suck quite as much as everyone says he does." Here's
a really fun Reggie Bush thread that opens with this post:
Reggie is a guy you need to move if you can, and I mean before the season starts or early into it. Here's why:Reggie was the worst starting RB in the NFL last year and it wasn't even that close. When you consider everything and take it all into account, Reggie gave the least bang for your buck of any RB out there FROM AN NFL PERSPECTIVE. More on that later.
However, because he was very high draft pick and his team has a TON invested in him and had/have trouble going away from him to more effective players. He still had lots of opportunities last year and is likely to get a fair amount this year (for a while at least). He also had a HUGE amount of hype coming into the NFL and people love college highlights on youtube. So he still has value in the FF community because people feel like he will eventually turn it around, or that the team simply CAN'T go away from him.
CLASSIC sell high if you don't believe he will turn it around, even if his current value isn't at the "peak" you could have gotten for him. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.
Back to Bush the NFL running back (and why I don't think he will turn it around). For those who are familiar with DVOA, Bush was the worst rusher in the NFL last year by that standard. Basically, it means that you consider down and distance, and the defense the back is facing, how did that back in that situation compared all of the other backs in the league is those SAME BASIC SITUATIONS. When you compile all of that, guys like LT, Westbrook, Barber, Addai, Peterson etc came out on top. Bush was dead last at -26.7%, meaning he got -26.7% fewer yards than the average back in the same situations. The three guys above him on the list, all around -20% were Rudi Johnson, Cedric Benson, and Deshaun Foster. Yes, he was significantly worse than all three of those studs.
So we start there. But the comeback is always, "Yeah, but he's a threat to take it to the house so defenses have to plan for that.". The problem with that is that he DOESN'T take it to the house and everybody knows it at this point. His longest run last year? 22 yards. His longest reception? 25 yards. That's over 130 touches. Is the problem he can't break tackles? Is it that his vision is poor? Is his actual shake-and-bake not really as good as advertised? Dunno, don't care. "He's scaring defense and helping his team that way." just doesn't fly anymore.
..........
Finally, to this point, it's REALLY hard to argue against the fact that Bush has been a very bad RB overall. But some folks will STILL say he's young and could still turn it around. And that is true. He IS young, and he does have a chance to do that because at SOME point he displayed a lot of talent. But really, what are the odds? How many backs have looked as bad as Bush has and then gone on to great (or even mediocre) careers? When I went back and looked around a little bit, the ONLY guy I noticed that started off very slowly and became a real force was Tiki Barber. So there is that hope. But even Tiki wasn't nearly AS bad, and he was one amongst a TON of guys who started bad and stayed bad, so the deck is stacked against you if you want to hang on to Bush.
So for my part, I have given up on him and I just got rid of him in the only league I had him. You can still get pretty nice value out of him right now. But if he gets truly BENCHED in the middle or near the end of this season, you will NEVER get anything substantial out of him. Take your lumps, find a lifeboat and get off of the Titantic, you will thank me later.
Sound familiar? Replace the name "Reggie Bush" with the name "Trent Richardson" and you'd get this thread. I can say pretty comfortably that nobody predicted Reggie would be a 1000+ yard 5.0 YPC rusher after he finished his third straight 3.X YPC season with the Saints. People aren't that patient. They look at what happened yesterday and base their long-term rankings on that. I've been around the forums long enough to see this same thing happen 5...6...7 times with different "bust" RBs. It's actually something that I actively seek out when I'm looking for value. As the saying goes...those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
As far as your other comments, I change my mind on players all the time. I traded Ingram and Moreno away everywhere that I owned them after their rookie seasons. There are players that I hated as draft prospects like Brandon Marshall and Frank Gore who went on to become early picks for my dynasty teams in subsequent years. The question is when to stick with your initial evaluation and when to abandon ship. That's an art more than it's a science. Maybe Trent is just a huge bust. IMO it's far more likely that he's a solid player whose real talent is being muddied by usage and situational factors.
If you want to talk about odds, you need to clarify your frame of reference. How many backs who averaged less than 3.6 YPC in each of their first two NFL seasons became good starters? Probably not very many. But how many of those backs were top 5 draft picks? Probably not very many, if any. So the odds are going to change depending on the criteria you're using to identify comparable players. If you want to talk about odds, go back and look at all of the RBs drafted in the top 10 in the past 10 years and see how many have been complete and total busts.
