Maurile Tremblay said:
Shaun Hill's 81 yards passing with an interception in week 1 last year can happen to a Tyrod-type. It will never happen (absent injury) to an established "C+" or higher QB.
I don't think it would have happened (absent injury) to Shaun Hill, either.
Very true.
But Shaun Hill failed to reach 10 points 3 other times out of his 7 other starts. He hit 20 once in 8 starts and topped 15 in 3/8ths of his starts. And he only had 2 starts @ $5000. Basically he hit "value" in a cash game 4 times, with one of those hitting "value" as a GPP play. That's a consistent losing play no matter how you slice it.
Shaun Hill isn't good. But 4 out of 8 isn't completely disastrous for a cheap QB. The idea in 50/50s isn't to win all of them. It's to win around 60% them. (More is better, but much more than 60% is really hard.) So while 4 out of 8 is not what we want, 5 out of 8 would be acceptable.
And if we look at cheap QBs in general -- not just Shaun Hill -- I believe those who were projected to hit 2x their salary did so most of the time. There were some obvious fails (e.g., Manziel), but there always will be.
Cheap QBs are risky (otherwise they wouldn't be cheap). And risk should be minimized in cash games. But there's such a thing as being too risk-averse even in cash games, IMO.
If Tyrod Taylor is a great value, and I definitely think he is, I'm starting him in cash games as well as tournaments. Value, after all, is what drives success in cash games in the long run.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I went with the cheap ($5000) starting QB a lot more than most I imagine. But I think it's a higher-risk proposition than some are saying because I just don't think you can survive a sub-10 point entry at the QB position, even if you only have $5000 invested at the spot. As someone pointed out, perhaps early in the season the QB distribution will be wider but at least by mid-season I think well over half of every contest is scoring in the 20's at that slot.
I love the Google Sheets on the player performances -- they alone are worth the price of the FBG subscription. I haven't had the time to cull through all of that data (or even most of it), but I will note that there were 66 player weeks in which a QB had a $5000 (or less salary) and scored some points. Of those 66, a quick scan shows that ~21 of those were starts that didn't end very quickly due to injury (removing Hill's week 1 debacle from the analysis) (1 or 2 might be long relief appearances but I haven't had the time to drill down into that). Of those 21 "starts without injuries to the starter" you have these breakdowns for each salary point:
$4700 salary -- 1 start -- 9.4 points (Austin Davis)
$5000 salary -- 20 starts total:
9 of those 20 hit 10 or more points, with Fitzpatrick being the monster outlier at 39.32.
11 of those 20 hit less than 10 points.
That's 45% of the $5000 salary guys "hitting value" in a cash game, with 30% "hitting value" in GPP plays. That's a -EV in the cash games, +EV in GPPs assuming a 15-20% cash rate (admittedly the GPP is tougher to measure but I'm making very simplistic assumptions for this discussion).
But if we assume that the numbers skewed a little friendlier towards the cheap guys, I'm still not sure how impactful, say, Hill's week 11 13.3 performance (on a $5000 salary) was in the cash context. Sure, he was the 8th best "value" at QB that week, but only if we assume that we used that cost savings to obtain more points than we would have obtained with a more expensive QB who scored more absolute points at a lower "value" scored. This is the analysis I don't know. I mean, in week 11 Cam scored 20.68 on $7800 salary. That's ever so slightly a lower "value" than Hill (0.01), but it seems like it might be more valuable to me.
I guess my concern is that a sub-10 score seems nearly fatal to me and a score of 13.3 doesn't seem all that valuable to me. The goal of rostering a $5000 QB has to be simply to minimize damage because (Fitzpatrick notwithstanding), the performance of a $5000 QB isn't going to win money for you.