topman said:
You can definitely tell the difference when you have a group of knowledgeable drafters and when you have a group of people doing their first MFL 10.
That's a nice way to phrase it. The negative way to say it is that when you get a bunch of people who are engaging in groupthink, things are very predictable.
We have a tendency at FBG to be very conservative and laugh at anyone whose rankings diverge heavily from the FBG rankings. When drafting with those people, we think we get great bargains, but it's not always crazy for some guy to take (as a recent example from this thread) Joseph Randle way before we would.
I've done a lot of drafts with FBGs over the years, and there are never any values... unless you diverge from the FBG rankings. If I have a guy projected as a second round value and he's going in the 5th via worldwide ADP, I might take him in the 3rd since there's a lot of variability, and I don't want to miss out on him. But if I'm drafting with all FBGs and FBG has him projected as a 5th round guy, I can wait until the 4th to take him. When you know the rankings everyone's using as a starting point, you can be a little more aggressive and still get the guys you believe in more than the consensus.
One of the weird things is that it seems like FBGs mostly start from Dodds' rankings or the FBG average rankings. There seems to be more diversity in the FBG staff's rankings than there is in the subscribers. It would be interesting to pick a staffer whose rankings you like (call it Tremblay) and draft from his rankings in a draft where everyone's using Dodds or average.
But, yeah, I get frustrated in FBG drafts because for 95% of players, I like Dodds' projections. He's just really good.