Dynasty Rankings (7 Viewers)

[valhallan]

It's not about statistical relevance or any semblance of being 'right'. It's about giving subscribers a tool to use in their own analysis. I really don't think taking the time to rank a guy that has been picked up in every dynasty league over the last few weeks is difficult. Look at the last 20 guys on your list and slot him in somewhere. That's takes all of 10 seconds. No further pedantry required.

It's not like I intentionally tried to leave Marlon Brown off of my rankings. The behind-the-scenes ranking interface is a bit clunky, and sometimes things happen. That's why I appreciate people asking, like you did, because sometimes something slips through the cracks and that gives me a chance to correct it. Other times, such as with Stills (who wasn't showing up not because I'd forgotten about him, but because he'd been slotted in past the 90-WR cutoff), it gives me a chance to explain. And it gives me a chance to get outside of my personal head space and reflect on the rankings a bit. I've since dropped Toon and Morgan some and moved Stills up to account for the situation as it currently stands.

Edit: I thought I'd since updated, but it turns out my update never went through yesterday (probably owing to operator error). I went back and re-stacked again, and everything should be right now.

Good stuff. I didn't mean to come off as accusatory, it's just been a consistent frustration since FBG decided to acknowledge dynasty coverage was needed. I have my own rankings from top to bottom that incorporate Brown, Stills, Patton etc, but it's very helpful to see where the professionals are thinking the new guys fit. Whether you believe certain guys are flavors of the week or not, one only needs to look at the trading threads to see they've become higher activity players than the stagnant values of more established guys.

 

[renesauz]

Because borderline QB1 QBs are always on someone's bench, but WR/RB2guys are ALWAYS in someone's lineup.

Long term QBBC is a legitimate strategy if you want to put in the work. To continue the discussion though, in some sense all positions are the same. WR2/RB2 guys are always in someone's lineup. That makes them hard to acquire in redraft, but not necessarily in dynasty. Teams are willing to gamble short term for long term. Even when in contention. There are RB2 quality players like DeAngelo, Gore, Ivory, and Mendenhall (or whichever of those are still relevant in 3 weeks) that you can get cheaply; you can fill a hole at RB or WR just as easy as QB if you're willing to hold the bag when the player's career is done, or assume the risk for players viewed as risky. Regardless of position you can find marginal fantasy starters. QB is not special in that way.

If you want to find elite fantasy starters, which position is easiest? RB and WR have a steep age discount that makes it easier to acquire elite players if you're willing to take on the risk. You can point to Brady and Peyton as similar targets at QB. The evidence is probably shaky at best, but I think it's harder to find elite production at QB.

In some sense I think we're spoiled by Luck, RG3, Kaepernick, Wilson, Newton by thinking Manuel, Tannehill, Smith, Bridgewater, Boyd, Manziel are just as likely to become great NFL QB. My feel is at most 1 of those does.

Let me try this another way. If you spend a 3rd round pick on a guy you expect to be a WR2 for your team for the next five years and he underperforms...what do you have? You get a WR3 who still sees your lineup most weeks and retains significant trade value.

Spend that 3rd round pick on a QB you predict to finish in the QB5-10 area for the next 5 years and he underperforms, and what do you have? A guy with minimal trade value that you really don't want to have to start.

I think fantasy owners are under-estimating the churning and turnover that will almost certainly occur in the bottom half of the QB1 rankings over the next 5-10 years, and I'm not just talking about the normal rise of young guys and fall of older players. I'm talking about new philosophies of offense that will make QB values more dependant on the performance of the rest of the team. Guys like ELi Manning and Big Ben might be QB 7 one year, QB 16 the next, only to see a return to the top ten in two years when their O-line issues get fixed and the team adds a couple new WR weapons.

I want to draft STABLE long term options with premium picks that I know will retain value for 5+ years, and I simply don't see that long term stability in the lower half of the current QB1 crop because there are simply far too many young QBs with the talent in the NFL, coupled with a shift in offensive philosophy that can make short term wonders out of guys like Stafford or Pryor. I'm all behind spending the premium on Rodgers or Newton. But I'm not spending a 3rd or 4th on Ryan, Wilson or Stafford because there's an outstanding chance that they switch places with Eli, Tannehill, Bradford, or Manuel as soon as next year. Compare this to WRs taken in similar rounds. Are Torrey Smith and Reuben Randle as likely to switch spots?????? Colston and Stephen Hill? Antonio Brown and Chris Givens?

 

[ZWK]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

 

[thriftyrocker]

In other words:

I own Brady and Steven Jackson in one league. If I put them both on the block and let the league know I am looking for picks/prospects, I'll get a lot more bites for Jackson. In this first year dynasty - not one team wouldn't be improved by adding Jackson. I can't say the same about Brady. S&D will dictate a higher return for the RB, despite the fact that Brady's career is likely to last 2-3 years longer.

"What you’re thinking is that we have an inelastic product here. But what we have here is an elastic product."

There is more elasticity at RB than you are giving credit for. Price is affected by a number of items, not just demand. The demand is higher, but the supply is higher, and the volatility is higher.

Why can you get a better discount off MSRP at a Honda dealership than BMW? Because they have to move a certain number of cars off the lot by the end of the month or they are losing money. They have more incentive to sell. The incentive to sell at RB is high.

Even Peyton coming off a career game in a career career, there's little incentive to sell this week. He's Peyton Manning.

Just to argue my own point, you'll probably see more kneejerk selling on Brady this month. People too shortsighted to see what NE looks like in Nov let alone 2014.

 

[Biabreakable]

Decisions at the top have huge impacts, though. Ask the guy who drafted Matt Stafford in the first two rounds of a startup last year whether he wishes he'd spent a bit more time studying the top QBs. Ask the guy who got Peterson in the 2nd whether he thought he might have been better off focusing on guys in the 15th round, instead. And "at the top" doesn't just mean "WR#2 vs. WR#3", it also means looking seriously at the break between the 1st tier guys and the 2nd tier guys. Which side do you put Percy Harvin on? Randall Cobb? Hakeem Nicks? Victor Cruz? Larry Fitzgerald? How high are you willing to go on old man Peterson? Old man Brees? How worried are you about The Gronk's injuries? These decisions are potentially far more impactful than a decision on whether you should draft Kenny Stills or Nick Toon in the 16th, or a decision on whether it's worth it to reach on Quinton Patton in the 14th.

It's never easy, but I think picks actually become harder the further you get into the draft. And that makes intuitive sense. At the top of the draft, you have the entire player pool to choose from. That means you can exclude every player who has even a shred of risk. When you are picking from a list of Doug Martin, Trent Richardson, LeSean McCoy, Jimmy Graham, AJ Green, Julio Jones, Dez Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Andrew Luck, and Aaron Rodgers, you should be able to get a good player. If you're gun-shy about the rookies, you can restrict your options to the even smaller population of Graham, Green, Julio, McCoy, and Rodgers. All top level players who have done it for multiple seasons.

The risk with a player like this is minimal. Yea, you might take Julio over Calvin and you might surrender some VBD there when all is said and done, but you've still got Julio and if he performs at the level he has the past couple years with a modest improvement for experience and opportunity then you've likely got a top 5-10 dynasty asset that's helping you win games while also maintaining peak trade value for a period of several years. That's a relatively pleasant doomsday scenario. You might not always make the perfect pick in the first round of a startup draft. However, you should be able to make a good pick. There's very little reason (apart from random bad injury luck) why you shouldn't be able to find a solid foundational player from the available options anywhere in the top 10-12 of a startup draft.

If you calculated the average career VBD for a first round startup pick, it would be pretty high. I just went back and looked at the first round of a 14 team draft that I did in 2008. It's five years later, and I'd say 9-10 of the 14 first round picks still have reasonable FF value (Peterson, Lynch, Gore, Reggie, McFadden, Andre, Fitzgerald, Wayne, MJD, SJax). On the flipside, the teen rounds are a barren wasteland. Every now and then a good pick pops up from the sea of crap (Jamaal Charles in the 10th, Aaron Rodgers in the 11th, Jordy Nelson in the 12th, Cedric Benson in the 15th, Pierre Garcon in the 18th). But we're talking about maybe one guy per round, if that. Mostly, your expectation with a pick in the teen rounds is to get a nice steaming turd. What this means is that in those rare cases where you actually do find someone of value, you've secured a huge spike over expectations.

Finding a good player in the top 15 picks is not special. Most of your leaguemates will manage that feat. Doing the same won't distinguish you from the average team. It's the expectation. However, most of the teams in your league are not going to fare very well in the mid-late rounds. That means that if you can get those picks right, you will have secured a big advantage over your peers. That's why I spend more energy looking at rookies and bench scrubs versus trying to decide whether Julio, Green, or Demaryius is the most valuable. I think that's like debating Fitz, Andre, or VJax. Useful to a point, but in the end the advantage to be gained by getting that problem absolutely right is a lot thinner than the advantage of getting Marques Colston or Victor Cruz off the waiver wire, or making the right pick when you're choosing between Anquan Boldin and Taylor Jacobs in the 14th round of your startup.

Again, you keep focusing on the top 15. I already mentioned that I was talking about second-tier guys like Cobb and Nicks and Fitzgerald, guys who are drafted in the 2nd-4th round in dynasty leagues. That area is much more of a minefield, and I'm much more convinced that it's possible to predict which guys are more likely to blow up in your face. It makes sense to focus most of the effort there, then, since the rewards are higher and the downside of failure is much greater.

You admit that 95+% of late-round picks are going to turn into heaping turdburgers. You think that spending the bulk of your time in that area increases your chances of getting a gem. I'm not convinced- I think there's a lot more randomness to who succeeds and who fails there, and I'm not entirely convinced that predicting which late-round player will explode is a repeatable skill. Even if it is, if most 18th rounders have a 2% chance of hitting and you're so good at scouting that you can double that, you're still left with just a 4% chance of hitting, meaning you increased your odds of getting a quality player by just 2%. Meanwhile, if fifth rounders have a 35% chance of hitting and you can double THAT, you're increasing your odds of landing a quality fantasy player by a whopping 35%.

I stand by my original position. In terms of return on investment, the best place to spend the majority of your effort is on the guys in the 2nd-8th round range of startups, or the starter or top backup quality players in established leagues.

I can see that as far as making rankings for other people to use. I have never really come to a conclusion about how best to do that. Leagues are so different. So focusing most of your ranking on the players who will be rostered, even in small roster leagues makes sense as the focus for those rankings.

For folks who have been doing this a long time I think that process becomes cumulative however. So the rankings at the top should be more or less stable once established. While I do believe in using a form of the scientific method, of approaching each process of analysis with a clean slate, no pre-conceived notions. There should be a pretty large weight of analysis done on the more established players, and therefore it should not take as long to reaffirm/adjust those decisions.

Where that cumulative analysis forms is from the beginning of the players career, when things were less known, and then adjusted as more data becomes available.

It is not easy by any means. If I were to do a complete ranking from top to bottom every month or so (without looking at anything else I had done previously) I am sure I would be surprised at how different they are. Looking at those differences would be a good method of identifying players that deserve further investigation, because of the difference of my own rankings between those 2 time frames. So this is somewhat how I have been thinking to approach it if I were not so lazy.

While I agree with your overall point, that ranking the players who's value is most relevant to the largest number of people (top 150 list or so) will have the most usefulness to the majority of folks using your rankings as a second opinion on the relative value of players.

I also agree with what EBF is saying, that evaluating the situations with a lot of unknowns is where you can gain the most leverage against your competition, because those are the players where if you are correct, you can get at somewhat of a discount, by being ahead of the competition and getting in on the ground floor. Of course you are also going to be wrong much more frequently as well.

 

[Biabreakable]

As a rookie prospect many people seemed to be valuing Eifert as if he will have a career like Jason Witten, or one of those few players who can stay on top in TE rankings year after year. While I think that is possible, it is still a very tall order. It is more likely that he ends up being in this ever growing large group of TE who will have good seasons, but not difference making seasons, such as Graham has. If Eifert does have a top 5 season at some point (such as player like Miller have done once, usually with high TD numbers being the main impetus for this) will he be able to repeat that? I have my doubts about any rookie TE achieving this status. I recall KW2 and Vernon Davis having even more hype than Eifert as rookie prospects, and they certainly had the potential to become one of these elite players but fell short. It just is not easy to become a player so rare for as long as Tony Gonzalez has.

Not sure Winslow and Davis are the comparisons you want to be making.

Kellen Winslow suffered serious injuries early in his career and was never again 100%, but he's still cobbled together a 10-year career, most of it spent as a PPR beast. KWII averages 4.7 receptions and 52.4 yards per game for his career. Jason Witten averages 5.1 and 56.4. Winslow's Cleveland numbers actually are nearly identical to Witten's career numbers, at 5.0 receptions and 55.9 yards. Since Winslow entered the league, only Gates, Gonzo, Gronk, Graham, and Hernandez average more points per game in non-PPR or PPR. I'd be thrilled if Eifert gave me a career like Kellen Winslow's. That career is well worth a top-5 dynasty ranking right now. And that's with a never-fully-healthy Winslow, to boot.

Vernon Davis is right behind Winslow in PPG average, and still carries huge trade value despite disappointing for years. If you told me Tyler Eifert was going to post two dominant seasons and otherwise underachieve for the better part of a decade, but that at the end of it he'd still be considered a consensus top-5 dynasty TE, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Tyler Eifert doesn't have to be the next Tony Gonzalez to justify a top-3 or top-5 ranking. Simply being the next Kellen Winslow or Vernon Davis will suffice just fine. As long as he's not the next Brandon Pettigrew or Dustin Keller, I am content.

They may not be the best examples for the idea I am trying to convey.

I have invested in both players as rookies and I valued them slightly more than I currently value Eifert, which I do think I value Eifert pretty highly.

I realize that KW2's career could have been what many people expected if not for the injuries. I note that he is still doing well even now. My focus is not on PPR however, so my perceptions are different than what I think you are saying here.

Either way as you recall pre NFL draft nearly all FBG staff seemed to concur that Eifert should be ranked 4-6th overall for TE before he had even been drafted. While this could turn out to be the correct call I think it was far too optimistic and likely continues to be.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Decisions at the top have huge impacts, though. Ask the guy who drafted Matt Stafford in the first two rounds of a startup last year whether he wishes he'd spent a bit more time studying the top QBs. Ask the guy who got Peterson in the 2nd whether he thought he might have been better off focusing on guys in the 15th round, instead. And "at the top" doesn't just mean "WR#2 vs. WR#3", it also means looking seriously at the break between the 1st tier guys and the 2nd tier guys. Which side do you put Percy Harvin on? Randall Cobb? Hakeem Nicks? Victor Cruz? Larry Fitzgerald? How high are you willing to go on old man Peterson? Old man Brees? How worried are you about The Gronk's injuries? These decisions are potentially far more impactful than a decision on whether you should draft Kenny Stills or Nick Toon in the 16th, or a decision on whether it's worth it to reach on Quinton Patton in the 14th.

It's never easy, but I think picks actually become harder the further you get into the draft. And that makes intuitive sense. At the top of the draft, you have the entire player pool to choose from. That means you can exclude every player who has even a shred of risk. When you are picking from a list of Doug Martin, Trent Richardson, LeSean McCoy, Jimmy Graham, AJ Green, Julio Jones, Dez Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Andrew Luck, and Aaron Rodgers, you should be able to get a good player. If you're gun-shy about the rookies, you can restrict your options to the even smaller population of Graham, Green, Julio, McCoy, and Rodgers. All top level players who have done it for multiple seasons.

The risk with a player like this is minimal. Yea, you might take Julio over Calvin and you might surrender some VBD there when all is said and done, but you've still got Julio and if he performs at the level he has the past couple years with a modest improvement for experience and opportunity then you've likely got a top 5-10 dynasty asset that's helping you win games while also maintaining peak trade value for a period of several years. That's a relatively pleasant doomsday scenario. You might not always make the perfect pick in the first round of a startup draft. However, you should be able to make a good pick. There's very little reason (apart from random bad injury luck) why you shouldn't be able to find a solid foundational player from the available options anywhere in the top 10-12 of a startup draft.

If you calculated the average career VBD for a first round startup pick, it would be pretty high. I just went back and looked at the first round of a 14 team draft that I did in 2008. It's five years later, and I'd say 9-10 of the 14 first round picks still have reasonable FF value (Peterson, Lynch, Gore, Reggie, McFadden, Andre, Fitzgerald, Wayne, MJD, SJax). On the flipside, the teen rounds are a barren wasteland. Every now and then a good pick pops up from the sea of crap (Jamaal Charles in the 10th, Aaron Rodgers in the 11th, Jordy Nelson in the 12th, Cedric Benson in the 15th, Pierre Garcon in the 18th). But we're talking about maybe one guy per round, if that. Mostly, your expectation with a pick in the teen rounds is to get a nice steaming turd. What this means is that in those rare cases where you actually do find someone of value, you've secured a huge spike over expectations.

Finding a good player in the top 15 picks is not special. Most of your leaguemates will manage that feat. Doing the same won't distinguish you from the average team. It's the expectation. However, most of the teams in your league are not going to fare very well in the mid-late rounds. That means that if you can get those picks right, you will have secured a big advantage over your peers. That's why I spend more energy looking at rookies and bench scrubs versus trying to decide whether Julio, Green, or Demaryius is the most valuable. I think that's like debating Fitz, Andre, or VJax. Useful to a point, but in the end the advantage to be gained by getting that problem absolutely right is a lot thinner than the advantage of getting Marques Colston or Victor Cruz off the waiver wire, or making the right pick when you're choosing between Anquan Boldin and Taylor Jacobs in the 14th round of your startup.

Again, you keep focusing on the top 15. I already mentioned that I was talking about second-tier guys like Cobb and Nicks and Fitzgerald, guys who are drafted in the 2nd-4th round in dynasty leagues. That area is much more of a minefield, and I'm much more convinced that it's possible to predict which guys are more likely to blow up in your face. It makes sense to focus most of the effort there, then, since the rewards are higher and the downside of failure is much greater.

You admit that 95+% of late-round picks are going to turn into heaping turdburgers. You think that spending the bulk of your time in that area increases your chances of getting a gem. I'm not convinced- I think there's a lot more randomness to who succeeds and who fails there, and I'm not entirely convinced that predicting which late-round player will explode is a repeatable skill. Even if it is, if most 18th rounders have a 2% chance of hitting and you're so good at scouting that you can double that, you're still left with just a 4% chance of hitting, meaning you increased your odds of getting a quality player by just 2%. Meanwhile, if fifth rounders have a 35% chance of hitting and you can double THAT, you're increasing your odds of landing a quality fantasy player by a whopping 35%.

I stand by my original position. In terms of return on investment, the best place to spend the majority of your effort is on the guys in the 2nd-8th round range of startups, or the starter or top backup quality players in established leagues.

I can see that as far as making rankings for other people to use. I have never really come to a conclusion about how best to do that. Leagues are so different. So focusing most of your ranking on the players who will be rostered, even in small roster leagues makes sense as the focus for those rankings.

For folks who have been doing this a long time I think that process becomes cumulative however. So the rankings at the top should be more or less stable once established. While I do believe in using a form of the scientific method, of approaching each process of analysis with a clean slate, no pre-conceived notions. There should be a pretty large weight of analysis done on the more established players, and therefore it should not take as long to reaffirm/adjust those decisions.

Where that cumulative analysis forms is from the beginning of the players career, when things were less known, and then adjusted as more data becomes available.

It is not easy by any means. If I were to do a complete ranking from top to bottom every month or so (without looking at anything else I had done previously) I am sure I would be surprised at how different they are. Looking at those differences would be a good method of identifying players that deserve further investigation, because of the difference of my own rankings between those 2 time frames. So this is somewhat how I have been thinking to approach it if I were not so lazy.

While I agree with your overall point, that ranking the players who's value is most relevant to the largest number of people (top 150 list or so) will have the most usefulness to the majority of folks using your rankings as a second opinion on the relative value of players.

I also agree with what EBF is saying, that evaluating the situations with a lot of unknowns is where you can gain the most leverage against your competition, because those are the players where if you are correct, you can get at somewhat of a discount, by being ahead of the competition and getting in on the ground floor. Of course you are also going to be wrong much more frequently as well.

I actually do this. I keep players' names on index cards, and every so often I just shuffle the cards and re-stack them from scratch. It's a much more time-consuming process, but it's necessary sometimes to clear away the bad assumptions and misplaced beliefs that have just been compounding with further revisions.

At the same time, a full re-stack is usually not ideal, either, because someone always winds up getting misplaced simply because of the mood I was in. I really think my rankings are at their "best" about 2 or 3 revisions after a clean re-stack, because they're fresh enough that the misconceptions haven't had time to harden, but they've still had time for the crazy oversights to settle out a bit.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

Nailed it 100%. VBD grows exponentially as you move up the rankings, so being a little bit more right at the very top has a hugely disproportionate impact compared to being a whole ton more right at the bottom.

I also completely agree with you that thought and time are a limited resource, so you want to spend them where they'll do you the most good. I really like your phrase that "thinking is for doing"- I think that would not be a bad motto for running a fantasy team. I've had seasons in the past where I simply did not have the time to devote to the hobby, and I usually reacted by simply not thinking about half of the league. I'd basically only bother forming opinions on half of the players. This meant there might be someone grossly undervalued and I'd never know it or try to acquire him because he wasn't on my radar, but I found that by sticking to what I knew, I could continue to make positive gains with a dramatically lower time investment.

Now, I happen to be a very heavy trader in dynasty leagues. In my oldest dynasty, I'm a multiple champion and the prohibitive favorite, and the only three players on my entire roster who have been with my team continuously since their rookie season are Ben Roethlisberger (since the initial startup), Jonathan Stewart, and Randall Cobb. I own Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Percy Harvin, Demaryius Thomas, Michael Crabtree, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Miles Austin, Kenny Britt, Rob Gronkowski, Greg Olsen, and the San Fran defense... and I've traded for every single one of them. As a result, it's always made sense for me to make very specific rankings of those mid-to-high tier guys even long after the startup, because I never know who I'm going to find undervalued and target. A lot of times I'll find someone undervalued, trade for him, and then immediately trade him away to another team for something else I value even more. All that wheeling and dealing keeps the middle of my rankings very sharp. The bottom of my rankings, on the other hand, has never been that important to me. I like Kenny Stills. If he's on the street, I'll roster him. If we're close on a deal, I might add him as a piece to one side or the other as a sort of "prospect to be named later" just to balance everything out. I'm never going to actively target him in a trade, though. To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

 

[Biabreakable]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

I stopped playing FF in 2009-2012. So in that sense I have started over. There are still gaps in my reasoning from skipping those seasons.

What I was thinking about doing as a somewhat new methodology for ranking players is to start with the 2013 rookie class then move backwards by draft class. Slotting each draft class together along the way, until I reach the players who are no longer playing anymore.

So sort of building the onion from the inside out.

I have not tried to do this yet. Just thought I would share that idea as perhaps a different way of approaching the problem.

 

[Adam Harstad]

As a rookie prospect many people seemed to be valuing Eifert as if he will have a career like Jason Witten, or one of those few players who can stay on top in TE rankings year after year. While I think that is possible, it is still a very tall order. It is more likely that he ends up being in this ever growing large group of TE who will have good seasons, but not difference making seasons, such as Graham has. If Eifert does have a top 5 season at some point (such as player like Miller have done once, usually with high TD numbers being the main impetus for this) will he be able to repeat that? I have my doubts about any rookie TE achieving this status. I recall KW2 and Vernon Davis having even more hype than Eifert as rookie prospects, and they certainly had the potential to become one of these elite players but fell short. It just is not easy to become a player so rare for as long as Tony Gonzalez has.

Not sure Winslow and Davis are the comparisons you want to be making.

Kellen Winslow suffered serious injuries early in his career and was never again 100%, but he's still cobbled together a 10-year career, most of it spent as a PPR beast. KWII averages 4.7 receptions and 52.4 yards per game for his career. Jason Witten averages 5.1 and 56.4. Winslow's Cleveland numbers actually are nearly identical to Witten's career numbers, at 5.0 receptions and 55.9 yards. Since Winslow entered the league, only Gates, Gonzo, Gronk, Graham, and Hernandez average more points per game in non-PPR or PPR. I'd be thrilled if Eifert gave me a career like Kellen Winslow's. That career is well worth a top-5 dynasty ranking right now. And that's with a never-fully-healthy Winslow, to boot.

Vernon Davis is right behind Winslow in PPG average, and still carries huge trade value despite disappointing for years. If you told me Tyler Eifert was going to post two dominant seasons and otherwise underachieve for the better part of a decade, but that at the end of it he'd still be considered a consensus top-5 dynasty TE, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.

Tyler Eifert doesn't have to be the next Tony Gonzalez to justify a top-3 or top-5 ranking. Simply being the next Kellen Winslow or Vernon Davis will suffice just fine. As long as he's not the next Brandon Pettigrew or Dustin Keller, I am content.

They may not be the best examples for the idea I am trying to convey.

I have invested in both players as rookies and I valued them slightly more than I currently value Eifert, which I do think I value Eifert pretty highly.

I realize that KW2's career could have been what many people expected if not for the injuries. I note that he is still doing well even now. My focus is not on PPR however, so my perceptions are different than what I think you are saying here.

Either way as you recall pre NFL draft nearly all FBG staff seemed to concur that Eifert should be ranked 4-6th overall for TE before he had even been drafted. While this could turn out to be the correct call I think it was far too optimistic and likely continues to be.

The problem, as I like to say, is that someone has to be ranked there. You say that Eifert is not likely to be a long-term stable top-5 TE for years to come, so you don't want to rank him as a top-5 TE in your rankings. Okay then, who *IS* likely to be a long-term stable top-5 TE for years to come? Gronk, absolutely. Graham, no question. Witten? Hmmm... maybe, but he's certainly getting up there in years. Vernon? Cook? Rudolph? I'd argue that Eifert has as good of an argument as any of these guys. You can't just rank 3 TEs in your top-5 because those are the only guys you really think are likely to hold stable value. Like I say, SOMEONE has to be ranked there. In my opinion, it might as well be Eifert.

 

[ZWK]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

Nailed it 100%. VBD grows exponentially as you move up the rankings, so being a little bit more right at the very top has a hugely disproportionate impact compared to being a whole ton more right at the bottom.

I also completely agree with you that thought and time are a limited resource, so you want to spend them where they'll do you the most good. I really like your phrase that "thinking is for doing"- I think that would not be a bad motto for running a fantasy team. I've had seasons in the past where I simply did not have the time to devote to the hobby, and I usually reacted by simply not thinking about half of the league. I'd basically only bother forming opinions on half of the players. This meant there might be someone grossly undervalued and I'd never know it or try to acquire him because he wasn't on my radar, but I found that by sticking to what I knew, I could continue to make positive gains with a dramatically lower time investment.

Now, I happen to be a very heavy trader in dynasty leagues. In my oldest dynasty, I'm a multiple champion and the prohibitive favorite, and the only three players on my entire roster who have been with my team continuously since their rookie season are Ben Roethlisberger (since the initial startup), Jonathan Stewart, and Randall Cobb. I own Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Percy Harvin, Demaryius Thomas, Michael Crabtree, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Miles Austin, Kenny Britt, Rob Gronkowski, Greg Olsen, and the San Fran defense... and I've traded for every single one of them. As a result, it's always made sense for me to make very specific rankings of those mid-to-high tier guys even long after the startup, because I never know who I'm going to find undervalued and target. A lot of times I'll find someone undervalued, trade for him, and then immediately trade him away to another team for something else I value even more. All that wheeling and dealing keeps the middle of my rankings very sharp. The bottom of my rankings, on the other hand, has never been that important to me. I like Kenny Stills. If he's on the street, I'll roster him. If we're close on a deal, I might add him as a piece to one side or the other as a sort of "prospect to be named later" just to balance everything out. I'm never going to actively target him in a trade, though. To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

BTW, the phrase "thinking is for doing" comes from psychologist Susan Fiske, who was paraphrasing William James (James's original: "My thinking is first and last and always for my doing"). Neither was particularly accomplished at fantasy football, but they have both had success in other domains.

WRs in my league who have been on the wire over the last three years (prior to their big seasons) include Jordy Nelson, Stevie Johnson, Cecil Shorts, T.Y. Hilton, Danario Alexander, James Jones, and Brandon Lloyd. So I consider playing the wire well to be pretty important.

 

[ZWK]

Decisions at the top have huge impacts, though. Ask the guy who drafted Matt Stafford in the first two rounds of a startup last year whether he wishes he'd spent a bit more time studying the top QBs. Ask the guy who got Peterson in the 2nd whether he thought he might have been better off focusing on guys in the 15th round, instead. And "at the top" doesn't just mean "WR#2 vs. WR#3", it also means looking seriously at the break between the 1st tier guys and the 2nd tier guys. Which side do you put Percy Harvin on? Randall Cobb? Hakeem Nicks? Victor Cruz? Larry Fitzgerald? How high are you willing to go on old man Peterson? Old man Brees? How worried are you about The Gronk's injuries? These decisions are potentially far more impactful than a decision on whether you should draft Kenny Stills or Nick Toon in the 16th, or a decision on whether it's worth it to reach on Quinton Patton in the 14th.

It's never easy, but I think picks actually become harder the further you get into the draft. And that makes intuitive sense. At the top of the draft, you have the entire player pool to choose from. That means you can exclude every player who has even a shred of risk. When you are picking from a list of Doug Martin, Trent Richardson, LeSean McCoy, Jimmy Graham, AJ Green, Julio Jones, Dez Bryant, Demaryius Thomas, Andrew Luck, and Aaron Rodgers, you should be able to get a good player. If you're gun-shy about the rookies, you can restrict your options to the even smaller population of Graham, Green, Julio, McCoy, and Rodgers. All top level players who have done it for multiple seasons.

The risk with a player like this is minimal. Yea, you might take Julio over Calvin and you might surrender some VBD there when all is said and done, but you've still got Julio and if he performs at the level he has the past couple years with a modest improvement for experience and opportunity then you've likely got a top 5-10 dynasty asset that's helping you win games while also maintaining peak trade value for a period of several years. That's a relatively pleasant doomsday scenario. You might not always make the perfect pick in the first round of a startup draft. However, you should be able to make a good pick. There's very little reason (apart from random bad injury luck) why you shouldn't be able to find a solid foundational player from the available options anywhere in the top 10-12 of a startup draft.

If you calculated the average career VBD for a first round startup pick, it would be pretty high. I just went back and looked at the first round of a 14 team draft that I did in 2008. It's five years later, and I'd say 9-10 of the 14 first round picks still have reasonable FF value (Peterson, Lynch, Gore, Reggie, McFadden, Andre, Fitzgerald, Wayne, MJD, SJax). On the flipside, the teen rounds are a barren wasteland. Every now and then a good pick pops up from the sea of crap (Jamaal Charles in the 10th, Aaron Rodgers in the 11th, Jordy Nelson in the 12th, Cedric Benson in the 15th, Pierre Garcon in the 18th). But we're talking about maybe one guy per round, if that. Mostly, your expectation with a pick in the teen rounds is to get a nice steaming turd. What this means is that in those rare cases where you actually do find someone of value, you've secured a huge spike over expectations.

Finding a good player in the top 15 picks is not special. Most of your leaguemates will manage that feat. Doing the same won't distinguish you from the average team. It's the expectation. However, most of the teams in your league are not going to fare very well in the mid-late rounds. That means that if you can get those picks right, you will have secured a big advantage over your peers. That's why I spend more energy looking at rookies and bench scrubs versus trying to decide whether Julio, Green, or Demaryius is the most valuable. I think that's like debating Fitz, Andre, or VJax. Useful to a point, but in the end the advantage to be gained by getting that problem absolutely right is a lot thinner than the advantage of getting Marques Colston or Victor Cruz off the waiver wire, or making the right pick when you're choosing between Anquan Boldin and Taylor Jacobs in the 14th round of your startup.

Again, you keep focusing on the top 15. I already mentioned that I was talking about second-tier guys like Cobb and Nicks and Fitzgerald, guys who are drafted in the 2nd-4th round in dynasty leagues. That area is much more of a minefield, and I'm much more convinced that it's possible to predict which guys are more likely to blow up in your face. It makes sense to focus most of the effort there, then, since the rewards are higher and the downside of failure is much greater.

You admit that 95+% of late-round picks are going to turn into heaping turdburgers. You think that spending the bulk of your time in that area increases your chances of getting a gem. I'm not convinced- I think there's a lot more randomness to who succeeds and who fails there, and I'm not entirely convinced that predicting which late-round player will explode is a repeatable skill. Even if it is, if most 18th rounders have a 2% chance of hitting and you're so good at scouting that you can double that, you're still left with just a 4% chance of hitting, meaning you increased your odds of getting a quality player by just 2%. Meanwhile, if fifth rounders have a 35% chance of hitting and you can double THAT, you're increasing your odds of landing a quality fantasy player by a whopping 35%.

I stand by my original position. In terms of return on investment, the best place to spend the majority of your effort is on the guys in the 2nd-8th round range of startups, or the starter or top backup quality players in established leagues.

I can see that as far as making rankings for other people to use. I have never really come to a conclusion about how best to do that. Leagues are so different. So focusing most of your ranking on the players who will be rostered, even in small roster leagues makes sense as the focus for those rankings.

For folks who have been doing this a long time I think that process becomes cumulative however. So the rankings at the top should be more or less stable once established. While I do believe in using a form of the scientific method, of approaching each process of analysis with a clean slate, no pre-conceived notions. There should be a pretty large weight of analysis done on the more established players, and therefore it should not take as long to reaffirm/adjust those decisions.

Where that cumulative analysis forms is from the beginning of the players career, when things were less known, and then adjusted as more data becomes available.

It is not easy by any means. If I were to do a complete ranking from top to bottom every month or so (without looking at anything else I had done previously) I am sure I would be surprised at how different they are. Looking at those differences would be a good method of identifying players that deserve further investigation, because of the difference of my own rankings between those 2 time frames. So this is somewhat how I have been thinking to approach it if I were not so lazy.

While I agree with your overall point, that ranking the players who's value is most relevant to the largest number of people (top 150 list or so) will have the most usefulness to the majority of folks using your rankings as a second opinion on the relative value of players.

I also agree with what EBF is saying, that evaluating the situations with a lot of unknowns is where you can gain the most leverage against your competition, because those are the players where if you are correct, you can get at somewhat of a discount, by being ahead of the competition and getting in on the ground floor. Of course you are also going to be wrong much more frequently as well.

I actually do this. I keep players' names on index cards, and every so often I just shuffle the cards and re-stack them from scratch. It's a much more time-consuming process, but it's necessary sometimes to clear away the bad assumptions and misplaced beliefs that have just been compounding with further revisions.

At the same time, a full re-stack is usually not ideal, either, because someone always winds up getting misplaced simply because of the mood I was in. I really think my rankings are at their "best" about 2 or 3 revisions after a clean re-stack, because they're fresh enough that the misconceptions haven't had time to harden, but they've still had time for the crazy oversights to settle out a bit.

I've only done a little bit of rankings-making, but one version of the re-shuffle that I found useful was:

step 1: when my old, careful rankings are getting kind of stagnant, randomly re-shuffle to start from scratch

step 2: do a quick, intuitive, somewhat sloppy job of making a new set of rankings, starting from the randomly shuffled rankings (and ignoring my old rankings)

step 3: put my old (careful, stagnant) and my new (fresh, sloppy) rankings next to each other, and make a new set of rankings while looking at both (and treating them both as plausible options; not taking either one as the default). Put extra thought/time/research into the players for whom there is a large gap in the two rankings.

This is a lot quicker than doing a brand new, thorough, careful ranking while starting from scratch. It is more accurate (I suspect) than doing a brand new, moderately careful ranking from scratch (completely ignoring my old rankings). And I suspect that it provides the majority of the benefit of doing a fresh set of rankings (in terms of thinking fresh and escaping from anchoring effects, blind spots, etc.).

I've only done this once, but when I did my final rankings were basically equally correlated with my old (careful, stagnant) rankings and my new (fresh, sloppy) rankings. If I wanted to put the time into making weekly rankings (which I currently don't plan on doing), I think I'd aim to do something like this at least once a month.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

Nailed it 100%. VBD grows exponentially as you move up the rankings, so being a little bit more right at the very top has a hugely disproportionate impact compared to being a whole ton more right at the bottom.

I also completely agree with you that thought and time are a limited resource, so you want to spend them where they'll do you the most good. I really like your phrase that "thinking is for doing"- I think that would not be a bad motto for running a fantasy team. I've had seasons in the past where I simply did not have the time to devote to the hobby, and I usually reacted by simply not thinking about half of the league. I'd basically only bother forming opinions on half of the players. This meant there might be someone grossly undervalued and I'd never know it or try to acquire him because he wasn't on my radar, but I found that by sticking to what I knew, I could continue to make positive gains with a dramatically lower time investment.

Now, I happen to be a very heavy trader in dynasty leagues. In my oldest dynasty, I'm a multiple champion and the prohibitive favorite, and the only three players on my entire roster who have been with my team continuously since their rookie season are Ben Roethlisberger (since the initial startup), Jonathan Stewart, and Randall Cobb. I own Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Percy Harvin, Demaryius Thomas, Michael Crabtree, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Miles Austin, Kenny Britt, Rob Gronkowski, Greg Olsen, and the San Fran defense... and I've traded for every single one of them. As a result, it's always made sense for me to make very specific rankings of those mid-to-high tier guys even long after the startup, because I never know who I'm going to find undervalued and target. A lot of times I'll find someone undervalued, trade for him, and then immediately trade him away to another team for something else I value even more. All that wheeling and dealing keeps the middle of my rankings very sharp. The bottom of my rankings, on the other hand, has never been that important to me. I like Kenny Stills. If he's on the street, I'll roster him. If we're close on a deal, I might add him as a piece to one side or the other as a sort of "prospect to be named later" just to balance everything out. I'm never going to actively target him in a trade, though. To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

BTW, the phrase "thinking is for doing" comes from psychologist Susan Fiske, who was paraphrasing William James (James's original: "My thinking is first and last and always for my doing"). Neither was particularly accomplished at fantasy football, but they have both had success in other domains.

WRs in my league who have been on the wire over the last three years (prior to their big seasons) include Jordy Nelson, Stevie Johnson, Cecil Shorts, T.Y. Hilton, Danario Alexander, James Jones, and Brandon Lloyd. So I consider playing the wire well to be pretty important.

Do you believe that there is a way to meaningfully distinguish the successes from the (many, many more numerous) failures ahead of time with a reasonable degree of precision? Note that I said precision and not accuracy- no matter how much research you do, late rounders will always be a very low-percentage play. I'm just asking whether you feel like you can make meaningful distinctions between, say, your 83rd ranked WR and your 87th ranked WR. If you were to assign a percentage chance to your 83rd ranked WR becoming a meaningful fantasy contributor, what would it be? If you repeated it with your 87th ranked WR, what would it be? How tiny is the gap between the two percentages, and how much can that gap be widened with an extra hour of research?

That's my contention, here. The difference between the many late-round guys might wind up being huge ex post, but ex ante we're dealing with tiny margins. I feel like my bucket system, where I just dump a large number of similar prospects into broadly similar buckets (good prospects, decent prospects, bad prospects), produces outcomes that are maybe 90% as good with maybe 10% of the effort. The time I save by not focusing so hard on the end of my rankings can be spent improving the top and the middle, where that time will provide a greater return on investment.

Also, I'm not denying the importance of playing the wire. I'm very active on the wire, too- it's why I like the concept of urgency so much, because players with high urgency let me keep my end-of-bench roster spots productive and actively developing players. I'm just saying, none of us can really tell ahead of time who is the next Mike Wallace or Miles Austin and who is just Chaz Schilens or Mike Sims-Walker. The best way to increase our chances isn't more research, it's increasing the number of lotto tickets we buy.

 

[Dinsy Ejotuz]

Re: discussion of TE value... had a Witten for Cook offer rejected.

 

[EBF]

To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

They're interchangeable until they aren't. I had Jordy Nelson sitting on the end of three dynasty benches for years back when he was just one of those late round dart throws. I would not say he's interchangeable with Malcolm Kelly, Devin Thomas, and Donnie Avery 5 years later.

What we know about almost any group of 2nd-3rd round prospects is that 25-30% of them will probably become decent players. I don't think it's easy to consistently predict exactly who that's going to be, but I definitely think you can pick out some of the obvious duds and remove them from the equation if you know what you're looking at. I'll go on a limb with this year's group and say Stedman Bailey, Terrance Williams, and Marquise Goodwin have zero chance of ever becoming top 30 dynasty WRs. If I'm right and I can ignore those guys completely in my drafts, I've just bumped up my odds of landing one of the good rookies considerably. If you do that every year, it will add up. You are still going to have misses, but even a 10% increase in your batting average is going to result in a rapid accumulation of value relative to the average drafter.

It all comes back to uncertainty. The "wait and see" owner slaps a generic price tag on a rookie based on his draft slot and then waits to see what the rookie becomes. The proactive owner tries to figure out what the rookie is before he plays an NFL snap and then acts according to that judgment right away, without having to wait and see. The former strategy is conservative and safe. You're not going to get burned by a guy like James Hardy or Limas Sweed if you don't buy them until they look legit. On the other hand, you're probably not going to get Josh Gordon or TY Hilton if you don't buy them until they look legit because their owner won't sell cheap at that point. "Wait and see" is a strategy that saves face, but you risk losing out to proactive owners who are out there making judgments and acquiring players based on what they think they already know.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of the stacked teams in my dynasty leagues owe their success to proactive moves for players like CJ Spiller, Demaryius Thomas, Percy Harvin, Doug Martin, Jamaal Charles, and LeSean McCoy. Guys who at one point were ranked as generic high potential rookies, but who have proven to be worth far more than that. It's not random luck. Some owners are better at making those early spots than other owners. When you pair that ability with a willingness to make the necessary trades, you are going to have a very successful owner.

It's harder to get a steal with a known quantity. ZWK pointed out that Peterson and Calvin have provided a huge VBD edge over some of the players drafted in the same range. Well, guess what? Peterson and Calvin have occupied the RB1 spot and WR1 spots for the vast majority of their NFL careers, so it's not like you scored a big coup by taking them that high. Everyone basically knew those guys were awesome all along. You only got those guys at a discount if an owner made a mistake (that does happen, but you can't count on it). On the flipside, guys like Demaryius and Harvin were rated as 4th-6th round startup picks prior to their rookie seasons. There was a genuine question of whether or not they would ever be viable NFL players, and that made them relatively available in drafts and trades. Those situations are ripe for exploitation.

The same applies right now. There's a big cluster of high-potential young players whose long term value is highly amorphous. Treat them all as interchangeable and you'll have an average success rate. Any owner in your league with a willingness to make proactive calls who has even a 1% better than average ability to make those judgments will have an edge over you. If you're in a competitive league, those owners are out there and you can bet that they'll be on the prowl for a bargain. If you sit back and twiddle your thumbs, you will get lapped by an equivalent owner who's as good at you at working the VBD/veteran angle, but who also has a keen ability to parse uncertainty and make proactive moves.

My biggest gripe with consensus dynasty rankings is exactly that. They are passive and not proactive. They will not rank a guy like Christine Michael ahead of Steven Jackson until it's abundantly clear to everyone that he's worth more, at which point you've already missed the opportunity to flip Jackson for Michael. It's mostly a waste of energy to talk about what's already known. We already know who Julio Jones, Jimmy Graham, and LeSean McCoy are. Telling me that Jimmy Graham is great does not help my dynasty teams. On the other hand, telling me that Christine Michael is worth more than at least 50% of the dynasty RBs that you can trade for him is very useful, actionable knowledge.

The whole point of looking at guys like Quinton Patton and Marlon Brown is to try to make a similar judgment before the needle moves for the general FF public.

 

[Biabreakable]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of the stacked teams in my dynasty leagues owe their success to proactive moves for players like CJ Spiller, Demaryius Thomas, Percy Harvin, Doug Martin, Jamaal Charles, and LeSean McCoy. Guys who at one point were ranked as generic high potential rookies, but who have proven to be worth far more than that. It's not random luck. Some owners are better at making those early spots than other owners. When you pair that ability with a willingness to make the necessary trades, you are going to have a very successful owner.

While there may have been some uncertainty regarding these players in the beginning, I do not think any of these examples qualify. Most of these players were top players in any rookie draft from the begining. There was no getting in at floor level with them. It took a high investment from the start.

I for the most part agree with your overall statement, but I think you need to dig deeper for some real examples of what your saying.

There is also the issue of roster size and opportunity lost from holding these players a long time before they pay off. And the ones who do not burned up your roster spots entirely too long.

 

[EBF]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of the stacked teams in my dynasty leagues owe their success to proactive moves for players like CJ Spiller, Demaryius Thomas, Percy Harvin, Doug Martin, Jamaal Charles, and LeSean McCoy. Guys who at one point were ranked as generic high potential rookies, but who have proven to be worth far more than that. It's not random luck. Some owners are better at making those early spots than other owners. When you pair that ability with a willingness to make the necessary trades, you are going to have a very successful owner.

While there may have been some uncertainty regarding these players in the beginning, I do not think any of these examples qualify. Most of these players were top players in any rookie draft from the begining. There was no getting in at floor level with them. It took a high investment from the start.

First round NFL draft rookies are almost never cheap, but they're often cheap relative to what they'll eventually become. Look at this year's class. DynastyLeagueFootball has Hopkins rated as WR19 and Patterson as WR26. If I were convinced that Patterson was the next Julio Jones, I would be salivating at that WR26 price tag. It's not a cheap price, but it's a cheap price if he becomes an impact player. Apart from the uber hyped guys like Reggie Bush and Adrian Peterson, you're not going to see a lot of rookies taken in the first round of a startup. The less heralded ones like Harvin, Demaryius, Wilson, and Nicks will pretty commonly fall into the 40-60 range. It's a fairly modest price tag that represents a compromise between acknowledging the potential of a first rounder while also being wary of the bust risk. The fact that people apply risk discounts to players who are destined to become stars is what creates the potential to get a great player at a (relatively) low price. If you're convinced that Patterson is a future top 10 dynasty WR and you pay a WR20 price to get him, he wasn't cheap but he was cheap relative to his eventual value.

I'm not saying anything that people don't already know. Just pointing out that a player can be expensive and still cheap. If you took Calvin in the 2nd round of a startup in 2007, you spent a very high pick on him, but you still got him cheap. If you spend a 4th-5th round startup pick on a top prospect and he becomes a mega star, that's still a cheap price.

 

[Biabreakable]

Ok EBF I think I understand what you are getting at a bit better now.

 

[ZWK]

Judgments about the top players can matter a lot. Let's go back three years, to the offseason before the 2010 season. At the time, the consensus top four RBs (with disagreements about order) were Adrian Peterson, Chris Johnson, Maurice Jones-Drew, and Ray Rice. If you drafted any one of them that was a "hit" in some sense - they have each gone on to have at least one top 5 RB finish, they have each accumulated over 170 VBD over the past 3 seasons, and they are each currently in the top 20 dynasty RBs. But there is still a huge difference between them - Adrian Peterson has been worth about as much as CJ+MJD put together (335 VBD & current dynasty RB5 vs. 176+181 VBD and currently RB18&19). Rice has been neck-and-neck with Peterson.

It's similar with the top WRs. The top three WRs at the time (in some order) were Andre, Larry, and Calvin. Again, all "hits" - they have each had at least one top 7 WR season since then, and are currently in the top 15 dynasty WRs. But Calvin has been worth about as much as Andre & Larry put together.

You could ask similar questions this year. Are Dez & Demaryius only a hair behind A.J. & Julio, or are they only going to end up being worth half as much? Are A.J. and Julio on the same tier as Calvin, or even ahead of him? When you compare these players, there could be hundreds of VBD at stake.

Of course, spending time thinking about these players really only matters if you can do something about it, e.g., you are having a startup draft, or you're looking to trade for a top WR. The reason to spend time to form more accurate opinions of players is so you can make better moves involving those players - thinking is for doing. This time of year, most of what I'm doing is making waiver moves, so I spend a large fraction of my attention on waiver-wire-caliber players.

And I always devote extra attention to players that are likely to be involved in trades that I make. That includes players on my roster (especially players who I suspect are overrated and therefore want to move), players that I suspect are underrated (they're mostly the ones who I'll be trying to trade for), and players with a high variance across different people's rankings (because there might turn out to be a fairly big gap between my opinion of them and their owner's opinion). This last group (players who there is a lot of disagreement about) includes young prospects who haven't shown much on the field yet, players who are having an unusually good or unusually bad season so far, players who are injured, and players whose current (or future) role is particularly uncertain.

Nailed it 100%. VBD grows exponentially as you move up the rankings, so being a little bit more right at the very top has a hugely disproportionate impact compared to being a whole ton more right at the bottom.

I also completely agree with you that thought and time are a limited resource, so you want to spend them where they'll do you the most good. I really like your phrase that "thinking is for doing"- I think that would not be a bad motto for running a fantasy team. I've had seasons in the past where I simply did not have the time to devote to the hobby, and I usually reacted by simply not thinking about half of the league. I'd basically only bother forming opinions on half of the players. This meant there might be someone grossly undervalued and I'd never know it or try to acquire him because he wasn't on my radar, but I found that by sticking to what I knew, I could continue to make positive gains with a dramatically lower time investment.

Now, I happen to be a very heavy trader in dynasty leagues. In my oldest dynasty, I'm a multiple champion and the prohibitive favorite, and the only three players on my entire roster who have been with my team continuously since their rookie season are Ben Roethlisberger (since the initial startup), Jonathan Stewart, and Randall Cobb. I own Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Percy Harvin, Demaryius Thomas, Michael Crabtree, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Jamaal Charles, Miles Austin, Kenny Britt, Rob Gronkowski, Greg Olsen, and the San Fran defense... and I've traded for every single one of them. As a result, it's always made sense for me to make very specific rankings of those mid-to-high tier guys even long after the startup, because I never know who I'm going to find undervalued and target. A lot of times I'll find someone undervalued, trade for him, and then immediately trade him away to another team for something else I value even more. All that wheeling and dealing keeps the middle of my rankings very sharp. The bottom of my rankings, on the other hand, has never been that important to me. I like Kenny Stills. If he's on the street, I'll roster him. If we're close on a deal, I might add him as a piece to one side or the other as a sort of "prospect to be named later" just to balance everything out. I'm never going to actively target him in a trade, though. To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

BTW, the phrase "thinking is for doing" comes from psychologist Susan Fiske, who was paraphrasing William James (James's original: "My thinking is first and last and always for my doing"). Neither was particularly accomplished at fantasy football, but they have both had success in other domains.

WRs in my league who have been on the wire over the last three years (prior to their big seasons) include Jordy Nelson, Stevie Johnson, Cecil Shorts, T.Y. Hilton, Danario Alexander, James Jones, and Brandon Lloyd. So I consider playing the wire well to be pretty important.

Do you believe that there is a way to meaningfully distinguish the successes from the (many, many more numerous) failures ahead of time with a reasonable degree of precision? Note that I said precision and not accuracy- no matter how much research you do, late rounders will always be a very low-percentage play. I'm just asking whether you feel like you can make meaningful distinctions between, say, your 83rd ranked WR and your 87th ranked WR. If you were to assign a percentage chance to your 83rd ranked WR becoming a meaningful fantasy contributor, what would it be? If you repeated it with your 87th ranked WR, what would it be? How tiny is the gap between the two percentages, and how much can that gap be widened with an extra hour of research?

That's my contention, here. The difference between the many late-round guys might wind up being huge ex post, but ex ante we're dealing with tiny margins. I feel like my bucket system, where I just dump a large number of similar prospects into broadly similar buckets (good prospects, decent prospects, bad prospects), produces outcomes that are maybe 90% as good with maybe 10% of the effort. The time I save by not focusing so hard on the end of my rankings can be spent improving the top and the middle, where that time will provide a greater return on investment.

Also, I'm not denying the importance of playing the wire. I'm very active on the wire, too- it's why I like the concept of urgency so much, because players with high urgency let me keep my end-of-bench roster spots productive and actively developing players. I'm just saying, none of us can really tell ahead of time who is the next Mike Wallace or Miles Austin and who is just Chaz Schilens or Mike Sims-Walker. The best way to increase our chances isn't more research, it's increasing the number of lotto tickets we buy.

I don't actually do rankings for managing the wire. What I do is I keep a watch list of about 30-40 free agents who are on my radar, which I don't keep very carefully ordered. The top few FAs (who I would want to own if only I had the space) I do keep separate from the rest, and in order. Plus, I keep a cuttable list of the bottom few players on my roster, in order. I update these lists each week, before waivers go through, and consult them before putting in my bids. Most of my thought is focused on the few players on the top prospects list & the cuttable list, comparing them to each other and considering things like probability of hitting, upside, urgency, etc.

Timing matters a lot with playing the waiver wire. Finding guys who have a chance to break out in the next few weeks. Being a week ahead of your leaguemates, so that you can get someone for cheap who would be significantly more expensive a week later (or who wouldn't be available at all). Not giving up on guys a week too soon. Knowing when you can wait another week or two to pick someone up, using the waiver wire as an extended roster. Timing lets you cycle through more guys, and it lets you hold more guys who have a legitimate chance of breaking out while they're on your roster. That can provide a pretty big cumulative advantage. It doesn't require unusual skill at talent evaluation, but it does require a fair amount of thought and attention, because you need to update your thoughts each week and look ahead to what is likely to happen over the next few weeks.

(Talent evaluation helps, though. Some of the guys on my watch list are players who have signs of talent, where I'm waiting for them to get an opportunity with the goal of picking them up a week before my leaguemates. Last year, Cecil Shorts fell into that category - he was on my radar thanks to wdcrob, and it worked out beautifully.)

This probably has a lot of overlap with your approach with buckets & an emphasis on urgency - I'm not actually sure what the main differences are. It would also be tricky if I had to share all my thoughts publicly, instead of just focusing on my league. Turning this into a complete set of rankings, where I carefully put every player into order (instead of just ordering the top 5ish on the wire and the bottom 3ish on my roster), would take a lot more time/thought. And a lot of relevant thinking (e.g., about who is likely to still be available a week or two from now) would be hard to include because it depends on the league.

To give a couple examples for my league, right now I view Patrick Edwards as someone who should be rostered (high-uncertainty prospect in a pretty good situation who is getting plenty of playing time), and I see David Ausberry as someone who you can wait on and pick up when he is about to return from his injury.

 

[Biabreakable]

Broyles is still recovering from injury so I think Edwards makes a lot of sense. If he has a big game you can try to flip him and move on to the next one if you can.

It can be time consuming to keep up with everything but I agree with the idea of wanting to have some flexible roster spots for moves like this and just playing in the now.

The waiver wire should be treated like extended roster just like draft picks. You want to have the flexibility to use this so you can have trade bait for draft picks or bigger moves.

Getting too many roster spots tied up with long term prospects limits your opportunity to do this.

I sometimes think about a long term prospect as a 2014 draft pick that costs me a roster spot.

 

[Adam Harstad]

To me, until he does something on the field and gives me something to start evaluating, he's just "decent young WR prospect with upside", same as Patton or Brown or Thompkins. I like to say that those guys are the most overrated players in dynasty, because people will fall in love with certain individual prospects and overpay when in reality the entire group is mostly interchangeable.

They're interchangeable until they aren't. I had Jordy Nelson sitting on the end of three dynasty benches for years back when he was just one of those late round dart throws. I would not say he's interchangeable with Malcolm Kelly, Devin Thomas, and Donnie Avery 5 years later.

What we know about almost any group of 2nd-3rd round prospects is that 25-30% of them will probably become decent players. I don't think it's easy to consistently predict exactly who that's going to be, but I definitely think you can pick out some of the obvious duds and remove them from the equation if you know what you're looking at. I'll go on a limb with this year's group and say Stedman Bailey, Terrance Williams, and Marquise Goodwin have zero chance of ever becoming top 30 dynasty WRs. If I'm right and I can ignore those guys completely in my drafts, I've just bumped up my odds of landing one of the good rookies considerably. If you do that every year, it will add up. You are still going to have misses, but even a 10% increase in your batting average is going to result in a rapid accumulation of value relative to the average drafter.

It all comes back to uncertainty. The "wait and see" owner slaps a generic price tag on a rookie based on his draft slot and then waits to see what the rookie becomes. The proactive owner tries to figure out what the rookie is before he plays an NFL snap and then acts according to that judgment right away, without having to wait and see. The former strategy is conservative and safe. You're not going to get burned by a guy like James Hardy or Limas Sweed if you don't buy them until they look legit. On the other hand, you're probably not going to get Josh Gordon or TY Hilton if you don't buy them until they look legit because their owner won't sell cheap at that point. "Wait and see" is a strategy that saves face, but you risk losing out to proactive owners who are out there making judgments and acquiring players based on what they think they already know.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, most of the stacked teams in my dynasty leagues owe their success to proactive moves for players like CJ Spiller, Demaryius Thomas, Percy Harvin, Doug Martin, Jamaal Charles, and LeSean McCoy. Guys who at one point were ranked as generic high potential rookies, but who have proven to be worth far more than that. It's not random luck. Some owners are better at making those early spots than other owners. When you pair that ability with a willingness to make the necessary trades, you are going to have a very successful owner.

It's harder to get a steal with a known quantity. ZWK pointed out that Peterson and Calvin have provided a huge VBD edge over some of the players drafted in the same range. Well, guess what? Peterson and Calvin have occupied the RB1 spot and WR1 spots for the vast majority of their NFL careers, so it's not like you scored a big coup by taking them that high. Everyone basically knew those guys were awesome all along. You only got those guys at a discount if an owner made a mistake (that does happen, but you can't count on it). On the flipside, guys like Demaryius and Harvin were rated as 4th-6th round startup picks prior to their rookie seasons. There was a genuine question of whether or not they would ever be viable NFL players, and that made them relatively available in drafts and trades. Those situations are ripe for exploitation.

The same applies right now. There's a big cluster of high-potential young players whose long term value is highly amorphous. Treat them all as interchangeable and you'll have an average success rate. Any owner in your league with a willingness to make proactive calls who has even a 1% better than average ability to make those judgments will have an edge over you. If you're in a competitive league, those owners are out there and you can bet that they'll be on the prowl for a bargain. If you sit back and twiddle your thumbs, you will get lapped by an equivalent owner who's as good at you at working the VBD/veteran angle, but who also has a keen ability to parse uncertainty and make proactive moves.

My biggest gripe with consensus dynasty rankings is exactly that. They are passive and not proactive. They will not rank a guy like Christine Michael ahead of Steven Jackson until it's abundantly clear to everyone that he's worth more, at which point you've already missed the opportunity to flip Jackson for Michael. It's mostly a waste of energy to talk about what's already known. We already know who Julio Jones, Jimmy Graham, and LeSean McCoy are. Telling me that Jimmy Graham is great does not help my dynasty teams. On the other hand, telling me that Christine Michael is worth more than at least 50% of the dynasty RBs that you can trade for him is very useful, actionable knowledge.

The whole point of looking at guys like Quinton Patton and Marlon Brown is to try to make a similar judgment before the needle moves for the general FF public.

Throwing the flag on this one BIG TIME. I'm saying that I don't think spending a bunch of time agonizing over WRs75-90 is a very productive use of time, and you come back to me with those names? Demaryius and Harvin *NEVER* were valued in the 75-90 range at WR. Not once, not ever, not for a second, not at any point during their entire career. McCoy and Spiller were *NEVER* valued in the RB equivalent (say, somewhere around RB60). Jamaal Charles might have been before he ever played a down, but I doubt it.

I say that instead of focusing on the guys in the 75-90 range, I'm much better off focusing on the starters or top backups- so, say, the top 48 WRs and the top 36 RBs. You fire back by saying "well yeah, but if you'd focused on these starters and top backups and gotten them right, you'd be in a great position right now!" I agree completely. The value of Demaryius Thomas and Percy Harvin, the importance of landing a C.J. Spiller or Lesean McCoy... these are the reasons why I spend so much time working on my rankings in the WR2-4 and RB2-3 ranges. You can't throw out names like that in a conversation about guys like Kenny Stills, Quenton Patton, and Marlon Brown.

 

[Adam Harstad]

This probably has a lot of overlap with your approach with buckets & an emphasis on urgency - I'm not actually sure what the main differences are. It would also be tricky if I had to share all my thoughts publicly, instead of just focusing on my league. Turning this into a complete set of rankings, where I carefully put every player into order (instead of just ordering the top 5ish on the wire and the bottom 3ish on my roster), would take a lot more time/thought. And a lot of relevant thinking (e.g., about who is likely to still be available a week or two from now) would be hard to include because it depends on the league.

To give a couple examples for my league, right now I view Patrick Edwards as someone who should be rostered (high-uncertainty prospect in a pretty good situation who is getting plenty of playing time), and I see David Ausberry as someone who you can wait on and pick up when he is about to return from his injury.

When I compile my rankings, I try to think how people are going to use them. Other than rosterbation and discussion, I think most dynasty rankings are used for trade value. I don't think owners often go to the ranking lists when making waiver decisions, especially since the bottom of the rankings aren't combined across all positions (so there's no easy way to use my rankings to compare, say, WR78 against RB62). Maybe I'm wrong about that. Even if people are using my rankings to make waiver decisions all the time, though, I still think that the differences are so small that far down the rankings and so dependent on league specifics that I feel like diverting a bunch of time and resources to trying to split those hairs wouldn't pay much, if anything, in the way of dividends to those following my rankings. I'm skeptical that anyone has any real ability to sort the gems from the trash that deep, anyway. I think anyone who believes otherwise is probably falling prey to selective memory and confirmation bias. EBF's examples are a great one- he says he can exclude Stedman Bailey right off the bat. I know other owners who spend a lot of time scouting those really deep players, such as Bloom, who think Stedman is a very strong guy to target that deep in the rankings. Obviously both can't be right, which means one of them has just spent several hours reaching the wrong conclusion. And I think in the long run, the hits and the misses all pretty much even out.

I'm not saying I mail my rankings in. I'm just saying, if I have two hours to spend updating my WR rankings, I'm going to spend the bulk of that time on WRs in the 13-48 range, because I think that's the area that provides the greatest return on my investment in terms of actual real-world outcomes for myself and for those who are using my rankings as a tool to assist in the decision-making process. Those Demaryius Thomases and Percy Harvins and Lesean McCoys and C.J. Spillers that EBF was talking about typically come from this range. It's very rare to get a true fantasy difference-maker from outside of this area (Arian Foster, Marques Colston, Victor Cruz, maybe Miles Austin depending on how lax you are with "difference-maker"), and I'm not convinced that anyone has a better chance of identifying those guys ahead of time. I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts. I don't remember anyone high on Alfred Morris before he won the Washington job. I don't remember anyone talking up Victor Cruz before he lit the world on fire in his first preseason. I don't remember any Marques Colston hype when he was a rookie, other than people excited about his weird TE-eligibility in Yahoo. If it's possible for owners to identify these breakout stars prior to them actually breaking out, shouldn't we see more owners... you know... identifying these breakout stars prior to them actually breaking out?

 

[Biabreakable]

The main players I recall coming somewhat out of no where and being very relevant are Antonio Gates and Colston. But those guys were waiver wire gems more so than draft picks.

I am sure some folks were slick enough to maybe draft these guys but most got them as free agents.

I think Stills is a nice prospect to roster and is Kenbrell and some other players who might have gone undrafted for the most part in rookie drafts (maybe). I think that is more the range of player being talked about here right?

Lots of RB can emerge and be relevant for awhile, for example FWP and a ton I am not thinking of right now. But for the most part I think the nfl draft and dynasty FF owner drafts are good enough to sniff out the obvious gems pretty well.

 

[thriftyrocker]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

 

[thriftyrocker]

Demaryius and Harvin *NEVER* were valued in the 75-90 range at WR. Not once, not ever, not for a second, not at any point during their entire career.

I'll give you a pass on this one because you just sat through the NYJ/NE game but Thomas was droppable post Achilles. He was taken at WR 84 in my 2011 startup. I don't think that valuation was that unusual at that time.

 

[thriftyrocker]

And really Cruz had a similar value one year after his preseason-debut. He didn't set the world on fire right away. He spent a lot of 2010 on the IR. Played in a few game but no catches. People thought he was too raw to ever make an impact and that Manningham/Nicks would be it for a long time. It took over a year to find out he wasn't a fluke.

 

[EBF]

Throwing the flag on this one BIG TIME. I'm saying that I don't think spending a bunch of time agonizing over WRs75-90 is a very productive use of time, and you come back to me with those names?

I was mainly responding to the idea that the amount of time you spend on your rankings should be proportional to the player's ADP. I think the top of the rankings is actually the most paint-by-numbers part. I already mentioned why. Most of the players in that region are solved mysteries. We know who they are, so we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to assess their value. It is a lot tougher to put an accurate value on a Michael Floyd/Bernard Pierce/EJ Manuel than a Julio Jones/LeSean McCoy/Aaron Rodgers. And since those binary guys who could either hit really huge or flop immensely can be so critical towards determining the long term outcome of a startup draft or a trade, I think they warrant the most analysis and discussion.

 

[Adam Harstad]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

I remember Wesseling's stance on Foster. We discussed him a lot that offseason. I don't remember Wesseling having much of anything to say about Arian Foster halfway through Foster's rookie season, though. Then Foster finished his rookie season strong and started getting some buzz during training camps, and all of a sudden people were all over him. Who was drafting him in rookie drafts, though? How many of these people who pride themselves on their ability to spot talent way down the rankings were spending a 3rd or 4th round rookie pick on Arian Foster or Marques Colston or Miles Austin or Victor Cruz back before there was much NFL tape on them?

 

[Adam Harstad]

Demaryius and Harvin *NEVER* were valued in the 75-90 range at WR. Not once, not ever, not for a second, not at any point during their entire career.

I'll give you a pass on this one because you just sat through the NYJ/NE game but Thomas was droppable post Achilles. He was taken at WR 84 in my 2011 startup. I don't think that valuation was that unusual at that time.

I think that valuation was highly unusual. Demaryius was never going anywhere near that in any of my leagues. Still, even if he reached that in some leagues, that's basically a ranking of "we all agree he's a top-30 WR, but we think his career is over", which isn't really comparable to the Kenny Stills and Quenton Pattons of the world.

 

[thriftyrocker]

Who was drafting him (Foster) in rookie drafts, though?

How many leagues were you in in 2009? I think he was taken in all of mine. 3.10, 4.2, (eta) 4.2, 4.8. All by different owners too. One of the 4.2 was Instinctive. He was widely known as a sleeper. A lot of people didn't believe in Slaton and thought a decent prospect could take over given the system.

The rub is a lot of those guys dropped him when he was moved to the practice squad. I didn't draft him. But I did add him in two leagues of the 4 leagues after the guys smarter than me dropped him.

The internet existed in 2009.

 

[valhallan]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

Seriously. Foster was hot around here after those games at the end of his rookie season.

 

[EBF]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

I remember Wesseling's stance on Foster. We discussed him a lot that offseason. I don't remember Wesseling having much of anything to say about Arian Foster halfway through Foster's rookie season, though. Then Foster finished his rookie season strong and started getting some buzz during training camps, and all of a sudden people were all over him. Who was drafting him in rookie drafts, though? How many of these people who pride themselves on their ability to spot talent way down the rankings were spending a 3rd or 4th round rookie pick on Arian Foster or Marques Colston or Miles Austin or Victor Cruz back before there was much NFL tape on them?

I agree that those type of guys are always going to be waiver wire specials. Maybe you could have spotted Marques Colston or Daryl Richardson if you had been looking really closely because those guys were actually drafted, but for the UDFA guys it's mainly going to be about the training camp hype.

I don't think that really applies to a guy like Cecil Shorts or Quinton Patton though. They were picked high enough that they warranted at least some attention right away. You are doing your team a little bit of a disservice if you don't at least make a cursory attempt to evaluate those guys and assess their outlook.

I would also say that Marlon Brown is well beyond the point of being a mere flyer. 2-3 weeks ago he was in that territory, but already the moment has come and gone where if you were snoozing you missed out on the chance to get him. However, he's still an important player to monitor because he could be a guy like Shorts or Colston where "buying high" early in his career when he's just coming onto the scene will get you a discount compared to what he'll cost in 2-3 years. I'm not ready to say he's definitely one of those guys yet, but the possibility can't be ignored.

 

[Biabreakable]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

I remember Wesseling's stance on Foster. We discussed him a lot that offseason. I don't remember Wesseling having much of anything to say about Arian Foster halfway through Foster's rookie season, though. Then Foster finished his rookie season strong and started getting some buzz during training camps, and all of a sudden people were all over him. Who was drafting him in rookie drafts, though? How many of these people who pride themselves on their ability to spot talent way down the rankings were spending a 3rd or 4th round rookie pick on Arian Foster or Marques Colston or Miles Austin or Victor Cruz back before there was much NFL tape on them?

I think just about any warm body from the Gibbs ZBS should have been and should be on any FF players radar. Many RB with the Texans, Denver and now Washington are ideal systems for RB who fit them. Being high on Foster to me is not really differnt than being high on Slaton before or Wood now. The system is solid so you want to keep all of them on your radar.

Now going out on a limb that Foster would maintain that job for the next 3 years? That's actually a slightly more difficult call and would be talent based rather than based on the system.

This is why we talk about Denver RBs now because of Gibbs, although it might not be a payoff for some time.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Who was drafting him (Foster) in rookie drafts, though?

How many leagues were you in in 2009? I think he was taken in all of mine. 3.10, 4.2, (eta) 4.2, 4.8. All by different owners too. One of the 4.2 was Instinctive. He was widely known as a sleeper. A lot of people didn't believe in Slaton and thought a decent prospect could take over given the system.

The rub is a lot of those guys dropped him when he was moved to the practice squad. I didn't draft him. But I did add him in two leagues of the 4 leagues after the guys smarter than me dropped him.

The internet existed in 2009.

In 2009, I was in two. Both were like yours- Foster was drafted late and then later dropped. Which gets to my point- who knew Foster was a great talent? Obviously not the guys in your leagues, because a lot of them dropped him. I'm just not seeing the ability to spot the next Arian Foster or Marques Colston as some kind of consistent repeatable skill. I think it's luck and random chance.

By the way, I did some digging. After Demaryius Thomas's injury, I wrote the following: "Classic case of a guy being written off too soon. In the FBG composite dynasty rankings, Demaryius is the #62 WR. 2 of the 6 rankers didn't have him in their top 75. This is a guy who was the first receiver off the board, who was a legitimate 1st round talent, and who showed some very strong flashes of talent in limited time. I understand that the injury history has to be a red flag, but it's cause for a downgrade, not a freaking funeral! That's the same sort of short-sighted thinking that led everyone to bury Vincent Jackson last year, too."

I had him at WR28. Yes, I totally get to spike the football on that one- just like a year from now, I anticipate getting to spike the football over Michael Crabtree, too. Players like these are why I say the real value is in the 12-48 range.

 

[Adam Harstad]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

Seriously. Foster was hot around here after those games at the end of his rookie season.

Bolded part = my point exactly. If Kenny Stills has a few hot games to end his rookie year, he'll justifiably move up from the "decent prospect with upside" bucket and into the "money range" where I'm spending most of my time and effort. I know that some of the guys in my "decent prospect with upside" bucket are going to make the leap to my money range, but I don't concern myself too much with trying to figure out which ones it will be ahead of time. I just don't see the ability to identify sleepers in the WR75-90 range as any sort of repeatable skill.

 

[Adam Harstad]

I don't remember anyone pimping Foster before he locked down some starts.

OP.

I remember Wesseling's stance on Foster. We discussed him a lot that offseason. I don't remember Wesseling having much of anything to say about Arian Foster halfway through Foster's rookie season, though. Then Foster finished his rookie season strong and started getting some buzz during training camps, and all of a sudden people were all over him. Who was drafting him in rookie drafts, though? How many of these people who pride themselves on their ability to spot talent way down the rankings were spending a 3rd or 4th round rookie pick on Arian Foster or Marques Colston or Miles Austin or Victor Cruz back before there was much NFL tape on them?

I agree that those type of guys are always going to be waiver wire specials. Maybe you could have spotted Marques Colston or Daryl Richardson if you had been looking really closely because those guys were actually drafted, but for the UDFA guys it's mainly going to be about the training camp hype.

I don't think that really applies to a guy like Cecil Shorts or Quinton Patton though. They were picked high enough that they warranted at least some attention right away. You are doing your team a little bit of a disservice if you don't at least make a cursory attempt to evaluate those guys and assess their outlook.

I would also say that Marlon Brown is well beyond the point of being a mere flyer. 2-3 weeks ago he was in that territory, but already the moment has come and gone where if you were snoozing you missed out on the chance to get him. However, he's still an important player to monitor because he could be a guy like Shorts or Colston where "buying high" early in his career when he's just coming onto the scene will get you a discount compared to what he'll cost in 2-3 years. I'm not ready to say he's definitely one of those guys yet, but the possibility can't be ignored.

I can assure you that I at least make a cursory attempt to evaluate those guys and assess their outlook.

I agree that Marlon Brown is above that WR75-100 "decent prospects with upside" bucket. I believe I have him at 66 or 68 in my most recent rankings, which is above the bucket, albeit just barely. I think guys in the 60-75 range are valuable enough that you're starting to get some differentiation, if not much.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Regarding Wesseling and Arian Foster, F&L had Foster ranked 87th in his early 2009 RB rankings. Wesseling was pretty much the king of being ahead of the curve and one of the most famous Foster supporters around, and even he thought Foster was complete and total garbage early in his rookie year. This is what I'm getting at- yes, someone currently buried in the rankings is going to prove to have surprising value. No, I don't think you can tell who it is ahead of time, no matter how much time and effort you spend on it.

 

[thriftyrocker]

Regarding Wesseling blah blah garbage I'm acting superior to the guy who writes for the NFL now blah blah

This typically happens when UDFAs get moved to the practice squad.

Wesseling also listed Foster as a dynasty riser before he got his first NFL carry

http://dynastyrankings.blogspot.com/2009/12/dynasty-risingfalling-week-14.html

 

[thriftyrocker]

No, I don't think you can tell who it is ahead of time, no matter how much time and effort you spend on it.

This is bogus advice. Even if you give up on a player, your prior assessment allows you to act more quickly when new information comes in. Obviously Wesseling's summer 2009 opinion on Foster allowed him to start promoting him again when he was going to be made active. He didn't wait for his first carries (which were unremarkable) or his first good game. He promoted him as an add from an early time. At a time when you could still add him in a lot of leagues.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Regarding Wesseling blah blah garbage I'm acting superior to the guy who writes for the NFL now blah blah

This typically happens when UDFAs get moved to the practice squad.

Wesseling also listed Foster as a dynasty riser before he got his first NFL carry

http://dynastyrankings.blogspot.com/2009/12/dynasty-risingfalling-week-14.html

Wesseling marked Foster as a riser, Foster got 17 touches that week, and the next week Foster had moved all the way up to... RB51.

 

[Ernol]

Throwing the flag on this one BIG TIME. I'm saying that I don't think spending a bunch of time agonizing over WRs75-90 is a very productive use of time, and you come back to me with those names?

I was mainly responding to the idea that the amount of time you spend on your rankings should be proportional to the player's ADP. I think the top of the rankings is actually the most paint-by-numbers part. I already mentioned why. Most of the players in that region are solved mysteries. We know who they are, so we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to assess their value. It is a lot tougher to put an accurate value on a Michael Floyd/Bernard Pierce/EJ Manuel than a Julio Jones/LeSean McCoy/Aaron Rodgers. And since those binary guys who could either hit really huge or flop immensely can be so critical towards determining the long term outcome of a startup draft or a trade, I think they warrant the most analysis and discussion.

Seems like you guys are talking about different things.

EBF is talking ADP and SSOG is talking about his personally ranked WR75-90.

If talking personal rankings, if you already deemed that at least 74 WRs are more valuable than the WRs you are now evaluating, how important could the evaluation of those later WRs really be? If you spend hours ordering the rankings between 75 and 90 and the WR you ranked 75 instead of WR 85 hits it big, did you really get it right when you already thought 74 other WRs were better than that WR? If you really identified a gem, you would have him ranked much higher than WR75.

 

[thriftyrocker]

Regarding Wesseling blah blah garbage I'm acting superior to the guy who writes for the NFL now blah blah

This typically happens when UDFAs get moved to the practice squad.

Wesseling also listed Foster as a dynasty riser before he got his first NFL carry

http://dynastyrankings.blogspot.com/2009/12/dynasty-risingfalling-week-14.html

Wesseling marked Foster as a riser, Foster got 17 touches that week, and the next week Foster had moved all the way up to... RB51.

The mental gymnastics you're going through to try and prove your original indefensible statement that no one saw Foster coming is really admirable. Need to give you a flag for that Demaryius spike because darn it you didn't have him anywhere near the top 5.

 

[Adam Harstad]

No, I don't think you can tell who it is ahead of time, no matter how much time and effort you spend on it.

This is bogus advice. Even if you give up on a player, your prior assessment allows you to act more quickly when new information comes in. Obviously Wesseling's summer 2009 opinion on Foster allowed him to start promoting him again when he was going to be made active. He didn't wait for his first carries (which were unremarkable) or his first good game. He promoted him as an add from an early time. At a time when you could still add him in a lot of leagues.

Wesseling's summer 2009 opinion on Foster when he had Foster ranked 60th? It's not like Chris had Foster 30 slots higher than everyone else. Wesseling had him dumped into a big tier with a bunch of other 23-year-old backs with a pulse, which just reinforces how random it was that Foster broke out and not, say, James Davis or Rashad Jennings, the young backs Wesseling had ranked right above and below Foster.

I thought of a decent analogy for my rankings philosophy, by the way. In Dodds' top 200 forward, eventually he gets to a point in his player valuations where the gaps between the players are so microscopic that he just dumps all the names together and assigns them the exact same value. That's how I feel at the end of my rankings. They're all 1 value guys- basically a 20-way tie for 75th. I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure out if this guy's value is 1.00001 or 1.00031- I'm just rounding everything off to 1.

Maybe this is a fault of mine, maybe it's a "bad process". I'm not convinced that it is; in fact, I'm convinced it's textbook good process. Just like the gaps in player values are so much higher at the top of Dodds' top 200 forward, the gaps in player values are much higher at the top of the rankings, and making even marginal improvements in rankings of guys who are actually coveted dynasty assets produces much better outcomes than making huge improvements in rankings of guys who are universally considered flyers and bench fodder.

 

[Ernol]

Throwing the flag on this one BIG TIME. I'm saying that I don't think spending a bunch of time agonizing over WRs75-90 is a very productive use of time, and you come back to me with those names?

I was mainly responding to the idea that the amount of time you spend on your rankings should be proportional to the player's ADP. I think the top of the rankings is actually the most paint-by-numbers part. I already mentioned why. Most of the players in that region are solved mysteries. We know who they are, so we don't need to spend a lot of time trying to assess their value. It is a lot tougher to put an accurate value on a Michael Floyd/Bernard Pierce/EJ Manuel than a Julio Jones/LeSean McCoy/Aaron Rodgers. And since those binary guys who could either hit really huge or flop immensely can be so critical towards determining the long term outcome of a startup draft or a trade, I think they warrant the most analysis and discussion.

Picking correctly between Floyd/Pierce/Manuel may turn out to be a big deal. But picking the right player between Julio Jones, McCoy and Rodgers can be equally important, if not more so. I'd argue that it is more important to get the top end players correct in a startup (if you have picks in that range) because the investment you are making in that player is so high and the difference in production/value over a career can be great. It is my belief that my choice of Julio Jones on my new teams will prove to be a critical call down the road.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Edit: Double posted.

 

[Adam Harstad]

Regarding Wesseling blah blah garbage I'm acting superior to the guy who writes for the NFL now blah blah

This typically happens when UDFAs get moved to the practice squad.

Wesseling also listed Foster as a dynasty riser before he got his first NFL carry

http://dynastyrankings.blogspot.com/2009/12/dynasty-risingfalling-week-14.html

Wesseling marked Foster as a riser, Foster got 17 touches that week, and the next week Foster had moved all the way up to... RB51.

The mental gymnastics you're going through to try and prove your original indefensible statement that no one saw Foster coming is really admirable. Need to give you a flag for that Demaryius spike because darn it you didn't have him anywhere near the top 5.

You're kidding, right? You don't see the difference between "hey guys, you know that RB that a lot of people think is an RB6? Well, I think he's actually a pretty good RB5!" and "hey guys, you know that WR that consensus seems to consider a WR6 or WR7? Well, I think he's a solid WR3"? RB51 is your backup's backup's backup. WR29 is a starter.

Chris Wesseling was well ahead of the curve on Arian Foster, and he gets crazy props for that. He gets props, though, for being so aggressive promoting Foster AFTER TRAINING CAMPS prior to his breakout season. Before training camps, Wesseling was still hopelessly off the mark on Foster. You're holding up Chris Wesseling as the guy who saw Foster coming, and yet what did Wesseling do after Foster's huge start at the end of 2009? Wesseling downgraded Foster back to RB58. Yeah, Wesseling was all over Foster during that time, which is why he was on the cusp of dropping him back out of his top 60 and declaring him a fantasy RB6.

I happen to agree with you that Chris Wesseling was probably the first guy to really recognize what Foster was. He recognized it during preseason, when he moved Foster into his top 30. He recognized it in week 1, after which he moved Foster into his top 5. That was an amazingly bold call, and Chris deserves all the props in the world for it. If he wants to spike that football, he's earned himself a nice, Gronkowski-sized monster spike. Chris recognized what Arian Foster was before anyone else I know of. And yet, three months earlier, he'd had Arian Foster at RB58. This is my point- the late guys who make the leap are essentially random. That June, Wesseling thought Foster was less likely to make the leap than Kevin Smith, Tim Hightower, or Jonathan Dwyer. It's totally random.

 

[EBF]

Picking correctly between Floyd/Pierce/Manuel may turn out to be a big deal. But picking the right player between Julio Jones, McCoy and Rodgers can be equally important, if not more so.

I wasn't arguing which was the most important. Only which warrants the most time and effort. Selecting between the veteran players is a simpler process. The last 2-3 years of their career give you a reasonable expectation of what to expect from them over the next several seasons. From there all you really have to do is look at their age and figure out how valuable their performance is going to be in your scoring system. What you don't have to do is decipher who those players are, because for all intents and purposes you already know. Not the case with a player like Floyd or Pierce. Maybe they're future Pro Bowlers. Maybe they'll be out of the league in three years. There's an added layer of mystery compared to the guys who are known quantities. If you can solve those riddles even marginally better than your leaguemates, it will give you an edge.

 

[thriftyrocker]

You're kidding, right? You don't see the difference between "hey guys, you know that RB that a lot of people think is an RB6? Well, I think he's actually a pretty good RB5!" and "hey guys, you know that WR that consensus seems to consider a WR6 or WR7? Well, I think he's a solid WR3"? RB51 is your backup's backup's backup. WR29 is a starter.

I admire the Foster call much more because it relies on talent evaluation rather than blind faith in medical science. When we were discussing your ranking of Thomas back in 2010/2011 I said he belonged around WR50 because maybe there was a 10% chance he would become what he is now but a better than even money chance he'd be constantly injured, similar to the fate Ryan Williams and Danario Alexander have suffered. Yours was the bolder call but both allowed us to move on the player and acquire him at what turned out to be a steep discount.

The same applies to Foster. I wouldn't pay to look at anyone's rankings, but a guy you promoted this offseason is currently at ADP RB64 - Knile Davis. Even if you have him ranked at RB50 that's significant information. It's enough to tell people to go move and trade Andre Ellington or Bilal Powell for him. And if the player hits (not saying he will) that was good advice and useful rankings. You've been publicizing your rankings for 3 or 4 years now so you have to realize it's not fair to expect CW to have ranked AF in the top 20 or even top 40 or 50 all throughout his demotion to practice squad and eventual use in games. It is enough to say this is a player you should look at; a player you have ranked significantly above others.

You're outright saying you don't care about your backup's backup's backup because you're not even paying attention to Kenny Stills having 2 long bombs in W1 and almost a 3rd. But that's where a lot of people get their kicks from, and if it only allows you to get one stud player every 2-3 years then is it really a bad strategy. Even if it is part luck and for every Foster you roster there are 2 or 5 James Davises or Rashad Jenningses. Otherwise what are you devoting those spots to, extra defenses? Nick Foles? It seems this is your strategy when you tell people to trade 2nds or 3rds for defenses and to roster teams' second best QBs.

I happen to agree with you that Chris Wesseling was probably the first guy to really recognize what Foster was. He recognized it during preseason, when he moved Foster into his top 30.

You're saying 2010 preseason. He made the call in 2009. When he had him in the top 60 as a UDFA rookie he made the call. When he had him above numerous guys that were drafted, as high as the 3rd (Coffee), he made the call. When he has a UDFA as the 7th best rookie RB and that guy becomes All Pro he gets credit. A lot more credit than saying "that guy we all think is a top 30 WR pre-injury, we should bet on him healing well."

In Dec 2009, when Bloom calls him a plodder and promotes Travis Henry instead, you have to give him credit for "Foster has drawn more compliments from the head coach, and he was promoted from the practice squad before Henry. Foster is also a perfect fit for the one-cut scheme and a terrific pass-catcher." If you were playing dynasty in competitive leagues back then you had to guess from at least 4 names on who to use the spot on if anyone at all. Plenty of people picked Moats or Henry or Brown instead. Others maybe traded for the Ravens D.

 

[Dinsy Ejotuz]

Adam, I'm generally a fan, but I couldn't disagree with you more on this one.

The problem with trying to trade for proven studs is that you have to pay for them 100% of the time, and if you miss or make a mistake you might gut your team. There's no margin for error. It's high risk/high reward. And trading for potential studs after everyone has bought the hype? Crazy. Lamar Miller, I'm looking at you.

But if you have a Colston, Garcon, Shorts, Steve Johnson, Victor Cruz, Arian Foster, Priest Holmes or Antonio Gates rostered in every league when they hit you've suddenly gained an advantage over your leaguemates with no risk. The 90% of the time you're wrong doesn't hurt you at all.

Ditto that for draft picks. Who cares if you miss a lot? You get more picks every year -- simply by virtue of being in the league. Swing for the fences. You're team won't be worse when you miss -- you'll still own all the starters you had rostered.

So it's absolutely worth spending tons of times at the margins. That's where the risk/value proposition is the best and it's the best way to minimize the damage your misses inflict. Everyone misses a lot!

 

[Instinctive]

Adam, I'm generally a fan, but I couldn't disagree with you more on this one.

The problem with trying to trade for proven studs is that you have to pay for them 100% of the time, and if you miss or make a mistake you might gut your team. There's no margin for error. It's high risk/high reward. And trading for potential studs after everyone has bought the hype? Crazy. Lamar Miller, I'm looking at you.

But if you have a Colston, Garcon, Shorts, Steve Johnson, Victor Cruz, Arian Foster, Priest Holmes or Antonio Gates rostered in every league when they hit you've suddenly gained an advantage over your leaguemates with no risk. The 90% of the time you're wrong doesn't hurt you at all.

Ditto that for draft picks. Who cares if you miss a lot? You get more picks every year -- simply by virtue of being in the league. Swing for the fences. You're team won't be worse when you miss -- you'll still own all the starters you had rostered.

So it's absolutely worth spending tons of times at the margins. That's where the risk/value proposition is the best and it's the best way to minimize the damage your misses inflict. Everyone misses a lot!

I've got a lot to say here but no time to say it. I'm gonna go with a quick remark:

If you miss on those high picks, you're ####ed. That's a HUGE reason to spend more time up there, after the first tier, no-brainer guys. You can get a ton of value, and the damage to missing is far greater.