It's not an insult. Apologize if you took it that way. Your reputation (of a poster not a person) precedes you, and you like to dig in and act superior. I'm looking at this purely from a data standpoint, that the sum of the VBD numbers is higher from an earlier draft pick. Thousands of leagues use 3RR as it makes people think a lot more about where they'd like to draft in a KDS. Yikes, pot calling the kettle black on your last line there!
I’m not acting superior in any way, nor do I ever do that here. I would expect everyone posting their opinions here to be confident in them, or what’s the point of expressing them? Debates are friendly, and I’m always open to learning from others. And if I didn’t have that reputation with others before, someone might develop it from that characterization.
Anyway, I think the biggest difference between my approach to draft slot and yours (and to some extent @Gally’s) is that some folks approach it with a calculator, and some with a paint brush. And some apply elements of both.
Like I said earlier - there’s an art and a science to it.
We’ve all said at various points that you can win a league from any draft position.
I feel like there are some advantages to picking last, regardless of what the math suggests. Because as Gally has said, that math depends on inputs we just don’t have. So I get that it frustrates you when you say “but 1+1 is 2” and I respond “but 1+1 might be 3” - but the fact is that you don’t know that 1 is actually 1. Neither do I. Neither does anyone. We’re all just making best guesses at those inputs every year, and historically our collective track record is horrific. lol
ADP / tiers are all the result of groupthink. If one disagrees with the group, one might draft very differently.
Also the concept of all the eggs in one basket applies. You astutely pointed out that the deeper into the draft one gets, the less value is assigned to picks. The converse is then true - 1st round picks are the most valuable. And if I feel like I can get 2x 1st round values at 12 in a given year, but I can’t at 6, then I’m going to select 12 over 6. Even though on paper, we collectively believe Chase is > Adams, Chase might not actually be better than Adams. I believe Adams could, realistically, finish as the WR1 this year. His team has a crap defense and they’re in a high powered division. That’s a lot of shootouts. Then the 2nd pick is 1 pick later, so theoretically a similar tier. And similarly someone like Barkley or Kamara could finish as the RB1.
So one could argue that having picks 12-13 could produce the FF RB1 & WR1
Good luck doing that from 1.01, or 1.06
Again, these are just hypotheticals. I’m not saying any of this is going to happen, I’m just saying why I, personally might prefer pick 12 over anything else. I wouldn’t be concentrating the most draft capital into one guy (CMC, JT, etc) and maybe, just maybe the art would be > the math.
Again, since no one really knows what the value of any player actually is yet.
Obviously this is within reason, and I’m not completely discounting rankings. Many people smarter than me put a lot of work into composite rankings, and I’m sure they’ll get a lot of them right.
But they’ll also get a lot wrong. That was my point about Higgins earlier - not that I’m smarter than everyone, but that they completely missed on Higgins valuation.