Concept Coop said:
I honestly think it's the opposite. Tier your draft board, rather than fall in love with a couple guys.
Diontae Johnson is a perfect example. Early 3rd round pick by the franchise with the best WR track record over the last 10 years or so. He's going in the early 3rd round of rookie drafts. Hakeem Butler, drafted a full round later, is going as high as 1.07.
I'll gladly let the rest of my league reach for "their guys" - and I'll take the value as it falls.
I'm of both minds to some degree because if you really favor one guy and the price isn't too extreme then I think it makes sense to trust your gut, but there are limits to how far I'd be willing to stretch that philosophy. I took a quick peek at the Bloom post-draft 100 and saw that he had Butler in the top 3-4 players. I'm doing a slow rookie draft right now and Butler just went 9th overall. Maybe these guys have it right and Butler is really that good, but taking a 4th round NFL draft pick that high in the rookie draft when there are still day 1-2 talents on the board is definitely a tightrope act. You are putting a lot of faith in your subjective analysis while disregarding the league's verdict to a degree that's probably reckless.
My general approach with rookie rankings has been to divide players into tiers based on draft position (1st round // 2nd-3rd round // 4th round // 5th+) and then sort them within those tiers based on subjective opinion. However, if I really like or dislike someone then I'd be willing to bump him up or down a tier. So if I had a strong positive opinion on someone like Butler or Bryce Love (I don't) then I wouldn't bump him into the top tier because I'd want to anchor to that 4th round draft slot a little bit, but I'd be willing to put him up in the 2nd-3rd round tier.
This is one of the big challenges of doing rookie rankings. Historically, we know that 2nd-3rd round players have about a 35% hit rate, but it's not a random lottery. There are reasons why some succeed and others fail, and hypothetically you can learn those reasons and make predictive assessments that exceed the generic hit rate. When we look back on this Deebo/Hardman/JJAW/AJ Brown/Campbell/Isabella/D Johnson/Hurd/McLauren cluster a few years from now, there's a good chance that 1-2 of those guys will be awesome, 1-2 others will be decent, and the rest will be crap. But right now, on paper, they are all just 30-40% dice rolls basically. So should you try to identify which ones are legit and bet hard on that guy, or just trade down to the bottom of the tier and take whoever falls?
I think I fall in the middle between the full on ballsiness of taking Hakeem Butler as a top 2-3 WR in this draft and the conservative approach of lumping them all together into one tier. I'd probably be willing to pay a modest price to jump up to the top of that generic tier to get the players I like (AJ Brown, Deebo). But for the players who don't really inspire any special confidence in me (JJAW, Campbell, Hardman), I don't see a world of difference between them and guys you can get 5-10 spots cheaper (D Johnson, Isabella).
This is a funky draft and while there are 4-5 guys I like a bit near the top, beyond that I do agree that the value from about pick 6 to pick 18-20 is relatively flat. I'm intrigued by that 12-18 range where you're getting players like Harris/Isabella/Henderson/M Brown/Fant who might outproduce the Montgomery/Campbell/Hardman types who are going much higher despite similar generic draft slots. I feel that while late 1sts hold less value than a typical year, the sheer number of players with some type of pulse provides good depth into the late 2nd round of most rookie drafts. That's an argument for trading down, but if I'm sitting there in the 8-10 slots and someone I like falls to me, I'll probably still pull the trigger.