I have another one for this topic:
Ya know how if you’re around a smell long enough, you can go “nose blind”? Where everyone else smells it, but you don’t because you’re around it a lot? I had friends who lived in Turlock, there were massive chicken farms.
In the heat of the summer, the town smelled something fierce. I went out to play poker with my friends and their friends and I asked, “how do you deal with this smell all summer” and they, to a man, said “after a while ya just don’t notice it any more.”
This is also applicable to drafting. Whether it’s a mock draft or a real one, it’s human nature to look for your targets in certain ranges of the draft, but ignore others. Through mocking, or tiering players up, it’s a natural tendency to (for example) be in the 2nd round, and look for the players you expect to be there.
And that might cause you to miss a player that
shouldn't be there.
Like the NFFC draft I did on Wednesday. One of the “lessons learned” for me from last year was from going back to the draft board and asking myself why I picked X player when Y player was still on the board? And time and again it was because I was looking for a player at a position I expected to be there instead of taking a tick to sort through the positions to see if there was someone unexpected.
It seems like a very obvious thing to do, and honestly I felt a little simple-minded to have overlooked it.
Back in the day I drafted with paper. I’d spend days creating my binder with color-coded tabs by position, and would cross off names each pick. Then at my turn I’d check every position page in my binder. So this isn’t a new practice for me, rather one that technology sort of defeated. Using software to draft, and software to track picks, it’s easier to forget this simple round by round exercise.
In this example I was fully planning on going WR1 ~> WR2, for weeks. I mocked that way heavily. And just before the draft I looked down at my notepad, where I’d written “check every position”.
After round 1 I did just that, and Gibbs was sitting there at 2.06, long past where he should have been.
I strikes me that the 5 teams picking before me in the 2nd may have had a preconceived target, and simply not looked at RB. It was 2 RB (Barkley/Henry) 2 WR and a TE.
So yeah - not sure what you’d call that. Confirmation bias? Probably that.
So my simple trick to winning your draft is be open minded and diligent. Check every position every round and be willing to change from your predetermined plan. Getting your targets is great. But getting your target who fell 1/2 a round late is even better.
Insomniac, out.
still took will anderson 
