Waldman's GM Scenarios (RSPWP3) (1 Viewer)

[ZWK]

For this year's RSP Writer's Project, Matt Waldman is posing a bunch of hypothetical scenarios for armchair GMs (of a hypothetical NFL team) to sort out. Here is a place to discuss them and give your answers.

Three are up so far.

Scenario 1: In the midst of a late-season playoff race, do you cut a useful TE who is a mismatch to cover, but has become a distraction due to an ongoing conflict with an ex-girlfriend who he cheated on?

Scenario 3: A freakishly talented and charming young LT's love of partying and consequence-free lifestyle might be leading towards trouble; what do you do about it?

Scenario 4: The under the radar WR who you consider a steal at the end of round 1 of the draft seems likely to still be available half a round later - do you trade down or do you draft your guy?

 

[ZWK]

Scenario 4: I trade down. It's a risk worth taking. Finding underrated players and drafting them just before someone else would've taken them is how you add a ton of value to your team; drafting them only slightly after where you think they should go only adds a little bit of value. I'll roll the dice and take the risk of missing out on some of the underrated players that we identify.

On another framing, trading down is smart because it's the safe move. I don't want to be overconfident in our evaluation process and reach too far for a player that we rate higher than other teams do.

Though I would like more information on precisely how highly we rate this receiver, what options we'll have at pick 40something if our guy gets sniped (including non-WR options), and how solid our predictions are about what other teams will do (e.g., a quantitative analysis of how the results of previous drafts differed from our expectations). That could affect how far we trade down.

(The same logic applies to fantasy drafts. In fantasy football, we have the benefit of being able to look at ADP data to predict how long we can safely wait on our sleepers.)