That's the thing though. If you're 95% sure you still could have had him 12 picks later, then you're bypassing significant value that early in the draft. That said, you got Branch as your WR1 so if you're indifferent about him versus any of the guys who went between your Dayne pick and your Branch pick, then no value is technically lost.
However, I would much rather have some of the WRs that went in between your 3rd and 4th rounders, and I would have rolled the dice that Dayne would have been there in the 4th. Say what you will about others on the board understanding some of your preferences, but selecting somebody more than 3 rounds earlier than their ADP in the 3rd round means your passing up on a potentially stronger team imo.
I didn't even put the chances of Dayne being around at 95%. I put them at just over 50%. Maybe if I were more familiar with the rest of the owners, I would have waited, but as it stood, I couldn't risk it. I just feel that Dayne + Branch is a DRASTICALLY stronger team than Driver (who was my second choice at that pick) + Branch (or Roy Williams, if he'd fallen instead).Also, as I said elsewhere... my RB2 is Dominick Davis, and I'm extremely concerned about his injury status and injury history, so I felt the need to get a very strong RB3 just in case. In my rankings, there was Dayne, Chester Taylor, and Warrick Dunn... and then a very steep dropoff. Taylor and Dunn went within the next 3 picks. If I had passed on Dayne, I would have been in a very uncomfortable position.
I understand the whole concept of holding off as long as is humanly possible before drafting a player in order to maximize value and get the strongest team possible, but allow me to give you an extreme example. Let's say, perhaps, that it's 2005, and I view Mike Anderson as a first or second round caliber RB (which I did). Now let's say his ADP is the 17th round. Let's say the 15th round comes around. I could maximize value by letting Anderson slide again, but if he gets taken earlier than projected, then I am completely out of luck, losing out on a top-12 RB just because I was determined to wring the most value out of the situation that I could. That would, in my mind, be idiocy.
This was a similar, albeit less extreme, situation. I could try to wring the last ounce of value I could possibly get out of Ron Dayne... but I would risk losing him entirely. I felt that he presented better value at that point of the draft than anyone else on my entire board... so I took him. It might have been a little bit of a reach, but I seem to recall how everyone screamed that the Cincinatti Bengals "reached" when they drafted Chad Johnson. Ask them if they regret that, sometime.
I know it's not a very popular opinion around these parts, and I recognize there was probably a better than 50% chance that he fell another round (I was targeting him in the 4th originally, which is why I made my statement about the 5th round), but at the end of the day, I still felt that I got the best player on the board with my selection, so from that persepective, it was still a very good pick.
In fact, if the others in the league don't mind, I'd be curious to know when they were planning on targeting Dayne, and where they had him ranked in their projections.
