Currently running battery commercial, maybe you’ve seen it?
Basically, you’d better choose good batteries or…guy intent, in front of computer, when mouse messes up…and…
“Auto drafts a kicker in the seventh round!”
It gets repeated several times in the ad, and the guy is clearly freshly devastated, at every recall.
As a person unfamiliar with, I can only assume, fantasy football it’s like gibberish.
Except I know it means something. It gets played a lot. And I find myself wanting to know; What’s so bad about a kicker? Teams need kickers, right? How bad could auto draft be? What difference the round?
Can anyone explain so a non football fan can understand?
Thanks! You cleared up why 7th round is bad, but no one I know has addressed the question “Are there fantasy football pools where IF YOU DON’T CLICK YOUR MOUSE at an exact time, you’ll be given a bad kicker?”
Sounds like a horrible idea for an interface. And a horrible football pool.
Not precisely. What will usually wind up happening is that, during a fantasy football draft, you’re given a set amount of time to make your pick (say, two minutes). If you don’t make the pick during that time (like, say, if your mouse battery dies at an inopportune moment), the draft program will automatically make your selection for you, giving you the highest-valued player still on the board.
Different leagues and systems use different weights to assign those values, but what often happens is that a few kickers (typically accurate kickers who play for good teams) are assigned relatively high values, even though the conventional wisdom in fantasy football is that there isn’t a lot of difference in value between the best kicker in the league, and the 10th-best. That, combined with the fact that a lot of football fans feel that kickers “aren’t real players,” leads to the typical strategy of not drafting a kicker until the end of the draft, even if, drafting purely on the projected value, a few kickers would go earlier in the draft.
Conventional wisdom in fantasy football is mostly dumb, as who to pick when is VERY dependent on the rules of your particular league. The main rule to follow is to maximize your potential points scored, so you have to know how many points a particular position scores at various skill levels, and adjust your drafting accordingly.
In the league I’m in, the rules are such that you very well might want to get Stephen Gostkowski instead of some second-tier running back for a round after the fifth or so.
What bugs me is they contend drafting Justin Tucker would be a bad idea. He’s arguably the best kicker in the league and would be an excellent addition to many fantasy teams.
In a draft though, the most important thing is “Value over Replacement.” The difference between the best kicker and the 12th best kicker is only a couple points a game.
Things like this are why I won’t buy a wireless mouse again.
But I have one at work, and I’ve been there 2 years, and I’ve never personally changed the batteries, but I have had to plug in my wireless keyboard a few times. I guess the secretary changes the mouse batteries every once in a while before people come in? I dunno.
Even if some kickers are worth more in a particular scoring format, it can still make sense to wait if you have good reason to believe no one will draft the best kickers until the final couple of rounds. The best players at all other positions will be gone by then, but if most good kickers will still be there, you have to consider who you can choose in the seventh round at another position, vs. who will be available in the final rounds.
For Yahoo! at least, the problem isn’t that they assigned too high values to kickers, it is that the autodrafter will try to fill your starting lineup before drafting any bench players. It will always pick kickers last of your starters and will almost never take a backup kicker if you auto the whole draft, but it still takes them way too soon for conventional strategy.