SDMB Fantasy Football early discussion

In My Humble Opinion
161

Yeah, a second tier QB can often do you quite well and are usually available in rounds 5 - 7. But, RBs are what make or break a team.

Even at #11, you still have good choices of RBs. And, being at the elbow of a snaking draft can almost guarantee you two top ten RBs, because someone always panics and takes a QB or a WR in the late 1st Round, thus giving you some great RB choices.

Even if the top 10 RBs are taken, you still have two good choices and could possibly snare any two of Fast Willie Parker, Maurice Jones-Drew, Travis Henry, Rudi Johnson, Willis McGeehee, Brian Westbrook, etc… Of course, if ANY top 10 RBs are open by your pick, TAKE THEM. Also, be sure and look at their receiving numbers projections, since you’re in a PPR league. A good receiving back like Westy jumps in value several places in PPR.

I have done well with a #1 or #2 RB and several 2nd tier RBs (in the 20s and 30s ranking), but I also have done well with two guys in the #10 to #15 range. Plus, that elbow pick means you won’t lose out if your #1 or #2 ranked RB goes down for the season, like Priest Holmes or Shaun Alexander.

162

After snagging two high end RBs, you might look for these WRs:

Smith, Steve
Johnson, Chad
Harrison, Marvin
Owens, Terrell
Evans, Lee
Wayne, Reggie
Holt, Torry
Houshmandzadeh, T.
Williams, Roy
Driver, Donald
Johnson, Andre
Fitzgerald, Larry
Walker, Javon
Moss, Randy
Boldin, Anquan

And the 2nd tier QBs I spoke of?

Kitna, Jon
Cutler, Jay
Roethlisberger, Ben
Leinart, Matt
Losman, J.P.
Manning, Eli
Campbell, Jason
McNair, Steve
Rivers, Philip
Remember, a decent enough 2nd tier QB can still get you plenty of points in garbage time of a game they’re losing. Of course, if your league penalizes for sacks and INTs, be sure to figure that into your calculations.

YMMV, IMHO

163

Westbrook will not be available that is for sure. I know he will go at 8 if still available then. Bush I am unsure if he will be there. So I am guessing the idea of taking 2 WRs is out?

So go: RB-RB-WR-WR? Ok that is what I did last year (and I am the champion). the difference was I drafted 2nd overall as opposed to 11. I thought maybe the 2 WRs might be a good idea.

Who would you guys put as the top 10 in a PPR league?

LT2, S. Jackson, Gore, Westbrook, LJ, Addai, Bush, Parker, Alexander, Ronnie Brown? Maroney? Jones-Drew? Johnson?

164

[QUOTE=Jimmy Chitwood]
They aren’t, is my point. Giving points for returns rewards a positive stat. Taking points away for points allowed punishes a negative one. It just isn’t the case that there’s a straight line correlation between points allowed and return yards. For one thing, better defenses generally force more punts. Punt returns count too, albeit for less.

[/QUOTE]

Actually, they are. Of the top ten teams with the best return yards in the NFL, 6 are also in the bottom ten in the league for points allowed. There IS a direct correlation, so the point is very valid. And while punt returns count, the average punt return is what? Five yards? The average kick return is probably somewhere around 15-20. Punt returns most definitely wouldn’t generate enough yards to compete with kick returns from allowing a lot of points.

Perhaps, though, the answer lies in the uses of the defenses? Like a WR, D/ST’s might have different uses that make them valuable. Some WR score a lot by catching a ton of balls and scoring a ton, these are the elite. Elite D/STs would prevent a lot of points AND get lots of return yards. Some WR don’t get many TDs but make up for it with lots of yards. Is it wrong to have some D/STs be useful because they generate a lot of return yards, but not good defense? I don’t know. Personally I think, if possible, the value for D/ST yards should be decreased so as to diminish this scoring double standard.

165

[QUOTE=Jimmy Chitwood]
They aren’t, is my point. Giving points for returns rewards a positive stat. Taking points away for points allowed punishes a negative one. It just isn’t the case that there’s a straight line correlation between points allowed and return yards. For one thing, better defenses generally force more punts. Punt returns count too, albeit for less.

[/quote]

It’s not a direct correlation, but there’s a strong correlation in that really bad D/STs tend to get a lot of return yards - and while some bad defenses have better special teams than others, it’s still a score that generally correlates with rewarding bad play. There are exceptions, but that’s the general trend.

Think of it in more extreme terms - if I had return yards set to 10 yards = 1 point, you’d purposely be picking the worst defense in the league and celebrating everytime they had a touchdown or field goal scored against them because you’d want to get as many kick return attempts as possible.

At 50 yards/point, it’s not that extreme, but it demonstrates that the scoring system can reward things you don’t really want to reward. Teams are punished for giving up a lot of scores for a reason… letting them make up some of those points every time they make a return after those scores offsets that… the yardage per point value only determines to what degree that is.

Another factor is something I discussed in our IDP discussion about tackles - that since everyone does it routinely, it adds noise to the numbers. That is… if one team scores on average 20 points a week, and one scores 12, that’s a significant difference. But if you throw in a stat that’s routinely accumulated by all teams, let’s say they both get +10 that way. Now one team puts out 30, and one team puts out 22 - a relatively smaller gap. Adding more things to the scoring that don’t strongly differentiate between the things you want to differentiate by pushes all scoring relatively closer together.

This does make sense, and it made me reconsider for a while.

The main problem I see is that I want to reward special teams efficiency - teams that get big returns frequently and/or have a high average return value. And the best way to do that would be to subtract a score for each attempt, so that only above-average returns got a positive score. But yahoo doesn’t support anything like that… there’s no scoring category for number of kick returns, no way to differentiate between kicks and punts, etc. But we can’t go by efficiency, we can only go with total points, which correlates more strongly with the number of attempts (five 25 yard kick returns is better than three 40 yarde returns).

So while the point you make is an aspect of this scoring that’s an upside, in my view, there’s too many countering factors to provide a bigger downside for me to want this score.

I like the discussion, though, and I’ll go with whatever the consensus is.

166

EsotericEnigma posted this in the yahoo forums for our league, but figuring more people would notice it if we discussed it here, I’m going to quote it.

I’m definitely open to discussion about the sack penalty.

I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying too much… sacks can kill drives entirely on their own though, so being worth 1/4th of an int isn’t totally unreasonable. Keep in mind that one of the things we did to offset the more punishing penalty rules we have is that we give QBs 1 point per 20 yards instead of the standard 25. That said… with RB scoring unchanged I do think QBs might be penalized to the point where they’re relatively weaker than they already usually are. To me ints and fumbles being worth the same score doesn’t seem right. They have the same overall value to the game being played, but from a scoring perspective… a good RB might fumble 3-5 times per year, where even a good QB is going to get 3-4 times that in interceptions, and 5-10 times that in sacks. But then again.. if we made fumbles cost more, then flukey, high scoring penalties would have a bigger impact in the game… hmm…

We’ve strengthened WRs relative to RBs with the .35 PPR scoring. I’m worried that we’ve weakened QBs relative to RBs with a system that makes QB efficiency important where RBs are almost entirely based on raw production with very little penalties of any sort. I wouldn’t be opposed to tweaking our numbers a bit, like a sack penalty of .33 (1/3rd) or even tweaking the other numbers.

167

[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
EsotericEnigma posted this in the yahoo forums for our league, but figuring more people would notice it if we discussed it here, I’m going to quote it.

I’m definitely open to discussion about the sack penalty.

I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying too much… sacks can kill drives entirely on their own though, so being worth 1/4th of an int isn’t totally unreasonable. Keep in mind that one of the things we did to offset the more punishing penalty rules we have is that we give QBs 1 point per 20 yards instead of the standard 25. That said… with RB scoring unchanged I do think QBs might be penalized to the point where they’re relatively weaker than they already usually are. To me ints and fumbles being worth the same score doesn’t seem right. They have the same overall value to the game being played, but from a scoring perspective… a good RB might fumble 3-5 times per year, where even a good QB is going to get 3-4 times that in interceptions, and 5-10 times that in sacks. But then again.. if we made fumbles cost more, then flukey, high scoring penalties would have a bigger impact in the game… hmm…

We’ve strengthened WRs relative to RBs with the .35 PPR scoring. I’m worried that we’ve weakened QBs relative to RBs with a system that makes QB efficiency important where RBs are almost entirely based on raw production with very little penalties of any sort. I wouldn’t be opposed to tweaking our numbers a bit, like a sack penalty of .33 (1/3rd) or even tweaking the other numbers.
[/QUOTE]

I definitely see EsotericEnigma’s point but I do not want to take the sack all the way down to a quarter of a point. I would like to see it go down to a third of a point though. I understand that it is not entirely the qb’s fault but it should still weigh against them. Additionally, I do not want them to be crushed by a bad game. The frequency of sacks and interceptions are often connected so one bad game for a quarterback is far worse than a bad game for a running back.

168

[QUOTE=SenorBeef]

I’m definitely open to discussion about the sack penalty.

I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying too much… sacks can kill drives entirely on their own though, so being worth 1/4th of an int isn’t totally unreasonable. Keep in mind that one of the things we did to offset the more punishing penalty rules we have is that we give QBs 1 point per 20 yards instead of the standard 25. That said… with RB scoring unchanged I do think QBs might be penalized to the point where they’re relatively weaker than they already usually are. To me ints and fumbles being worth the same score doesn’t seem right. They have the same overall value to the game being played, but from a scoring perspective… a good RB might fumble 3-5 times per year, where even a good QB is going to get 3-4 times that in interceptions, and 5-10 times that in sacks. But then again.. if we made fumbles cost more, then flukey, high scoring penalties would have a bigger impact in the game… hmm…

We’ve strengthened WRs relative to RBs with the .35 PPR scoring. I’m worried that we’ve weakened QBs relative to RBs with a system that makes QB efficiency important where RBs are almost entirely based on raw production with very little penalties of any sort. I wouldn’t be opposed to tweaking our numbers a bit, like a sack penalty of .33 (1/3rd) or even tweaking the other numbers.
[/QUOTE]

Here’s a couple other things to consider. In just about every league where a QB TD scores 4 pts, the value for yards is ALREADY 20yards/1pt. So instead of lowering the yardage requirements to meet the TD score, you merely brought it into line as to where it should have been anyway. In addition, remember that QBs are already penalized for INTs, Fumbles, and now sacks as well. So where you adjusted the yardage to match the TD score, you also added in a sack penalty too! Is there an adjustment to reflect that?

I’m not against a sack penalty. I think in the vast majority of cases, a QB with a load of sacks isn’t a great QB. Look at Manning (the good one) and Manning (the bad one). Perhaps, you say, that Peyton had a much better O-Line, and that would be true. But Cincinnati has a top 5 O-Line too, and look at Palmer’s sacks. There is something else there to warrant Palmer having so many sacks.

Another thing I did in crunching the numbers: I took the total points deducted from a QB for INTs and compared it to the total points deducted for sacks for last season. I found that in a lot of cases (half or so) a QB was given a total points penalty for INTs that was barely (less than twice) that of sacks. This means that the sack penalty, where it stands now, contributed almost exactly that of INTs (One QB was penalized MORE for sacks than INTs… this is a GOOD QB too!). Yes, a sack can kill a drive. The emphasis being CAN. An INT will ALWAYS kill a drive, They are not equal, and yet as it stands, they very nearly are.

Changing the penalty to .33 makes it a lot better. I threw out .25 just as a random number, but either to me works as is intended.

169

It’s a week away until our draft. Tazmanian Devils will be unable to make it because of unexpected work issues, but will pre-rank. Otherwise I hope we’ll have 11 people there on draft night.

Please go to the league page now, and on the main page, click the “test your system” link for the draft. Even if you’re pretty sure it’ll work… it’s best just to do the test and confirm it so you’re not surprised 20 minutes before the draft. If you have a problem, post about it and we’ll try to help.

You might also want to spend this time putting in a little thought about how our scoring differences from the default might change the value of players. You can see how yahoo projects players under our scoring system by going to the players tab under our league, and selecting “remaining weeks (proj)” from the dropdown.

As discussed, I took out defense/special teams return yards and toned down the sack penalty to -.33. The scoring system is still open to changes, so if anyone feels like anything should be added, removed, or tweaked, speak now and we’ll discuss it.

Personally I propose that we set our bench to 7 deep rather than 6. I like having a little extra depth so that you can draft a sleeper in the last round, or you could keep a rotating open position based on matchups. For instance, you think one of the free agent defenses might do better than your top-ranked defense in a particular week due to matchup… and you want to pick that defense up and start them… but to do so, you’d have to drop one of the 6 critical backups on your team that would probably get snatched up. So having a shorter bench discourages weekly roster moves to exploit matchups, which I think is as an aspect of fantasy football that allows good players to shine. So I’d even be open to the idea of having 8 bench slots, but since I figure that’ll probably be unpopular, I propose 7.

170

My computer was fried in a recent electrical storm, so I only have web access at school. I have made arangements for the draft however and i will be there.

171

[QUOTE=RetroVertigo]
My computer was fried in a recent electrical storm, so I only have web access at school. I have made arangements for the draft however and i will be there.
[/QUOTE]

Excellent.

This year’s draft is going to be harder in the first round I think than last year’s was. Who goes 3 through 10 or so is a pretty trick subject. I kinda wish we could set an option for yahoo to randomize our draft order now, so that we could better prepare for the position we’ll be drafting in.

Does anyone have an opinions, pro or con, about a 7 man bench? We had too much depth in our league last year, but that’s a better situation than having not enough. I really like the idea of being able to pick a long term sleeper, or pick up a free agent based on matchups, without sacrificing one of my core backups to the waiver wire.

172

[QUOTE=SenorBeef]

Does anyone have an opinions, pro or con, about a 7 man bench? We had too much depth in our league last year, but that’s a better situation than having not enough. I really like the idea of being able to pick a long term sleeper, or pick up a free agent based on matchups, without sacrificing one of my core backups to the waiver wire.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t have a problem with a 7-man bench, and I too prefer a lot of depth in my leagues. 8 might be too much (as the idea is to have the room for a sleeper, but there won’t be any sleepers left if the bench is too large), but I’d go for 7.

173

[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
I kinda wish we could set an option for yahoo to randomize our draft order now, so that we could better prepare for the position we’ll be drafting in.
[/QUOTE]
Jimmy came up with a way that we could if you’re really interested.

174

Would you guys want to do that, to know our draft order in advance, or should we just prepare for anything?

175

[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
Would you guys want to do that, to know our draft order in advance, or should we just prepare for anything?
[/QUOTE]

I would rather known in advance, in case I felt the need to trade up or down. But if it involves something jukey like everyone drafting for the person who is randomized into their actual spot, I’d rather not.

176

No, as commisioner I can preset the draft order rather than leaving it up to being random a half hour before the draft. So we just need a neutral third party way of determing draft order. I could run a random number generator and come up with a list, but if I ended up with a top 3 pick, you’d probably all be wondering a little bit…

177

[QUOTE=EsotericEnigma]
I would rather known in advance, in case I felt the need to trade up or down.
[/QUOTE]
What do you mean by trading? Yahoo doesn’t support trading draft picks in any way. We can trade draft picks in the keeper league, but it’s actually rather complex and labor-intensive for the commissioner.

heh, no worries since it would have nothing to do with you. Read Jimmy’s method [post=8828391]here[/post].

178

[QUOTE=Queuing]
Westbrook will not be available that is for sure. I know he will go at 8 if still available then. Bush I am unsure if he will be there. So I am guessing the idea of taking 2 WRs is out?

So go: RB-RB-WR-WR? Ok that is what I did last year (and I am the champion). the difference was I drafted 2nd overall as opposed to 11. I thought maybe the 2 WRs might be a good idea.

Who would you guys put as the top 10 in a PPR league?

LT2, S. Jackson, Gore, Westbrook, LJ, Addai, Bush, Parker, Alexander, Ronnie Brown? Maroney? Jones-Drew? Johnson?
[/QUOTE]

Tomlinson, Jackson, Larry Johnson, Alexander, Addai, Gore, Travis Henry, Rudi Johnson, Brian Westbrook. I’d think about Peyton in about 3 or 4 picks, especially with a possibility of three running backs that you can start. Look at the points. Peyton is the best quarterback, but he’s not better than an elite, or even second-tier running back. Let’s assume you get the 11th pick. Someone’s going to take Peyton early, so he’s almost certainly off the board. Carson Palmer will be fine for quarterback, if you want a high pick as quarterback. If you’re looking for value, go get yourself a Marc Bulger in the third round. Get running backs with your first two picks for sure. Your third round, if there’s someone you’ve got a boner for, take him. I’d develop a boner for running backs, though. Take a backup quarterback two to three rounds behind your starter. You want some kind of quality in case of injury. If you don’t do that, then you better be ready to go bargain shopping. Look at Culpepper or Quinn if you’re in a pickle. Don’t draft a kicker until the last round. Last year’s best fantasy kicker was Robbie Gould. Virtually nobody drafted him, not even his dad. Kickers can be dropped and picked up every week. Same as having an elite tight end. If you’re picking between elite tight end or your third running back, take the running back. Chris Cooley will be available a round or two after that. Take your defense late. Someone will take the Ravens, and then the run starts on defenses. Let them. They’re giving you value for the other positions. Also, for your last pointer, receiver is the deepest position. Let someone take Randy Moss early. Get your running back situation cemented. The difference between the best receiver and the 50th receiver is close to 30 points. Well, 30 points and 4 or more rounds. There are tons of value picks at receiver, but you’ve got to do a little bit of homework.

RB, RB, RB/QB, RB/QB/, QB/WR, QB/WR/RB, WR/RB, WR/TE/RB, WR/TE, WR/TE, K/RB/WR, K/DEF, K/DEF

That’s about your priority list right there.

179

[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
What do you mean by trading? Yahoo doesn’t support trading draft picks in any way. We can trade draft picks in the keeper league, but it’s actually rather complex and labor-intensive for the commissioner.heh, no worries since it would have nothing to do with you. Read Jimmy’s method [post=8828391]here[/post].
[/QUOTE]

Sounds fine, if we have enough people interested in doing it. It’s pretty late in the game with a draft a few days away - if not enough people are aware of it it might give a disproportionate advantage to the ones who are.

If a few people chime into this thread tomorrow and are interested in setting our draft order now, we can do that. Please voice your opinions.

180

[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]
What do you mean by trading? Yahoo doesn’t support trading draft picks in any way. We can trade draft picks in the keeper league, but it’s actually rather complex and labor-intensive for the commissioner.
[/QUOTE]

Yahoo doesn’t have to support it. It’s rather simple. I trade down and draft whomever that owner wants in my spot, they draft whomever I want in their spot, and then after the draft we trade the players that were drafted in the spots we agreed to trade. I’m assuming that the honor system would be in effect in a league like this, yeah?

There are two specific spots in which I would absolutely want to trade down or up, so I’d like to know in advance what my order is so I can start preparing for that and talking to our other owners.