I’m looking to move up as well. And yes, the top three picks are going to be very interesting indeed.
The 5th pick might be available for trade, though I have a sneaking suspicion that at least one guy I really covet will still be there.
Yahoo put out their preseason ranks. (Link is top 200, but they have individual position ranks too).
Turns out I have 3 of the top 6 players - and 5 of the top 15.
Best QB, #3 and #4 RBs, #1, #2, and #5 TEs. WR is still my weakest, but #13 and #16 as a starting pair isn’t too bad.
I’m surprised they ranked the tight ends so high. Graham is #14, Gronk is #15. It’s not that they’re wrong - they’re right. It’s just that much like actual football, fantasy football has a lot of people who follow conventional wisdom and intuitive feelings even when it’s clearly wrong. And I’m guessing everyone is going to think “lol drafting a tight end at the top of round 2? lololol” for no logical reason.
Of course one of the fundamental principles that often seems to escape people is that high end production at the TE position is a lot more rare than the WR position. It’s relatively easy to get an 1100 yard WR, but it’s very rare to land a 1100 TE. So obviously the TE is inherently more valuable, and yet when it comes to what seems to be “common sense” to most people - they often value the WR in that situation higher, or at least equally. Makes no sense. Graham/Gronk are probably the most valuable receiving assets in the game - the fact that they put out WR1 numbers from the TE position makes them ridiculously valuable, since you can get more production out of tier 2 WR + one of them as compared to tier 1 WR + tier 2 TE.
The yahoo “experts” are at least savvy enough to realize this, which makes me wonder which will win out amongst the fantasy football masses: the counterintuitive idea that a tight end could be so valuable, or their strong desire to just absorb what the experts tell them without doing any thinking on their own?
They’re reasonably optimistic about Demaryius Thomas, putting him ahead of guys like Colston, Maclin, Bryant, Britt, and Bowe. Brad Evans, who’s probably the best of the bunch, puts him up at #9. I still think he’s got a pretty decent shot at top 10.
My team is really coming together. Everyone is just coming into their prime - McCoy is likely to be my least long lived starter and he’s still got a good 5 years ahead of him. Then again, the way he runs, he may even be able to squeeze out a longer career. Rodgers, Mathews, Nelson, Thomas, Gronk, Graham - they’ve all got 6+ years of good production ahead of them.
I’m again in the silly position of having 3 of the top 5 TEs and no one seems to want to take them. I offered up Gronk last year for almost nothing but no one was interested, so thanks to everyone for that. But I should move someone, it’s sort of silly to have that sort of talent on my bench. So I’d like to move Finley, but I’d be comfortable with moving Gronk or Graham and going into the season with Finley as my #2 TE. Talk to me.
I think they’re devaluing players too far due to injury. Jamal Charles, Kenny Britt, etc. are too low.
What do you guys think of their board?
I’m really looking forward to this league next season. I’ve got a combination of the 1st draft pick as well as Drew Brees and Cam Newton available for trade. I won’t make any moves until August but there will be some good trades in this league this year.
All of that is true, except there’s a relevant factor that you’re skipping: each team only needs 1 TE, so the scarcity of good ones isn’t nearly as important so long as there are enough guys at the position who are within sniffing distance of the very best ones. Without having thought too hard about it, I’m guessing that Tony Gonzales and then Antonio Gates were more valuable than Graham/Gronk/etc. are now back when they were on their own little planet in terms of TE production. Now, with big-time receiving TEs somewhat in vogue, it’s different: ok, you can pencil in Gronkowski for 1100/10, but if you could realistically figure the next seven guys for 800/7 or better, and it’s a 12-team league…
It’s really not much different than being able to put in a 1000/8 at WR3 instead of being thin at the position and having to scrounge around for a 650-5, to say nothing of whatever benefits the first guys gets from having the advantage in the WR1 and WR2 slots. This is not to say that the very best TEs aren’t very valuable – they are – but if people are drafting them at the top of Round 2 I would suspect that they’re making the mistake of viewing their 2011 stats in the context of the 2006 TE receiving environment.
Thumbs up. I agree with this analysis completely.
Is the draft time of Sunday night Sept. 2 locked in or is that a placeholder? While I’m hoping to be on a new schedule by Sept, right now I work Sun-Thurs 11 PM-730 am Chicago time. I have to catch a train by 10 PM Central Time on Sunday nights.
I believe we did this draft on a Saturday night last year, that would work perfect for me as I’m sure I’m off on Saturdays since the futures markets are closed!
You have to work on Labor Day?
We can change the draft time, no problem. I just picked 9:30 9/2 because I figured it would be roughly the first one to fill up.
Does Saturday night work for everyone?
I’m good with Saturday.
Saturday probably works for me but I won’t know for sure for a little while. I’d love to be able to say “don’t worry about it, I can just pre-rank 50 players and be safe” except I did that last year and it didn’t work. The autodrafter only picked my first preference, but randomly picked my other 2 ignoring my pre-rank list for no apparent reason (I didn’t have any empty positions or anything)
Is there any interest in doing a thread-draft this year instead of a live draft? I ask because this league has a short enough draft to make that practical, and because all of the other leagues tended to get the premium drafting times, this one ends up scheduling at odd time. And… the autodrafter doesn’t work right (last year I drafted a kicker even though I already had one on the roster and I had like 20 guys rated ahead of any kicker on my pre-rank list - the computer just mysteriously ignored it). And making a drafting mistake (due to the autodrafter or missing the draft) is compounded by the nature of drafting in a dynasty league. If you miss the draft (or have technical issues with yahoo’s draft app, like I did last year) it’s can do years-long damage rather than just having one bad year in a regular league.
Since we’ll only have a few dozen picks, I think it might be cool if we just handle the drafting through the thread and then Varlos can input the results. Plus it might be an interesting experiment to get discussion going and build suspense. What do you guys think?
I love the idea, but I can’t help thinking there will be someone who holds the whole thing up. What sort of time limit were you thinking about?
Good question. We could do a casual, slow draft over a couple of weeks where each person has a few hours or even a day to submit their pick- but the issue there is that we probably want to see the rookies in action, so we don’t want to miss too much of the preseason. On the other hand, the top picks are the guys most likely to see action early on in the preseason, so by the time we get to the tail end of the draft, we might be past week 3-4 anyway.
Or we could try to do something more rapid fire, where we all show up over a night or two and rattle off picks quickly. This isn’t too much different from an actual live draft, except that we could submit a pre-rank list to Varlos and actually have him do it right if necesary. And it would be more practical to draft via smartphone if someone is busy but not too busy.
I’d like something closer to the first. Maybe a max limit of 1 day on each pick (at which point Varlos makes your pick with your pre-rank list, or just makes it based on some agreed-upon average draft position chart if you didn’t submit one) but keeping in mind that we’ll probably get 5-10 picks done per day.
I really like it.
The autodrafter always seems to screw someone, this way certainly fixes that problem.
I’m up for it as well, perhaps start right after week 3.
I’m good with it but wary. We need some kind of time limit and a rule on what we do when time expires.
I’d go with 12 hours, not 24, and I think we could easily recruit some non-Dynasty League fantasy player to make a pick from a pre-ranked list if the person doesn’t show up.
There were 59 picks in both of our previous drafts, so if we start on August 15 and give each team 12 hours to make their pick, we’d be done by September 14 at the latest (which is before the start of Week 2) if everyone used their full 12 hours. And we all know that’s not going to happen.
Doing the draft in the forums would also give us more of a chance to make trades with a 12-24 hour window between picks.
12 hours seems pretty reasonable, since we know some nights we’d get 6+ picks done. If someone knows they’ve got a pick coming up and they may miss it, they could always PM Varlos a few picks ahead of time. So if their pick is 4th up, but they may not be around the next day, they could just give him 4 names in order, and he can auto-pick for them.
If someone just dissapeared without submitting any preferences, we could just draft from the yahoo average draft position or something.