September 9, 2016 Leave a Comment

Fantasy football snake draft review for a 16-team league

I have been part of a college friends league for the past seven or eight years and it’s the one football league in which I have the most invested emotionally. Most of the managers are of the casual type, but the size of the league makes it hard to actually win the whole thing. In addition, it’s a very shallow league with only two bench spots per team. This makes it aggravating and yet strategically exciting at the same time. I have only won the championship once, but last year I tore things up with an all-star team and a 12-2 regular season record before getting dropped in the first round of the playoffs. This year the league added two more teams which means talent is even harder to come by.

The league uses Fleaflicker, and old-school fantasy sports platform that I have come to realize utilizes somewhat absurd rankings and player projections. I realized that I could use that to my advantage by waiting on certain players I wanted on my team because I knew they would likely be available in later rounds. After all, fantasy managers typically follow the default draft rankings in whatever software platform they are using.

I did around half a dozen mock drafts in preparation until I settled on one strategy that seemed the most promising. I figured that I would take A.J. Green (FantasyPros overall rank #6) in the first round, then another wide receiver like Brandon Marshall (#15) or Alshon Jeffrey (#26) in the second round, before targeting a running back like Matt Forte (#46) or possibly Jeremy Langford (#44) in the third round. When doing my mock drafts, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Coby Fleener (#79) was still available on my turn, so my plan was to take him there.

The first few rounds

Of course, mock drafts only mildly predict what will happen in actual drafts, so when it came to real draft time, things went quite differently. First of all, I was thrilled when it came to my turn in the first rounds and lo and behold, who is still waiting to be picked, but Julio Jones (#2)? I’m not exactly sure how he managed to stay there, but he’s an upgrade over A.J. Green and could plausibly be the #1 non-QB player in all of fantasy this year.

With my second pick, I took Dez Bryant. I think the impact of Tony Romo‘s injury might be overestimated, and Bryant’s consistent history suggests that he can still play at a top level this year. Besides, with Romo’s potential return in Week 9, Bryant’s performance should only go up over the course of the season. The fact that Dallas has one of the easiest schedules for wide receivers only sweetens the pot.

Since Matt Forte was off the board when it came to my turn in Round 3, I instead went with Latavius Murray (#31), who had been passed over and was actually fifteen spots higher in the FantasyPros overall draft rankings. In Round 4, I took the one player that had slipped way too low on Fleaflicker’s draft rankings (somewhere around #67) – Jarvis Landry (#34). I was really targeting him with that pick and I would have kicked myself someone else had drafted him, but fortunately for me he was buried quite deep and not one else seemed to notice him there.

The later rounds

So far, my draft was proceeding better than I had hoped, but it was about to change. Going into the fifth round, there was a run on tight ends. Delanie Walker, Travic Kelce, and Gary Barnidge went off the board with three of the first four picks of the round. Then, Coby Fleener was taken. Not only can he potentially produce great numbers on the New Orleans offense, but the drop off in tight end production seems to begin right after him. Once Fleener was off the board I realized it was in a jam and had no clear-cut choice to make at tight end.

I decided I would wait on tight end and pick up someone like Julius Thomas (#15) in a later round, which I ended up doing in Round 11. So I switched gears and instead chose the Arizona defense (#2 in DST rankings). I know that conventional wisdom says to wait on defense, but in my particular league’s scoring settings, defenses are rewarded particularly well. In fact, top defenses in the league are comparable in points scored to the top flex players. In fact, in 2015 the Denver DST outscored the top wide receiver, Antonio Brown, by three points. Because of this, choosing Arizona was a prudent choice.

With the rest of my draft I filled in my remaining positions which included quarterback (Matthew Stafford in Round 6), bench spots (Melvin Gordon and Marvin Jones), and IDP spots. All indications point to Stafford having a tremendous year in his pass-happy offense, and the fact that Detroit faces the second-worst defenses against QBs persuaded me to pick him over a similarly good quarterback, Derek Carr (I would have chosen Carr had Stafford not been available). As for Gordon and Jones, well these two players were simply too good to pass up late in the draft. We’ll see soon enough whether or not they become legitimate weapons.

Assessing my draft

In the beginning of the season, all players seem to have upside, and perhaps even crazy potential. The unknown can be tantalizing at times, but the first few week or two deflate these kinds of ideas and reality asserts itself once again. This attraction to potential leads me to pursue some of my players, particularly Julius Thomas and Matthew Stafford, but I really can’t tell for sure whether they’ll be as successful as I hope. But my other players – including my core of Jones, Bryant, Landry, and to some extent, Murray – give me more confidence that they will produce throughout the season.

In relation to the other teams in my league, I would say my team is highly competitive. I do have a few areas of concern that I may need to address, depending on the performance I see during the first few weeks. Can I upgrade my tight end? Will Murray be the productive workhorse that I hope he will be? Will Marvin Jones flourish or flounder with Detroit? And will this be Gordon’s year to break out?

I like to maximize the potential of each and every roster spot that I have so that I have as many top ten players at each position as I can. This will take some work, but as I already know, successful fantasy teams aren’t built in a (draft) day.

January 19, 2016 1 Comment

I constructed one of the greatest fantasy football rosters ever and still lost

Since we’re about to reach the NFC and AFC Championship games in real life football, I wanted to gather my thoughts and review what happened in this year’s fantasy football league that left me bitterly disappointed. Maybe it will provide me with some catharsis to go over it, or maybe it will even provide me with some insights about what went wrong.

To begin, I’ll give you some context. I reviewed my draft last September, and suffice it to say it was a good draft. It’s a 14-team league with a snake draft and shallow rosters which include a few IDP spots. I had won the championship the prior year and so I got the last pick in the first round (then the first pick in the second round, etc.) this year.

Here’s my roster at the end of the season:

Tom Brady QB NE *
LeSean McCoy RB BUF
Lamar Miller RB MIA
Julio Jones WR ATL *
Odell Beckham WR NYG *
Greg Olsen TE CAR *
Cairo Santos K KC
Seattle Seahawks D/ST SEA *
Mark Barron DB STL
Luke Kuechly LB CAR
Jamie Collins LB NE

Bench
Eddie Lacy RB GB
Alshon Jeffery WR CH

*denotes player taken in the draft

I don’t know about your team, but this team was one of the best I have ever assembled. I was able to pick up McCoy, Miller, and Jeffery off waivers during the season after their owners dropped them due to injury, or (perhaps in Miller’s case) poor performance. Because the league is so shallow, there’s really no room to keep non-producing players on a roster, and this inevitably leads to some juicy talent drops over the course of the season.

The positions on each team in the league included 1 RB, 2 WR, and 1 flex, so some of my late-season deliberating was over whether to start Alshon Jeffery or Lamar Miller as my flex. In other words, that was not a bad problem to have. I should also point out that for about half the season, I had Julian Edelman on my team. Before he went down with a prolonged injury, I was faced with the luxurious dilemma of figuring out which three WRs to start among Odell Beckham Jr, Julio Jones, Edelman, and Jeffery. I believe for at least one week, all of these players were top 6 or 7 WRs, which almost makes it a crap shoot as to which players will play merely good and which players will go off.

The Regular Season

The season flew by with crazy results. After losing in Weeks 2 and 4, I was looking at a middling 2-2 record. However, I caught my stride in Week 5 and it kept going, and going, and going. At the end of the season I was riding a 10-game win streak with the uncontested #1 seed in the league. My average points scored per week was 138.41, which was well above the next highest team at 121.01 (the league medium was around 113 ppw).

Now before I go any further, I realize that wins in fantasy football can be kind of fluky. You put up as many points as possible and so does your opponent, and you just hope that you come out on top. But you can’t control the outcome of your opponent’s scoring, so a head-to-head win is the result of what you can control and what you cannot. Fortunately for me, my opponents managed to score only 106.49 points per week against my team. This was the third-lowest point scoring against in the league, and it admittedly contributed to my high win total.

The Playoffs

So with my #1 ranking in the league, I was pitted against the #8 (last) seed in the first round. On paper, it should have been a relative breeze. Although my opponent was starting Antonio Brown at WR, he was also starting Brock Osweiler at QB, Denard Robinson at RB, and Michael Floyd and Tyler Lockett at his other WR spots.

To make a long story short, my opponent had an on night, and I had a ho-hum night. It was Brock Osweiler’s best-performing game of the season (3 passing TDs, 1 rushing TD), as well as Antonio Brown’s best game of the season (16 receptions, 189 receiving yards, 2 TDs). Meanwhile, by running backs sputtered like crazy and the rest of my team couldn’t pick up the slack. I ended up losing that week 161.2 to 142.58.

Knocked out of the playoffs in the first round. To the lowest seed. Ouch.

So my all-star team fell flat…

I recall Matthew Berry of ESPN once said that skill gets you into the playoffs but luck gets you championships. Whether you agree with that sentiment or not, I do think that the best you can do in fantasy football is to put yourself in the situation to succeed and let everything take its course. I would have loved to have seen my team keep on playing with all the pieces coming together, but with one cruel week my team had its legs cut out from underneath it.

I’m not sure there are really any lessons to learn from this about assembling successful fantasy rosters, so I shouldn’t really try. Four times out of five, I bet that my team would have won the playoff game that I lost. All you can do it put a good team on the field and hope it’s enough.

Obviously, that one weekend in December shows it wasn’t.

September 11, 2015 Leave a Comment

Fantasy Football Snake Draft Review for 14-Team League

I drafted a team a few days ago in a shallow 14-team league where teams only get two bench spots. I ran through several mocks to prepare for the snake draft so I was able to try out several player combinations available at my position. Since I won the league last year, I ended up picking last in the first round, first in the second round, last in the third round, and so forth.

Here are the available roster positions in the league:

QB – 1
WR – 2
RB – 1
TE – 1
Flex – 1
K – 1
D/ST – 1
DB – 1
LB – 1
DB/DL/LB – 1
Bench – 2

Since my picks were always back-to-back, it didn’t really matter the exact order of my picks. I contemplated picking WR1-WR1 or WR1-RB1 pairs, and at the end of the day I just felt more comfortable picking two solid wide receivers. The strongest RB1 that I was looking at picking (both in mock drafts and the actual draft) were not terribly impressive, whereas the WRs I could choose from could all be top scorers by the end of the season.

With my first two picks, I chose Julio Jones and Odell Beckham. I had some reservations about Beckham since he doesn’t have a proven track record and the word on the street is that he’s going to be a target for defensive backs this year, but I think his upside is pretty special given the system that he’s in. I had the opportunity to choose a few other top tier players (Demaryius Thomas, Calvin Johnson, or A.J. Green), but I’m satisfied with the players I got.

My third pick is where things got ugly. The website I was drafting on was running slowly, so I decided to log off and reload the browser in between the mass of picks I had to wait through before it was my turn again at #42 overall. When I tried to re-enter the draft room, though, my browser hung again and I was not able to enter until just after my pick expired and auto-selected Jonathan Stewart. While not a bad pick, I would more likely have chosen T.Y. Hilton, who ended up going to another team a few picks later. When I was finally able to enter the room I managed to select Greg Olsen with the first pick of Round 4 (#43 overall). I knew from my mock drafts that Olsen would not be around by the time I picked in Round 5, so it was in my best interest to take one of the more reliable TEs at this point in the draft.

By the time I picked in Round 5 (#70 overall), quarterbacks had started to fly off the board. I noticed that Russell Wilson started to fall, and I would have picked him had he not been picked five selections ahead of me. Given the absence of other attractive position players, I chose Tom Brady with my pick. In Round 6 (#71 overall), I pickd ed up Julian Edelman. I now had three clear #1 receivers on their respective teams, a solid TE, and a reliable QB as the basis for my team.

By Round 7, many IDP players were being drafted, but I wanted to wait on them given the sporadic nature of those players. Before the draft, I noticed that the way the league’s scoring system was set up, D/STs actually accounted for far more points per game than they might in other leagues. In fact, in the previous year the highest scoring defense – the Philadelphia Eagles – averaged slighly more points per week than either Marshawn Lynch or Antonio Brown. Meanwhile, the highest IDP player averaged about 40% fewer points per week. With no other teams yet chosen in the draft, I was able to select the Seattle Seahawks, the consensus #1 D/ST this year.

In the later rounds, when taking risks can pay off big time, I decided to pick up both Joseph Randle and Darren McFadden. While I really do not like investing in murky running back situations like I just did, the fact that the Dallas offensive line may be the best in the game suggests to me that if one of these does win the battle, it will be a RB who may carry me to fantasy glory. I also picked up Ameer Abdullah with a late pick (#126) since he could be primed for stardom as well once the Detroit backfield gets settled.

Because I picked up three running backs for my bench, it meant that I was unable to fill my active DB/DL/LB roster spot. I would like to drop one of these benched running backs once I figure out who will be the odd man out on their actual teams, but I’m willing to hold on to them until I get a better idea which player will star for his team. Right now, I have only 10 players in active roster spots against my opponent’s 11 active players. I feel that I may be able to win this week even without the contributions of the 11th man, and if that continues into this weekend, I will go ahead and keep three players on my bench. Cutting a player in Week 1 may mean cutting a player who can potentially carry my team in Weeks 3 – 16, so I am willing to take a small risk for the possibility of a larger fantasy payout.

Hogan League