After drafting them in the first two rounds of last week’s draft videos, Ryan Mathews broke his collarbone and Trent Richardson had to go under the knife for knee surgery. Which players will I hex with Draft Video #2? Watch and find out.
(Again, note that you may need to adjust the settings on the YouTube player to “HD” to be able to read all the player names and statistics on the screen.)
Part 1 (Rounds 1-6):
Part 2 (Rounds 7-12):
Part 3 (Rounds 13-16):
Thanks for the feedback Al. That’s good advice for anyone going into a competitive draft. In those “hardcore” situations, you should absolutely take any draft software’s default rankings with a large grain of salt. When most or all of the managers in a draft know what they’re doing, it’s much harder to pull a fast one and sneak a player you like past your opponents into the next round, regardless of where that player appears in said rankings.
With all that in mind, I had a few pirmary goals with my first two draft videos:
1. Compare the Yahoo and ESPN draft software.
2. Compare 10-team leagues to 12-team leagues.
3. Try some draft strategies I wouldn’t normally consider (e.g. QB in the 1st round or TE in the 2nd round)
4. Compare the player rankings between Yahoo and ESPN, with the purpose of finding value in players that those websites have ranked significantly lower than the TFF Staff Rankings.
5. Analyze the drafting habits and player valuations of typical public league drafters, once again with the purpose of finding undervalued players based on our rankings.
Ultimately, I wanted to record some drafts and go through my in-the-moment thought process for drafting a fantasy team in various league setups. This means that if I’m drafting in a public standard league, I assume I’m playing against slightly less experienced managers — ones who rely on the draft software’s default rankings a little too much. I may not be giving all the managers in a given draft the credit they’re due and they’ll burn me occasionally, but the types of gambles I made in the first two videos have a pretty high success rate for the most part.
In general, the ideas and lessons that viewers take away from these videos are going to be pretty varied, simply because fantasy managers are a very diverse group of people with a diverse set of goals. Each manager has their own preferred league type, scoring setup, draft style, set of player rankings, etc. Taking all that into consideration, I don’t want to force myself to record videos where I draft in the exact same way every time, to the letter of my/our rankings. As far as I’m concerned right now, the context of the draft is as important to the video as the results, especially considering that these drafts are practice for the proverbial fake football “Main Event” that we drafters assuredly have on the horizon.
Above all, I want all viewers to take away whatever they think is useful from these videos. Some managers will get more out of the videos than others and that’s okay. Still, your original criticism is certainly valid. I need to record at least one draft where I ignore the default software rankings and draft based purely on my own tenets of building a championship fantasy football team. Keep an eye out for that after I update my rankings later this week. Thanks again for the feedback and thanks for watching.
(And you thought YOUR comment was long. Damn.)
12:06:38 am
re your Mike Williams-Kevin Smith debate, this shows how mock drafts can be less than perfect preparation for the real thing, since in the latter, you obviously won’t be able to look at one set of rankings that everyone is more or less going off of, and see that you can wait on a guy you really like b/c he’s buried so far down the master list. ideally, one should try to do a mock draft just how one would do the real thing — i.e., have one’s own rankings handy and ignore the list everyone can see on the draft site — but of course no one’s that hardcore. still, you’d be doing yourself, and in this case your viewers, a favor by assuming that you’re in a situation where you have no idea at all who the guy after you is going to take (with allowances for knowing what positions he’s filled already), and to just draft the guy you think represents best value each time your turn comes up. that way, you wind up with the most accurate simulation of how a real draft might go.
sorry this was so lengthy