| Fantasy Forecast®: The Risks of Drafting |
| By John Georgopoulos |
Published
08/15/2008
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Fantasy Forecast
| Unrated
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John Georgopoulos
Senior Editor and Founder John T. Georgopoulos is a 15-year veteran of the fantasy sports industry. He has written for several national fantasy magazines and has appeared on sports talk stations around the country.
John has also been a six-time finalist for various Fantasy Sports Writer Association (FSWA) awards; his Fantasy Forecast column was awarded the 2006 Best Fantasy Football In-Season Series by the FSWA.
View all articles by John Georgopoulos
The Risks of Drafting
RB Jamal Lewis was the inspiration for this column... |
Long-time (and perhaps long-suffering) readers of my column know that I love digging through gigabytes of data in order to unearth fantasy football gold. In this week's Fantasy Forecast®, however, I will address a "fuzzier" side of drafting.
My impetus for this approach came out of a recent request by one of our subscribers for me to evaluate his most recent mock draft. This subscriber had dutifully read all our strategy columns, studied the customized cheatsheets we generated for him and used our Draft Tracker. Now, he was taking advantage of our Advice-O-Matic to get our feedback on his mock draft.
After carefully reviewing his roster, I replied to his request for feedback: the team did not look all that strong. But what went wrong? He had followed all our guides and recommendations. Could it be that our strategy articles were wrong? Were our cheatsheets out of whack? No.
The reason the team looked weaker than it should have was that the subscriber was a relative newbie and did not appreciate the subtleties of putting a team together. It would be similar to someone writing a blues song where the notes, rhythm and tempo were technically correct but lacked any sort of soul. You know, like when Bruce Willis gave singing a shot.
So in this article I'll try to indentify the risks involved in drafting and how to address those risks-- something to keep in mind as you sort through all the technical information about players and draft theories.
Identify Various Risk
You should always identify the risk associated with any player you're considering drafting; always be able to answer the question "What is the most cynical thing I can say about this player?". For example, Jamal Lewis enjoyed a great comeback season in 2007 (as I had predicted) and most experts expect him to be a Top 10-12 runner this season (as do I). But if you're drafting Lewis as your RB1 this season, you need to identify the risk associated with Lewis: he's old. He's beat up. The Browns won't be taking anyone by surprise this season. So while Lewis rates in the Top 10-12 RBs for 2008, he does come with some baggage.
What are some other risks to be aware of? Glad you asked:
- Age - given the player and the position he plays, is he starting to approach the age where he statistically begins to see an erosion in production (see: Age Old Issues)?
- Injury - players like Andre Johnson and Bob Sanders have a huge upside for their owners... but also have histories of being brittle. Know which players are true injury risks, and which are only perceived injury risks (see Fred Taylor and Brian Westbrook).
- New Team/Coach - most experts would have you believe that a player on a new team is in line for a big season. Maybe, maybe not. Just be aware of the risk of a player being successful in a limited role (e.g., backup RB) that suddenly will be getting all the touches in a new system. Think Michael Turner.
- Off-field Status - players are, believe it or not, people. Off-field issues like contract status, legal status or personal problems can all effect performance and are not tracked by most computer predictions. Think Chad Johnson, Marshawn Lynch or Jason Taylor.
- Bye Week Conflict - this one is a hotly-debated issue; there is a school of thought that says that you draft according to the best talent available during the draft, then deal with bye week conflicts later. I disagree. If I draft two or three runners with the same bye week, there is a risk that I will then not be able to execute my draft strategy later in the draft because I have to draft one more runner than I had planned. Either that or I am likely conceding the conflicted week during the season.
- Tunnel Vision - all our models and draft theories are great-- I truly believe that the work done at Sports Grumblings on behalf of its readers is the best on the market. But even that great work cannot be taken in isolation; it needs to be taken in the context of your draft. Thus, if for some reason the first six picks in the first round are WRs instead of RBs, you need to be aware of that quirk and adjust on the fly.
Mitigate the Risk
When I was writing predictive analysis programs for foreign exchange markets back in the early '90s, I was a good coder but not familiar with the actual nuances of trading currency. So my models tended to be a bit conservative, eschewing the more exotic currencies. One of my supervisors noticed the way my models behaved and realized what was going on; he then gave me a piece of advice for which I have always been grateful. Risk is your friend, and can be very beneficial. Just make sure you understand the risk and take steps to mitigate it.
People tend to fear risk and avoid it. But without risk, the potential return on investment is limited. Thus, the key to maximizing value is to accept risk and use it to your advantage. Embrace risk, but understand it and take steps to minimiza your potential downward exposure. Use one type of risk (say, an injury risk) to counteract a different risk (e.g., an age risk).
In the case of our subscriber, he failed to identify several of the risks listed above:
- He drafted Lewis in his draft slot (#9), which was fine; the next RB he drafted was Edgerrin James, because he was the highest-rated RB available and our Best Damn Draft Method told him he needed a runner in that draft slot. But what our subscriber did not do was indentify the risk in his picks (both runners are age risks) and take steps to mitigate that risk. In this case, he would have been better off taking a runner like Thomas Jones, someone rated a few spots below James-- but someone who mitigated the age risk associated with having taken Lewis in the first round.
- Our subscriber drafted three wide receivers, all of whom were in our top 25; pretty good, right? Well those three receivers-- Andre Johnson, Greg Jennings and Laveranues Coles-- all carry injury risks. A solid PPR receiver like Derrick Mason would have been a better pick than Coles.
- Let me conclude this treatise by saying that of all the risks I've indetified, by far the most difficult to mitigate (especially for less than experienced fantasy players) is the Tunnel Vision risk. It is very difficult to be in a draft, spot a quirk, then devise a risk mitigation strategy-- all in the space of the 2-16 minutes between picks. Using the example of our subscriber, he had dutifully read and studied our Best Damn Draft Method and knew that drafting a QB1 prior to the eighth round was a less than optimized plan. But what happened during the course of his mock draft is that every one of his 11 opponents took a QB1 prior to the sixth round, and were already drafting backups by the time he got around to drafting his QB1. The result was him drafting a poor choice of a QB1. He should have identified the bizzare QB run and realized that the guidance of the BDDM-- to wait on the QB-- no longer applied; he should have adjusted and grabbed his QB1 a round or two earlier.
Like most situations in life, there are no absolutes in fantasy drafts. As much as I am a believer in the use of metrics and analytics to guide my drafing principles, I have to acknowledge that there is a component that goes beyond the numbers... and you should as well.
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