Aug 24
I had my first of two fantasy football drafts today, the first using our website, and it went… ok.
Not great. Not terrible. Just ok.
I had the #8 pick out of 10 and the first two rounds went pretty much exactly as I expected. Going into round 3 pretty much all of my planning fell apart as a few people in our league made a series of suspect picks, leaving a number of good players that I would never have thought I’d have a chance at. Seizing the opportunity being more important than following my plan, I took the best player and essentially abandoned my pre-draft strategy. Unfortunately that meant that I was more or less scrambling from pick #4 on, a bad situation compounded by my shaky attempt to track player selections in my own spreadsheet. After every pick I would find the chosen player in my spreadsheet and mark them as selected, but as the selections came faster and faster I couldn’t keep up and regularly missed checking off a player completely. Spending 90% of my time maintaining my spreadsheet I ended up with very little time to actually use my spreadsheet. As such, when it came my turn to choose a player I was often forced to scramble, wildly reaching for a pick with almost no time for actual thought. In the later rounds I wound up drafting a few injured players and with my last pick I actually drafted a kicker who turned out to be suspended for the first four games of the season.
That’s unforgivable.
The good news is that our rankings system seemed to work out real well, the bad news is that leading up to the draft I managed to sell subscriptions to half of our league. As such, ESPN’s #2 overall player fell to #7, their #1 fell to our #3 (not far enough… but it’s progress), and a number of good players were snatched up right in front of me. Of course, the half of our league without subscriptions made the expected boneheaded moves and even a few that were so ridiculous to us that Lukas and I could only shake our heads in confusion (Kevin Boss in round 8??).
Perhaps expectedly I ended up with a team with a very high upside and a very low downside. My classic Go Big or Go Home approach. As Lukas pointed out, “You will have by far the most points some weeks… and by far the lowest in others. You could win the league, or finish in dead last.”
A lot of my players could potentially be super good. They could also be completely worthless (McFadden, Crabtree, Stafford) or injured (Palmer, Schaub, Barber).
Here’s my team and their overall draft position.
My league is non-standard, we play 2 QBs and 1 RB/WR flex using PPR scoring.
8 – Chris Johnson (RB)
13 – Calvin Johnson (WR)
28 – Marion Barber (RB)
33 – Darren McFadden (RB)
48 – Matt Schaub (QB)
53 – Tony Gonzalez (TE)
68 – Carson Palmer (QB)
73 – Laveranues Coles (WR)
88 – LeSean McCoy (RB)
93 – Julius Jones (RB)
108 – Donnie Avery (WR)
113 – Domenik Hixon (WR)
128 – Vikings D/ST
133 – Percy Harvin (WR)
148 – Matthew Stafford (QB)
153 – Jets D/ST
168 – Michael Crabtree (WR)
173 – Michael Bush (RB)
188 – Brandon Pettigrew (TE)
193 – Garrett Hartley (K)