In one’s quest for fantasy football glory, it’s very possible to fall short.  In one of my leagues, I fell short by a single game; four teams made the playoffs, and I was the fifth.  Playing in the “consolation bracket” may soften the blow a bit, but let’s not kid ourselves; it was a disappointing season.

So in the spirit of self-improvement, I am going to take stock my fantasy team and figure out went wrong, especially when I had a rather promising team after I got done with my auction draft at the beginning of the season.

What went wrong

With my focus on talent concentration, I left the draft in September with several players whom I thought would be the drivers of my fantasy team.  Adrian Peterson, Calvin Johnson, Aaron Rodgers, and Randall Cobb were expected to be the key performers for me week in and week out, and other players were supposed to play supporting roles – particularly players taken off the waiver wire during the season.  At the end of the day, my drafted studs under-performed on the whole and my supporting players couldn’t compensate.

Wide receivers

As I examine my roster, one key problem that sticks out to me is the poor performance of my top two WRs, Calvin Johnson and Randall Cobb.  I paid $81 ($200 budget) for both at my auction draft; a rough estimate indicates that Johnson was the sixth most expensive WR in the league, and Cobb was the eighth most expensive WR.  Sadly for me, to this day Johnson has produced the twelfth most points for WRs in my league, and Cobb has produced the twenty-second most points.  Cobb was particularly troublesome because many of his points came in Week 3 when he scored 3 touchdowns; in most other weeks his performances were very pedestrian.

Meanwhile, probably my top-scoring WR for the first half of the season, Julian Edelman, went down with an injury in Week 10.  Not long after that, my team took a string of three straight losses, which effectively took me out of the fantasy playoffs.  Still, many studs for different managers were injured, so I can’t blame my performance on one player going down.

Running backs

My running back situation was centered around Adrian Peterson.  Drafted for $61, he has been the second-highest scoring RB in my league this year, so his price tag was worth the amount I spent on him.

As I explained after my draft, I left a hole in my roster at RB by not drafting a second quality RB.  I had run out of money on draft day and expected to pick up a RB off waivers at some point in the season who could fill the void, and I was determined to use a “band-aid” approach for a few weeks until that undetermined key RB emerged.  I drafted DeAngelo Williams for $1 and put him into my lineup, but I dropped him after a few weeks with the return of Leveon Bell (there was no real reason to keep Williams, even though he is the #8 RB in points scored so far).

As I anticipated, a prominent RB did emerge for me to scoop off waivers: Doug Martin.  I managed to pick him up after Week 4.  His original owner probably dropped him after his mediocre performances in the first few weeks of the season, but his strong rest-of-season results has made him the third highest RB in my league overall.

Tight ends

The situation with my tight ends was nothing special.  I originally drafted Jordan Cameron and thought he would serve as a key component in the Miami passing attack, but eventually it became evident that he wouldn’t be the player he was in Cleveland.  I dropped him and picked up Antonio Gates (who had recently come off an injury) who provided a worthy addition when San Diego’s offense decided to go bonkers.  The TE didn’t really hurt my team, but it didn’t help much, either.

Quarterback

My season-long quarterback was Aaron Rodgers.  Often considered the elite QB in the league, Rodgers had a slightly off year, in my opinion.  I paid $28 in my draft for him – the second-highest-priced QB in my league.  To date, he has scored the fifth-most points among QBs.  While this was not too shabby, consider the fact that QB Blake Bortles went undrafted and scored the sixth-most points among QBs (only three points behind Rodgers).  Nevertheless, I think the price I paid for Rodgers was reasonable considering the fact that his production was reliable and above average.  This just so happened to be a year in which QBs valuations, as a whole, were unpredictable.

Bench players

Some other players that I held for part of the season with the hope that they would break out never emerged as I had hoped.  Matt Jones, Ronnie Hillman, and James Starks never turned into reliable options at RB, even though they did produce flashes of promise from time to time.  Stephon Diggs was another player who I appeared to be on the brink of greatness at one point, but the Minnesota passing attack was simply too ineffective to make him a player worth keeping for too long.

The final analysis

On to assigning blame.  As I alluded to above, my greatest mistake was over-valuing my top-drafted WRs.  They simply weren’t reliable enough.  I think it’s interesting that my top two WRs – Cobb and Calvin – were ranked in the #6 to #10 range for WRs in the preseason, but they obviously didn’t live up to their billing.  Meanwhile, the guys who were top-five in the preseason rankings (Odell Beckham Jr., Antonio Brown, Julio Jones) did much better and lived up to their high pre-draft valuation.  The lesson here seems to be that it’s better to go after elite players than merely better-than-average players.  Reliability is key.

Another mistake I made was not having enough depth at the WR position.  My league played rosters with three active WR slots and only two RB slots, and for whatever reason it was easier to stream RBs this year than to stream WRs.  My team suffered once I was forced to stream a WR when Edelman was injured.  Rather than drafting my TE for $7 (Camerson), I should have gone after a WR3 late in the draft in the $10 range.  Brandon Marshall went for $7, Allen Robinson went for $9, and Amari Cooper went for $8.  Any of these players would have been great values and would have provided me with a lot of depth.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.  Mistakes were made.  Hopefully I’ll redeem myself by winning the consolation bracket (sigh), but more of my focus will be on the leagues in which I did make the playoffs. Forward march!

 

 

 

 

Week 1 of the 2015 NFL season is already in the books, so I wanted to recap my draft results from my 10-team auction draft.  I will try to explain my approach that I took on draft day, and over the course of the season I will revisit my explanation of waiver wire pickups.

Here were the roster positions available ($200 budget):

QB -1
WR – 3
RB – 2
TE – 1
K – 1
DEF – 1
BN – 6

My general strategy is to go hard or go home during auction drafts.  This means I am not afraid to blow through 75% of my budget on three or four top tier players.  I have reasons for this that I will explain at some other time, but for the time being I will say simply that this strategy has worked for me in several different types of fantasy sports leagues.  Time to use it again.

The first player I acquired, Calvin Johnson ($43), was the first player to be nominated.  Although not quite the same caliber of player as he was just a few years ago, I feel that he has at least the possibility of ending up as the #1 receiver in the league and so for $43, this pick presented a good value.  Because rosters start three WRs and only two RBs,

I find that the first player nominated in an auction draft can sometimes be had at very good prices.  The reason for this is that at the beginning of the draft, team owners are unable to accurately value top tier players.  Should the #1 player go for $55?  $60?  $65 or more?  Until owners actually start bidding and winning several players in the draft, it’s really difficult to say, and so some of them may decide to sit out a pick or two before valuations become more predictable.

I picked up my next player, Adrian Peterson ($61), as the third player taken overall.  He was arguably the best player overall in the draft, so he was a natural choice in my decision to concentrate my budget on a few high-talent players, rather than disperse it among many better-than-average players.  The price was perhaps a tad more than I would have liked for him, but he was still three dollars less than the price of Eddie Lacy ($64), who was chosen by another team as the eighth pick overall.

My next player acquired was Randall Cobb ($38) as the twelfth overall pick.  I would have preferred to wait and add a receiver who would provide higher upside since there were still several that were yet-to-be nominated, but Cobb’s price was fairly attractive.  I anticipate that his floor will be rather high this season because a) he has moved into the #1 receiver spot on his team, b) he has a proven track record even as a #2 receiver in past seasons, c) he benefits from the talents of arguably the best quarterback in the league, and d) he plays on an offense that will almost certainly generate more points than 75% of the rest of the teams in the league.

At this point in the draft, I had spent $142 on three players, which left me with a maximum bid of about $47 for any single player (this would leave me with the required $1 in reserve to fill players in other roster spots).  Because of this, I was unable to compete on top talent such as Antonio Brown ($54), Jamaal Charles ($56), or Dez Bryant ($54).  Blowing the rest of my budget on a single player would not have been the end of the world, but I find that extending the last 25% or so of my budget by drafting low-cost, “value” picks provides me with a great deal of flexibility in accumulating supporting players for my team.

Fortunately, my next selection was my best yet: I acquired Aaron Rodgers ($28) as the #33 pick of the draft.  I call this my “best” pick because of its relative value.  Relative to the Andrew Luck ($47, pick #31), Rodgers was clearly the better value because he cost much less but will likely provide similar fantasy numbers.  Relative to other positions players who went later for around the same price (Lamar Miller, $31; Brandin Cooks, $27; Emmanuel Sanders, $30), Rodgers was clearly a better place to put money.

My acquisition of Rodgers left me with a new maximum bid of about $19, so I was unable to compete for many quality players after that apart from Julian Edelman ($13, pick #40) and Jordan Cameron ($7, #86).  I ended up getting stuck with the injured Julius Thomas ($1) after nominating him as auction bait.  No one bit, but it didn’t cost me anything apart from a minimally-priced roster spot.

My final draft results were as follows:

1. (1) Calvin Johnson (Det – WR) $43
2. (3) Adrian Peterson (Min – RB) $61
3. (12) Randall Cobb (GB – WR) $38
4. (33) Aaron Rodgers (GB – QB) $28
5. (40) Julian Edelman (NE – WR) $13
6. (43) St. Louis (StL – DEF) $2
7. (73) Julius Thomas (Jax – TE) $1
8. (86) Jordan Cameron (Mia – TE) $7
9. (93) Teddy Bridgewater (Min – QB) $1
10. (111) Matt Jones (Was – RB) $1
11. (131) Alfred Blue (Hou – RB) $1
12. (136) Danny Amendola (NE – WR) $1
13. (140) DeAngelo Williams (Pit – RB) $1
14. (143) Matt Prater (Det – K) $1
15. (146) Arizona (Ari – DEF) $1

Overall, my draft went well with Tier 1 talent at the QB position, RB position, and Tier 1/Tier 2 talent at two WR positions.  One gaping hole in my roster was at my second RB position.  I drafted DeAngelo Williams ($1) as cheap starter for the first two weeks of the season (while RB1 Le’Veon Bell is suspended), and I figured that some other running back would emerge on the waiver wire during that time whom I can target.  Other picks of mine, such as Alfred Blue ($1) and Matt Jones ($1) are more speculative and will probably not be worth holding on for the long term.