2016 Draft Preview

Draft week is finally here, and thanks to the Rockies' schedule, we all had one fewer week to prepare. This will likely lead to some hilarious bids, as well as the soul crushing feeling of someone's $50 player tearing his ACL two days after the draft. My money is on Bennett. Here are a few other things to look forward to this weekend:


1. New Members

We unfortunately won't get to see how Bruno handles an auction draft in person, but the introduction of new team owners is always interesting to watch. Everyone has different draft strategy and behavior, so we'll see which of the following categories Marco and Bruno fall into, or if they create their own:

Esco - Never bids on any player for the first hour.
Barnard - Talks a lot while desperately seeking approval for his picks.
Alan - Doesn't talk at all while desperately seeking approval for his picks.
Donny - Only picks Giants.
Joseph - Shits on every single bid.
Bennett - Gets every single bid shit on.
Ajay - Shits on himself.
Gutman - Has immediate buyer's regret after every player he drafts.
AGD - Whispers sweet nothings to each other while doing a secret handshake after each player they draft.
BAM - Worries more about the beer situation than their team.
Zacherman - Worries more about the food situation than his team.
Weissbard - Worries more about pranking the rest of the league than his team.
Levine - Silently drafts a team that everyone agrees is solid, but no one is scared of.
Kumpf - Talks loudly about how this is the year he's not going to be wasted for the draft while downing his 15th beer.


2. Suspended Players

More so than any year in recent memory, the 2016 fantasy season will be affected by players facing suspensions. Brady, LeVeon and Josh Gordon will all miss the first month of the season, but when active they are all legit #1 options at their respective positions. Some teams will either luck into bargains, or completely overspend for the three of them along with DeAngelo Williams, Jimmy Garoppolo and.... whoever the Browns have at receiver other than Gordon. My guesses:

Tom Brady - Ajay (Bargain)
LeVeon Bell - BAM (Bargain)
Josh Gordon - Barnard (Overpay)
DeAngelo Williams - Levine (Bargain)
Jimmy Garoppolo - Bennett (Overpay)
Corey Coleman - Esco (Bargain)

3. Altered Realities

Given the legal standards put forth by the state of Colorado, it's extremely likely that the league will be collectively higher during this draft than in previous years. Whether that's due to overall participation or the extreme efforts of a few brave men remains to be seen, but it will probably have a legitimate effect on the outcome of the draft. We could see Gutman bidding repeatedly just to hear the ESPN music, a paranoid Alan hiding in the bathroom for hours, and Zacherman straight up fall asleep mid-draft. I'm not putting anything past this group.

4. NO KICKERS!

The long awaited removal of the most useless and unpredictable position in fantasy football will actually have an impact on the draft. The overall draft budget has not changed, but we all have one extra dollar to spend on a bid that actually requires some thought. If we all theoretically spent that money on Antonio Brown, his price could break $70. Isn't that more fun that bidding on Chandler Catanzaro?

5. Positional Craziness

In my draft prep, I've been baffled by the change in the typical positional hierarchy in fantasy. Outside of the top 4-5 RBs, that position is a complete wasteland. Receiver is pretty deep, but still feels risky to invest in heavily with auction dollars. Someone is going to pay runningback money for Gronk, as well as Jordan Reed. And QB is the most confusing position of all with questions ranging from "Can Cam repeat his 2015 production?" to "Am I really dropping $10 on Blake Bortles?"

I don't think I've ever been as confused about auction prices heading into a draft, and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. See you fuckers on Thursday.

Podcast 2016.08 - The Rise And Fall Of The McConaissance: From The Lincoln Lawyer To Lincoln Commercials

Who's Really The Best?

For the last three years, we've done a division draft that has little to no effect on the league's outcome, but does give us a good chance to shit on each other. To refresh everyone's memory, the winner of each division is guaranteed a playoff spot, unless the NiJo rule intervenes. This typically happens organically, as the best team out of a (seemingly) random group of 4-5 teams will likely be a top 6 overall anyway. The only time the Division Champion rule was used was its first year, when the division Joseph drafted had no team better than 6-7. In this case, Bennett should have been granted a playoff spot over Weissbard (also 6-7, but with more points), however Weiss was also a top three scorer overall, so the NiJo rule superceded.

This is just a long way of saying that divisions haven't mattered at all. Yet. But even if they never do, figuring who is actually the best at fantasy football does matter. Yes, Ajay has two Stevens Bowl championships under his belt, which is undeniably impressive, and AGD/Esco have both been to multiple title games as well. But using Stevens Bowls as the ultimate determining factor of greatness is the same "Count The Ringzzz" argument that puts Eli Manning as a better QB than Dan Marino.

On this blog, I have tried to aggregate performance overall using Won-Loss record, but that's a similarly flawed metric that nearly has as much to do with schedule as it does team quality. So, as I start a new job that doesn't have a lot for me to do for the first few weeks, I decided to actually try to objectively determine how to rank each team in our league.

Methodology

The obvious way to rank teams is by points scored. But there are caveats there that matter including number of seasons played, number of teams in the league, scoring settings for particular years, etc. I could have gotten super-statistical and looked at standard deviation across multiple years, but I wanted to keep it a little less abstract, so I ultimately decided on using Points Above Average (PAA). PAA is simply calculated by determining the average number of points scored in a given season, and calculating the number of points scored above (or below) average for each team. This should limit most of the issues that stem from changing league settings, while also keeping things relatively simple. Instead of averaging things across all seven years, I took the PAA for each year, added them up, and divided by the number of seasons played for each team to get total PAA/Season.

The biggest issue that I faced was that the 2012 League page is no longer accessible. We created a "new" ESPN league in 2013, and have kept it since then, but the 2012 version is lost. Unless ESPN gets their shit together like Yahoo, those stats are gone. To estimate the points from 2012, I took each team's finish in the standings and assigned them the average points scored from that position in 2010-11 and 2013-15 (years where we had 14 teams). This isn't perfect, but should be good enough.

Results

There's a lot to unpack here. Quick thoughts:

• Levine? Levine! An unexpectedly dominant three-year run from Levine in which he has never finished worse than 55 points above average puts him at the top of the list. Good for you Steve.
• Esco, AGD, Joseph, and Ajay rounding out the top five isn't really a surprise, and with Nick's retirement, the league has a clear upper crust.
• Between his solo team and BAM, Billy has been extremely consistent overall.
• Barnard and I being separated by less than 2 points over the course of seven years is fucking incredible.
• The Long Line is a real thing, both in terms of Winning Percentage (.346) as well as PAA.
• Alan......

This should hopefully provide better information for the Division Draft this year, or at the very least spark some conversation as we lead up to Denver. I'll also leave you with the overall points scored, which is interesting if nothing else.

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