Postby Dookmarriot » Wed Jan 02, 2019 8:31 pm
I feel - now that I lucked into a title - that in the spirit of this thread I should discuss my team building strategy. What I did right, what I did wrong (lots), and just how fundamentally important that horseshoe stuck up your backside is come playoff time.
I took over the team coming into the 2016 season, and it looked like this:
Player 2015 Pts
Cassel, Matt DAL QB 86.60
Manning, Peyton DEN QB (P) 130.85
Osweiler, Brock DEN QB 144.45
Anderson, C.J. DEN RB 145.30
Bell, Le'Veon PIT RB (I) 111.20
Cunningham, Benny STL RB 65.00
Gerhart, Toby JAC RB (I) 9.70
Hyde, Carlos SFO RB (I) 81.30
Reece, Marcel OAK RB (S) 78.50
Zenner, Zach DET RB (R) (I) 9.10
Baldwin, Doug SEA WR 268.90
Fuller, Corey DET WR 11.60
Garcon, Pierre WAS WR 185.70
Ginn Jr., Ted CAR WR 183.90
Greene, Rashad JAC WR (R) 40.30
Holmes, Andre OAK WR 58.10
Janis, Jeff GBP WR 9.90
Jones, T.J. DET WR 28.90
McBride, Tre TEN WR (R) 9.60
Stills, Kenny MIA WR (P) 89.00
Wallace, Mike MIN WR 98.90
Williams, Tyrell SDC WR (R) 17.00
Donnell, Larry NYG TE (I) 63.30
Fells, Darren ARI TE 70.10
Gronkowski, Rob NEP TE 255.60
To now, a team that looks like this:
Player YTD Pts
Cousins, Kirk MIN QB 350.10
Keenum, Case DEN QB 272.80
Manning, Eli NYG QB 301.95
Davis, Mike SEA RB (Q) 136.80
Freeman, Royce DEN RB (R) 103.30
Henry, Derrick TEN RB 203.50
McCaffrey, Christian CAR RB 388.00
McGuire, Elijah NYJ RB 89.90
Perine, Samaje WAS RB 6.70
Scarbrough, Bo SEA RB (R)
Williams, David JAC RB (R) 3.60
Brown, John BAL WR 143.90
Coutee, Keke HOU WR (R) 62.70
Davis, Corey TEN WR 183.60
Enunwa, Quincy NYJ WR (I) 88.90
Jones, Zay BUF WR 165.20
Kirkwood, Keith NOS WR (R) 45.90
Reynolds, Josh LAR WR 100.00
Smith-Schuster, JuJu PIT WR 298.90
Snead, Willie BAL WR 134.40
Stills, Kenny MIA WR 134.45
Watson, Justin TBB WR (R) 1.50
Dickson, Ed SEA TE 45.20
Engram, Evan NYG TE 126.30
Griffin, Ryan HOU TE 54.50
25 Total Players
Injured Reserve
Guice, Derrius WAS RB (R) (I) ‐
Grant, Jakeem MIA WR (I) 60.30
Wallace, Mike PHI WR (D) 0.00
Shortly after I took over the team, my first son was born. And while he's fine now, he had a pretty terrifying start, with lots of time spent in the hospital. So while looking at the roster - terrible at QB, very good at RB, the GOAT at TE, a pretty fugly WR corps and zero high picks - I decided to distract myself from real life by trying to pull off that most mythical of rebuilds. The scorched earth. Everything had to go. That was just my first mistake...
I really liked the 2017 class, so my strategy was to sell out for 2017 picks. I wanted first rounders and lots of them. In retrospect, that was a really narrow, myopic plan. I turned down a lot of really excellent offers because they didn't contain a 2017 pick. I still kick myself about turning down an offer of Ertz and the 2016 1.04 for Gronk. Especially since I ended up trading his Gronkness and a 3rd rounder for Khiry, DGB (shudder - I was convinced he and Mariota were about to become a top pairing and bought him EVERYWHERE) and what turned out to be the 2017 1.05. I still consider this my biggest whiff. And that includes the trade of my other big piece, Le'Veon, who I traded with Ted Ginn, Tre McBride and what turned out to be the 2.01 for Allen Hurns, the 2016 1.05 and what turned out to be the 2017 1.07. So I essentially turned two of the top players in fantasy into magic beans. I put way too much faith in a class still a year away from declaring.
The most important lesson I've learned from this rebuild...the hard way, as you can tell...is not to assign trade values to players based on how *I* view them, but based on what they are worth to the community. Now, that can obviously vary from league to league. But I thought Bell was a oft-injured doofus who would eventually drive the Steelers to madness, and I thought Gronk played too physical a style to keep it up for long. Both of these things ended up being true...but not for a couple of years, where they were still excellent fantasy assets and should have returned me more if I didn't apply my personal discount to their trade value. Even worse, I made the elementary mistake of making the picks I got back for these players considerably worse. I should have held out, but as I said I was using this team as a distraction so I wanted trades and lots of them. Frankly, these moves should have torpedoed my team, and if the 2017 draft hadn't turned out to be a great one I'd be still spinning my wheels.
Aaaand apologies, I had planned to write more this evening son number 2 required his Dad, so I'm going to save this now, put myself to bed and add to it later. Hope that someone finds some value in it by the time I'm done.
"I like reading the predictions of the morons on here and cashing in by doing the opposite. Especially Dookmariot." - Lotto4Life
"Because of (the Raiders), there's the no-clothesline rule, the no-hitting-out-of-bounds rule, the no-fumbling-forward-in-the-last-two-minutes rule, the no-throwing-helmets rule and the no-Stickum rule. So you see, we're not all bad." - Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks