nobody

Okay first things first. This is Fantasy Football Drafting 501 with a focus on snake drafts. Drafting 502 covers auction drafts. If you hold hard and fast rules that you can’t treat as generalities and also know when to break those rules like “never draft a QB before round 10,” this isn’t the class for you. You need to go to Drafting 401. If everything you read on this board is stupid and obvious, this class isn’t for you. Go start a Drafting 701 PhD class. If you quiver in fear at deviating from rankings and pre-draft lists, you don't need this class. You’re good. Just auto-draft.

It's like talking to a wall. The guy posts that 20 unarmed black people were killed by police in 2024 and your response implies criminals are being gunned down in the streets by racist police. 20 people... That's not systemic. That's barely a blip in a nation of 330 million people and 40 million black people. You have a better chance of being struck by lightening than being killed by a cop. Is lightening racist too? This is madness.

And most important lesson... Unless you are new to the hobby, don't listen to weepaws advice.

I don't even know why anyone would plan to work until they are 67. I don't even want to be alive at 67.

To summarize, use your tiers married with ADP to anchor your draft to certain players in certain rounds and plan the picks in the surrounding rounds around that. It will help you optimize your team. What this means is, if you can find value and anchor to a specific position in a specific round, you can perhaps fit a QB or TE in those early rounds where you've been taught to never draft those positions. Think about it.

And now is when we make our team. We’ll assume PPR and 12 teams. Standard starting lineup. Starting with our tiers, we should identify folks in those tiers that have outlying ADPs that are much later than the other players in that tier. Example. Tier may include Jeanty, Achane, Jonathan Taylor, Derrick Henry, and let’s say you are high on Hampton since Najee shot his eye out, or James Conner since all he ever does is put up top 10 numbers. And this is just an example. I’m not expecting you to necessarily agree, but I am expecting you to have your own opinions that may differ from established rankings, otherwise, like I said, you can auto-draft. Well let’s look at the ADPs of the players in this tier: ADP Std Dev Ashton Jeanty 10.9 2.5 De'Von Achane 8.8 1.9 Joanthan Taylor 18.7 2.8 Derrick Henry 11.3 2.7 Omarion Hampton 41.6 5.7 James Conner 40.2 4.8 Well, I’ll be damned. I can get two guys in this tier at pick 35 easily. These guys now should become your pivot point players or anchor players. We’re going to build a team now around our ability to get one of these guys at this value. So, now we know in the 3rd round we are getting a low end RB1. Well now we can shape our team in rounds 1 and 2 (and potentially rounds 4 and 5) to complement the fact that we got what we think is a low end RB1 in the 3rd. What that means is we can favor wide receiver or maybe even other positions in the surrounding rounds if it is advantageous to do so. For example, in the 1st round if we have a toss up between Amon-Ra and we’ll say Jeanty. Well, we know we can get Omarion or Conner in the 3rd so why not take Amon-Ra? Then we can look at guys like Jonathan Taylor or Ladd McConkey in the 2nd assuming we have those players ranked similarly. We may already do this intuitively using tiering, but what I’m advocating is that we marry tiers to ADP and not just say "well there’s still a few guys left in this tier so I’ll do X.” We're getting away from intuition and applying rigor to our process to use the combination of tiering and ADP to inform positional value in the rounds surrounding your anchor player. In this way, we are looking at the draft as a whole as opposed to just round by round which may lead to a pick of Jeanty or Henry or Achane in the 1st, Taylor in the 2nd assuming no WR tiered similarly, and then we get to round 3 and we take a 3rd RB or pass up amazing value? Instead, we should anticipate getting the amazing value in round 3 and lean our picks in rounds 1 and 2 knowing that. You would do this exercise for every tier. In this way, you may identify two, three, maybe even 4 undervalued players in which you can build around.

Okay, so now let’s get into the real meat of our class. In this class, we’re going to discuss how to use the above tools we learned to build a team. That means we want to maximize not just the points produced by one pick, but we are going to endeavor to identify key players that are undervalued to optimize the number of points we produce from the team as a whole. To do that, we are going to shift our focus from looking at drafts round by round, and we must look at the draft wholistically. Now it’s critical that we know our rules and our lineup requirements to do this like we learned in Drafting 101. It’s critical that we make our tiers like we learned in Drafting 201 to identify players that we think are likely to perform similarly.

I’m going to pause here and review a key concept from Drafting 301. Use Average Draft Position. In this class, we need to understand where players are going to go, but to use ADP properly, an elite drafter needs to understand the concept of standard deviation. If you’re looking at ADP numbers that don’t have standard deviation, you’re only getting half the story. Standard Deviation is essentially a measure of variance or in other words how volatile something is. In the case of ADP, it tells you how close to the ADP number you can expect a player to go. If the standard deviation is low, that means a player is less likely to stray from his ADP. If standard deviation is high, it is more likely that a player can go either much earlier or much later than his ADP. For our purposes, we need to understand three concepts around Standard Deviation 1. A player has a 68% chance of going at their ADP +/- the standard deviation, so if a player has an ADP of 100 with a standard deviation of 6, there is a 68% chance the player will go between 94 and 106. 2. A player has a 95% chance of going at their ADP +/- twice the standard deviation, so in our example above, the player has a 95% chance of going between 88 and 112. 3. In a uniform distribution which we will assume, there is a 50% chance the player goes right on his ADP or before. We assume there is an equal chance the player will go later or earlier.

Now with that, let’s review some basics that we are going to build on: Drafting 101 – Have fun. Know your rules. Know your starting lineup requirements. Drafting 201 – Make Tiers. Drafting 301 – Use Average Draft Position to help target players. Understand when ADP is stale given recent news, so you can get value. Drafting 302 – Understand positional scarcity. Drafting 401 - This is the Fundamental Theorem of Drafting – Draft the best player for your team that won’t be available on your next pick. In other words – F dem rankings.

I'm invested in the Tet discussion so I've been watching Panthers preseason, and I like what I've seen from Bryce so far. Pretty decisive, throwing aggressively. Seems to have command. In fact he probably would've hit Tet for a big one on a double move last week against Houston where the DB slipped a little, but a d-lineman got a finger on the ball as Bryce was releasing it. It was an interesting rep because Tet was running an out and up, but the DB slipped right before tet made his out cut. Then when Tet made the double move, the DB was in chase mode. I wish Bryce would've gotten the ball off clean because for the two steps before everyone stopped, the DB closed a ton of ground. I wanted to see if Tet would maintain the separation, or if the DB would close and break it up or maybe Tet head tops him. Tet did fock it up a little though. When he got the step, he's supposed to stack him (get in line with the DB so he can't pass him), but he gave the DB a bit of an angle on the play that he shouldn't have had. Second week in a row they tried to get a big one on a Tet double move, but the timing was too slow. First week, Young wanted to hit him on a five yard TD but Tet didn't get around fast enough (and maybe alligator armed it - I'm starting to think tet might also be afraid of contact which I didn't clock before watching preseason). Then this week pressure got to Young before the climax on the out and up.

I called this 20 years ago. Even back then I knew they'd raise the retirement age past 70 by the time I got to what the retirement age was back then. I've never counted SS in my retirement planning just for that reason.

There was this phenomenon where I grew up where people would test you just to see if you were a b¡tch. They would see you walking with a walkman or bike or wahtever and be like, "That's a nice walkman or bike or whatever. Let me borrow it." And if you were a b¡tch, they would just take your sh¡t. If you weren't, they'd leave you be. They just wanted to see if you were an easy mark. Will this dude just give it up for free. Complete free roll for them. What all these wokies like gutter and rusty and squisiton and the tims and probably Kaep who got used as a mouthpiece by his female don't realize. This race hustling is the same sh¡t. The hustlers are just trying sh¡t to see who's going to be a b¡tch and just give them sh¡t. It's the same grift. It's just more sophisticated.

And his female got ahold of him.

If we care about black lives, we should figure out the biggest threat to black lives and mitigate that. Maybe there are some statistics on leading causes of deaths in the black community. I mean black lives matter, right? Instead of guessing at a problem, why not use data to make informed decisions so we can save black lives, right? Right?

The statistics around police brutality against the black population don't support that it's a big enough problem that we need a national crisis. This is how it goes. The race hustlers that make a living convincing you that you need to be pissed off give you vagaries about how police are hunting down black people in the streets, and everyone just takes them at the word for fear of being labeled racist. Like, nah. You're making an accusation. You need to prove that sh¡t with facts and data not some hand wavey BS and anecdotes. Literally 9 unarmed black people a year get killed by police. That is not a systemic problem. His cause is stupid.

Fundamental Theorem of Drafting: Always take the player you think will be the best that won't be available on your next pick. Corollary to that is: If Yahoo thinks you had a good draft, you had a bad draft. Many a team ruined because they worried too much about rankings and Yahoo's draft list.

I hate myself for hedging on how mid I thought MHJ was before the 2024 NFL draft. I watched games on all those guys... Nabers, MHJ, Odunze, BTJ... and I came away very underwhelmed on MHJ (and Odunze, to be honest) relative to their hype, but I felt pressure to still have him as one of the top receivers because the whole world was sooooo god damned convinced he was soooo god damned good. It felt like I was going to have to fight the whole world thinking he was just a guy at the NFL level. That's why I don't care what people say about Tet. I knew Egbuka was better than him going into the draft. The world was (and is) screaming for Tet. But what I realized is people listen to the first few guys that have opinions and that gains momentum. Then the media members who suck but have huge platforms (coughESPNcough) don't know any better so they just spread the same bad opinion. Then the average fans who don't bother to watch the games or don't know what they are looking at when they do pick it up and adopt it as a core belief because they heard it on tv so many times, and then because they heard it on tv and now it's a core belief, they'll die on that hill. Then in Tet's case, there was a time in Feb/March leading up to the draft when the smart people stood up and said, "wait. I don't think Tet is really worth all this hype," but by then it was too late. The Tet is amaze-balls hype train already had way too much momentum and any opinion to the contrary was shouted down. From there, it was only a matter of time before some dysfunctional franchise like the Browns or Jets or Panthers drafted him because they get influenced by ESPN too.

The skill that Egbuka has that Tet doesn't is the ability to get open on time. It showed up more in 2023 than 2024, but I assume you don't lose that skill.

Nah, he's a JAG. They'll force feed him targets this year likely, but he's going to end up being Michael Gallup primarily running go routes to clear out space for receivers that can actually get open.

Have you played fantasy football before? You don't start players that aren't playing because they're injured.

Well now I'm hearing a steady drumbeat of how good egbuka has looked in camp. No one was polishing his knob that hard before... Except me and la chup.

He probably heard about the sauce, and was like, "I'd rather be poisoned like a real man."

They're going to make me buy into this merritt guy I guess

Jesus Christ the Internet is so trifling. Ok. No way chig outscores goedert unless goedert misses another like 7 games or whatever he missed last year. Everyone happy now?

no doubt.