Breaking down 2024's $1 Million FFPC Main Event champion
Looking at a winner I drafted with Jakob Sanderson last night
Got a chance to draft a team with Thinking About Thinking’s Jakob Sanderson in the FFPC Main Event last night, and it went well. You guys have been asking about teams I really like, and to talk through my own builds, and today we have one I will absolutely stand on. It’s my favorite roster so far.
Before I jump into it, I have to do a quick addendum to yesterday’s Team HVT post. I’ve written so much this month that I clearly need a break, but there was this whole angle I wanted to address in that post that helped clarify what I meant about “the most important way to think about RB usage,” as the title claimed.
Essentially, as I referenced with commentary about how data goes in and out of popularity, what I’ve found to be more heavily referenced in the past couple years is backfield share, and snap share, and these types of benchmarks, and what I wanted to emphasize (and I think mostly did) is the size of the pie is still super relevant. If you’re hyper-focused on whether your guy is getting 75% or 65% of his backfield, and missing the size of the backfield as a whole, you’re missing a huge percentage of the picture. And as things in the fantasy space have gotten exceedingly focused on the individual player profiles, I do believe this is a real issue across the whole space.
I referenced my Stealing Bananas cohost Shawn Siegele’s work on the Denver and Miami backfields, and he was looking at it in terms of total fantasy points scored by the team’s RBs, essentially. One of the things I’ve heard him emphasize on our podcasts is that Miami’s backfield didn’t just gap most other teams in fantasy points last year, it literally doubled up some of the teams at the bottom of the barrel.
Think about that for a second. It is so easy to hyper-focus on a player who “only” gets 50% of his backfield, and love one who gets 75%, but if the guy getting 50% of his backfield is on a team that generates 200 RB fantasy points over some span and the other is on one that generates 100, you’re talking about 50% guy meaningfully out-producing 75% guy, 100 to 75. And in situations like that, you’d far prefer the player who has meat on the bone with his usage share. The 75% guy has to get to literally 100% just to match the 50% guy, unless the team starts scoring more RB points (and the RB is in control of this to some degree, which is why we talk about efficiency). But if the 50% guy just gets to 60% for a stretch because his backfield mate is dinged up, suddenly he jumps to the equivalent of 120 points out of his team’s 200-point pie.
The logical endpoint of this, by the way, is that we just look at the player’s role, and that focusing too much on his percentage of his backfield misses the other key context — what is that a percentage of? — and it’s probably an example of “advanced” ways of looking at things not actually improving the way we understand the players.
That was the point of yesterday’s analysis, was that many in the industry focus so much on the backfield splits, and miss the forest for the trees in terms of how big the overall size of the team’s backfield value is. And I did hit on that idea a little bit, where I talked about committee backs in an offense that generates a ton of HVT being independently strong fantasy plays. That’s the deal with Javonte Williams and Jaleel McLaughlin, and also with De’Von Achane and Raheem Mostert, who — if I have these situations right — are going to have low usage shares of backfields that generate so many RB points that it doesn’t matter. What you don’t want is a committee usage share in a backfield that doesn’t generate a lot of points, which is my fear in, say, Washington.
[I have now edited yesterday’s post to include these past five paragraphs, so if you read my work in the app, you may have already seen these notes over there, but I wanted to make sure to add them here for those of you who interact with the posts via email, which I believe is still the majority of you! That said, this is also a great time for me to remind everyone that if you do use the Substack app, there is a readback feature for all articles, so you can have a nice computer lady read my long diatribes if you want to listen to them and don’t have time to sit through them. I consistently hear from people discovering that that it’s a game-changer, so I try to mention it now and then.]
Alright, let’s get to the FFPC draft from yesterday. If you’re not familiar with the FFPC format, here’s what I wrote in the intro of one of these breakdowns last year:
It’s a TE Premium format, meaning TEs record 1.5 points for each reception, while every other player gets a standard 1 PPR. It’s also a two-Flex format, where you start one QB, two RBs, two WRs, one TE, and then two Flexes, plus a K and DST.
That creates a ton of optionality. Unsurprisingly, I’m often going in with the mindset of treating those Flexes like WR slots to get four WRs into my lineups, to the extent that I’m fine being pretty light even at RB2 and not expecting many circumstances where my RB3 or RB4 could contend to be Flex plays. But that doesn’t mean it never happens for me in these leagues! Part of the whole idea of building late RB depth is it is unequivocally the position where when you hit, it’s most meaningful, and you know the week to use the player because he’s widely projected for a significant touch increase (often because the starter is out).
But setting aside the RB element, the cool part of the FFPC is that while I like to think of the Flex as WR spots, the TE Premium element makes that position very viable there, too.
Let’s see how this draft played out from the 1.06 slot, since I’ve already crowned us champs.
Rounds 1-3
The first three rounds were somewhat uneventful, but we did catch a couple breaks. First, we expected the top-five picks to be the three RBs and top-two WRs, which would have put us in a decision between some good WRs. We’d decided pre-draft we’d probably lean Justin Jefferson in that spot.
Instead, Amon-Ra St. Brown crept up to the 1.04, which pushed Bijan Robinson down to us, and shuffled our positional structure in the early going. Had we not gotten Bijan here, we likely would have been thinking about a Zero RB build with the way thinks shake out from there. We were interested in De’Von Achane in Round 2, but in TE Premium, that Round 2 TE is a big opportunity, and we’re both very into Trey McBride, who fell there and would have made our Achane decision tough. As it stood, by getting a RB in Round 1 it was fairly easy to bypass one in Round 2 and take the TE. Even if we’d gone Jefferson, I suspect we would have gone McBride, for fear of losing our other TE targets before our pick at 3.06.
If we were on that imaginary path, the pick at 3.06 would have likely been Kyle Pitts. Pitts’ ADP in these formats is a little later in Round 3, but he does often go at the top of the round, which we’ve experienced in every recent Ship Chasing draft where we’ve been near the back of the board and have hoped he’d slide down to us near the Round 3/4 turn. Instead, with a RB-TE start, we were more focused on securing a high-end WR, and with Chris Olave, Drake London, Nico Collins, Malik Nabers, Cooper Kupp, and Davante Adams off the board, our discussion centered on Jaylen Waddle or Rashee Rice. Jakob isn’t quite as high on Deebo Samuel as I am, and he wasn’t the obvious pick or anything, so we weren’t necessarily considering him there. Rice had the potential to come back around to us in Round 4, as he did in my last FFPC Main Event writeup from the 1.06 last week. We went with Waddle, who is still a strong pick in this range, and consistently a solid value on FFPC.
Rounds 4-8
Here’s where things got fun.
Kyle Pitts, who I haven’t been able to get to fall to the late third when I’ve wanted to take him, fell all the way to 4.07. We were livestreaming this, and someone in the chat mentioned that in hindsight we probably wanted Achane over McBride in Round 2 given this Pitts ADP value, but Jakob and I jointly answered that in that scenario we would have likely taken Pitts over Waddle in Round 3, so we wouldn’t have realized this value. Interestingly, it was likely only going to be available to us in the scenarios where he was our TE2. (Keep in mind, this is a TE Premium format, meaning TEs get 1.5 points per reception, which makes them far more viable as Flex options. It’s also a format where you have two Flex spots, and can actually start up to three TEs.)
Coming back around in Round 5, we got a huge rankings discount on Stefon Diggs, who each of us believe has slid way too far in some of these rooms. Round 6 was the most painful snipe of the draft, as Xavier Worthy went one pick ahead of us (after we’d also missed out on Rice). We expected that to some degree, as the drafted in front of us had already gone with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, but they ran the clock way down and I know I at least let myself get my hopes up.
I had to twist Jakob’s arm a bit to make the boring Diontae Johnson pick, in part because we felt we had a good shot at one of Jaxon Smith-Njigba or Rome Odunze on the way back as an upside pick to balance out this build. You guys know I think Johnson is going to be a consistent target earner for the Panthers this year, and on a team that only had two WRs through five rounds, he made for a nice WR3 in Round 6.
Our hopes for an upside pick in Round 7 paid off when Odunze made it back around, but we also had a pair of sliding values in Keenan Allen and Jayden Reed we considered there. We settled on Odunze as the bigger swing given the Johnson pick, and wanting to level out our WR archetypes, but then both Allen and Reed made it back to us in Round 8. To put in perspective how much of a value this was, and also understand what’s happened with Allen’s price, let’s look at the player ADP charting feature on RotoViz’s FFPC Redraft Dashboard.
Our pick in the eighth round was pick 94; those two tiny dots above Sep 01 are the two selections from our draft last night, where we took Keenan there, and Reed went one pick later. But it’s also fascinating to look at Keenan’s trajectory, as he was a clear pick ahead of Reed for most of Main Event season — I just started this image from mid-July, but the trend holds if you work back — until he just started to fall around mid-August, and that fall just hasn’t stopped.
To me, this is a clear example of a guy people are just not thinking clearly about, and they just don’t want him at any cost right now. As he falls, people continue to let him slip past the new ADP. Suddenly a guy whose ADP was around pick 70 all draft season is available outside the top-90 picks, because he’s picked up the nickname “Fat Keenan,” a joke about some dubious reports he’s added weight.
Sure, he’s older, but that was known all offseason. One report about his weight, and some overanalysis of lazy preseason routes (which should frankly be expected from a 32-year-old) has led to an absurd freefall. Getting him outside the top 90 picks, after Khalil Shakir and other questionable prospects, is nonsense. Allen finished as the WR3 in PPR points per game last year. That’s not a typo. Third. Immediately ahead of St. Brown and Jefferson, and well ahead of someone like Puka Nacua, who was the WR6 but a full 3.5 points per game behind Allen. Yes, Allen’s situation has changed, and yes he might break down. But this isn’t how you price that stuff in. As a hugely vibes-based player, I am comfortably in position to see clearly that fantasy football has gone way too vibes-based in some spots, and it creates opportunities.
At the same time, Jayden Reed was an impossible pass in this spot, as well. Jakob and I ran the clock down to under 5 seconds before picking, mostly lamenting that the room hadn’t made this impossible decision for us by selecting one of them. I put Jakob on the spot with the clock winding down, and he did a coinflip thing where he looked at his clock and whatever number he saw first — whether even or odd — made his decision. Fate gave us Allen. Among things we discussed, Reed would open up a second stack, since we already had Odunze and had access to Caleb Williams, but it was also both of our impression that Allen was the bigger faller and ADP value here. We were legitimately torn, and a commenter nailed the situation, pegging it as a true Sophie’s choice.
The one thing that we didn’t have right as we made our decision was Keenan’s value here. He’s fallen so much, and so precipitously over the past two weeks, that if you look back at the RotoViz chart above, you see Keenan has actually gone at or beyond Pick 90 multiple times recently. Reed has not; he did once way back in July, and has been at 89 a couple times (note that I’ve set this to only Main Events). It’s probably the case that even as Keenan was going about half a round higher than Reed for months up until about two weeks ago, that Reed was the falling discount we should have prioritized.
Ultimately, though, both were sick values, and being able to add either one in Round 8 made this team with its Anchor RB and double Elite TE an instant threat to win the whole contest. And with the way things played out, we did wind up feeling good about the Keenan decision.
Rounds 9-14
As we entered the middle of the draft, we had one RB, five WRs, and two TEs. We had a clear QB in mind, but it was also time to find some RB targets.