More thoughts on rankings, late-round draft strategy, and early-season roster churn
The intros to my TE Tiers piece keep getting too long
Same as the prompt for yesterday’s one-off email, the intros to my TE Tiers pieces keep getting too long. But I really enjoy when I get going on a topic that is sparking my creativity, mostly because those seem to be the ones I get the most positive feedback from. You guys loved the Stealing Signals introductions last year, where I kept going longer and longer on whatever was on my mind that week about managing fantasy teams, even as the meat of those posts is already such a deep and thorough look into specific situations (just an incredibly stupid decision by me, every week, to not just start breaking down the games). You also seem to enjoy when I have a random spark like this in the offseason, so let’s get into more about rankings, late-round draft strategy, and early-season roster churn.
As I wrote about yesterday, my rankings are shuffling a bit almost every day, especially in the later tiers. After about Round 12, particularly in sharper drafts, you have to be incredibly flexible and be willing to take guys who might be movers well above ADP. Among these players, we’re talking about profiles where it’s a lot of projection, so there’s a constant shuffling as little bits of news have an impact on the slim upside outcomes we’re after.
Let’s try to quantify this. In those rounds, we’re mostly focused on top 1% (or maybe top 5%) outcomes. If the players had a wider range of ways to help us in fantasy, they just simply wouldn’t be later-round picks. What positive camp buzz might mean is only a very marginal increase in those outcomes we’re after, but marginal increases in those probabilities makes a player far more desirable in the later rounds. Let’s be absurdly and foolishly precise and say a rookie’s breakout path is a 1.2% probability, but positive camp news increases his early-season playing-time outlook such that it now feels more like a 1.5% probability, because we believe in the talent and situation, but now have just slightly more reason to believe the opportunity will be there. That’s a 25% increase to the part of the profile we actually care about!
Probably those numbers are too low for draftable players — maybe more like 2.5% or 5% or something, but who cares. The flip side of that implies we don’t really care about the other 95% of outcomes, and that’s not entirely true. There are probably at least another 20% of outcomes for a lot of these guys where additional future news will make them worth holding and keeping the bet going into the bye weeks and later. But in a very real sense we need to recognize that in redraft we’re likely to cut a lot of our late-round picks, and embrace that uncertainty.
What you don’t want to be doing in the late rounds is frequently drafting for Week 1 projection among a group of players no one really believes in enough to draft higher — so they probably don’t have great upside paths — but who might be good enough for stretches to be roster cloggers, or even trick you into adding them to your starting lineup after a big week on your bench, only for you to realize (too late) that the game they hit on your bench was the outlier. There’s an advantage to taking players who can miss so spectacularly by Week 1 that they are easy cuts, and that advantage is how it frees up a roster spot to make another bet. That bet — a waiver wire addition — might be a lower-probability bet, but the point is the process of stacking multiple bets across multiple periods of the preseason and early-season range, using a single roster spot.
That roster turnover is a good thing. As we start to think about in-season strategy, if you do draft a player who is obviously cuttable, the best and most obvious use for that roster spot is one of the clear top waiver pickups everyone is after in that period. And having the freedom to aggressively go after that player (or players) is an advantage, for sure. But I’m talking more about the situations where you don’t actually land that player.
When you can’t get the clear top waiver pickups for a given week, you should be targeting intriguing profiles that we might get more information on quickly. Many of you did this on Cordarrelle Patterson after his Week 1 last year, when he was a cheap pickup. But he made it through Week 2 even in some deeper high stakes leagues I was in, and he became a much more expensive pickup after his role got a second data point and felt more confirmed. The goal is the bet after Week 1. Had Patterson’s role not carried over into Week 2, he would have been an easy cut for a different, more intriguing Week 2 bet. This is what I’m talking about when I use the term “roster churning.” Holding one player in that lineup spot all year is a detriment to your ability to hit on a player who might be far more impactful, and it’s an especially bad outcome for your team if that player is, say, some boring 14th-round WR and you’re in a league where there are 15 comparable boring WRs on the waiver wire. If you ever need to actually use that guy, you can just add a different version of him that week!
It could be said the recipe for winding up in a position where fantasy feels very frustrating starts on draft day with the types of players you target, particularly in these later rounds. The ones with higher median outcomes have the potential to post pretty strong weeks, perhaps even in a row, and then they will almost certainly wind up in your starting lineup when that carriage turns back into a pumpkin. They will hurt your season-long point-scoring by being a starting option that week, and they will also hurt your roster flexibility by being difficult to drop for several weeks, limiting the likelihood of you hitting on the season’s big waiver wire stars. Undroppable depth through to your final roster spot seems like a great thing — and can be — but it does carry with it an actively negative element of limiting your flexibility. This goes back to some of the questions I answered in Monday’s mailbag about draft strategy, where as you guys are thinking about optimizing your roster through to the very end, the optimal for me is dedicating at least one or two spots to [upside player of the moment] that can be confirmed as a hit or churned as quickly as possible. It’s yet another way we need to embrace uncertainty.
Those of you who watch Ship Chasing will know there’s a running joke that I love Jarvis Landry, and you may have even picked up that it seems to annoy me. The reason it does is not about Landry, it’s about what he represents — Landry is a boring play that is a reasonable option to tack onto certain builds in deeper leagues where you need some stability in your WR group, because he’s a bit better than your run-of-the-mill late-round veteran. But he’s still the type of player that once you take him, you’re not likely to cut him, and he’s also not likely to hit in a way that makes a real splash for your team. So he is only a draft option in very specific situations. (And my concern is among anyone who might not know if that whole Landry thing is a joke — I would assume more casual viewers or casual players — Landry is the exact type of player I would advise against drafting in almost any situation. He’s a bad pick in casual leagues, for sure.)
But I didn’t get into this topic to make an official statement on my annoyance over a Jarvis Landry bit, rather to discuss the players we should be targeting late. We’re thinking through the possibilities of how our roster might play out in these late rounds, e.g. “Even if I assume this player does eventually break out, will it come late — say, after Week 10 — such that I might need to cut him during the byes?” That’s where some positive camp buzz might change the probabilities, indicating a quicker timeline and greater certainty — earlier in the season — with which we can make a decision to be in on the player or cut them. When these players whose projections have massive ranges do hit, it’s much more recognizable as real — a bona fide breakout — compared to the fool’s gold of a veteran putting together a solid three- or four-week stretch that might actually harm your roster.
So stay diligent in those final rounds, and don’t hesitate to go off the board if my rankings aren’t yet in on a player I probably should be. It’s extremely tough to weigh the movement of a few hundred player profiles each day and week right now. If you do go with your guy, it’s entirely possible I’ll find my way to them at some point after that and eventually move them up in my rankings into a range where you took them. I wrote about Isiah Pacheco vis a vis the Chiefs’ other two backup running backs yesterday, specifically noting I was keeping them all in the same tier, and then later last night — after my draft — I moved Jerick McKinnon and Ronald Jones back a tier, largely because of how far they fell and the desire to be price-sensitive.
(To be honest, though, I think Jones might be the best cost-adjusted late-round RB in all of fantasy when he falls to the 16th or later, as he has in my last couple Main Event drafts. We have an interesting dynamic here where the people who were in on Jones have packed their bags with best ball shares on Underdog all offseason and are spooked off of any additional exposure, and he’s always been a polarizing player where there was a certain type of drafter that was willing to take him and everyone else seems to think he’s terrible. The result is a massive freefall in some drafts that treats him as a near-lock to be cut without upside, largely on the basis of beat reports about the exciting, athletic youngster who is crushing the early part of camp — Pacheco, and it’s not exactly an infrequent phenomenon what he’s doing — and it’s still entirely possible the first few weeks of camp/preseason aren’t even reflective of the way we see the Pacheco-McKinnon-Jones hierarchy by Week 1, let alone into the regular season, assuming Jones makes the roster. But that last clause, “assuming Jones makes the roster,” is the biggest part of what makes him such a nice bet at this specific point in time, because he is going super late and we will get more information that could rebound his value significantly before Week 1 or else he will be an easy cut if the assumptions being made do prove accurate.)
Anyway, draft with confidence, is what I’m saying, not a reliance on my rankings as fact. I’ll miss a lot, and any fantasy analyst who positions their work otherwise is probably a snake oil salesman.
TE Tiers will eventually make it to your inbox, I swear, followed by the other positions. Until next time!
this is the perfect example of why i love subscribing to your content because it just opened up my mind to one of my weak spots i was not really aware of.
i think i am pretty good at identifying those high upside late round guys but balancing that with good roster churn is where i fail. i’ll use a recent draft bench of olave/skyy/nyheim/m.carter as an example - i am a huge believer in the talent of olave and skyy but i should be more mindful that they may take a while to hit so balance those picks out with more immediate week 1 signals. i know i am going to be stubborn with skyy because any investment in the KC offense can yield high rewards but if nyheim doesn’t show increased usage like his HC has been saying or if carter doesn’t dominate pass game snaps, i’ll probably look to drop one of those two for a lower perceived talent but an immediate signal.
in the past, i would just stick with my guns and not churn these guys because of them being high median starter and avoid those recent spike week guys because i wanted my bench to be “balanced” and that probably hurt my team even more. i don’t know if i explained that well so this is more of me just spewing my thoughts but best ball has especially opened my eyes to how much better i can be at roster construction and balancing certain archetypes.
Looking at some of your bench spots as upside incubators, which you just churn, is a great strategy!