It's conventional wisdom that a fantasy football drafts set the tone for the entire season: a great draft instantly propels one into frontrunner status, while a poor draft (e.g. stepping back afterward and realizing your team is awful) can nearly end a season at the outset.
As you can guess by this post's initial tone, such "wisdom" is actually ignorance, giving great drafters false confidence and bad drafters a misguided sense of hopelessness.
Last year I competed in two leagues, as I always do, because I like rooting for players on game days, rather than "kinda rooting" for one player on one of my teams, but "not too much" because an opponent has him in another league. In these two leagues, I won one and lost in the finals in the other. The one I lost was a 2-QB auction league where I successfully acquired underrated players during the draft: Stafford, Romo, Chris Johnson, Dez Bryant, Antonio Brown, Seattle D, etc. In one stretch I scored the most points in 7 out of 9 weeks. But an elite-level draft wasn't enough to overcome a tough opponent in the finals--an opponent who assembled the right players who thrived in the week that mattered most.
In the league I won, this was my round-by-round draft:
7 C.J. Spiller, Buf RB
22 Stevan Ridley, NE RB
35 Larry Fitzgerald, Ari WR
50 Marques Colston, NO WR
63 Antonio Brown, Pit WR
78 Texans D/ST D/ST
91 Eli Manning, NYG QB
106 Daryl Richardson, StL RB
119 Jared Cook, StL TE
134 Patriots D/ST D/ST
147 Vincent Brown, SD WR
162 Rob Housler, Ari TE
175 Rob Bironas, Ten K
Pretty bad, right? I made a lot of assumptions that preseason--agreeing with most experts that Spiller was a 1st round-caliber player, trusting a highly ranked Texans defense, and taking risks on seemingly underrated players like Eli Manning, Daryl Richardson, and Vincent Brown, none of whom panned out. My draft made me look dumb.
Rather than gripe or quit, I set to work trying to improve my roster, one or two players at a time. Changes weren't going to come overnight. As you can see in the attached photo, it took seven trades and 51 pickup/drops--FIFTY-ONE!--to construct a championship roster. In hindsight, not sure what Matt Schaub was doing there.
Don't get me wrong: drafts impact results. But it's not as much as most people think. Through hard work and persistence, even bad teams can evolve into powerhouses.
As you can guess by this post's initial tone, such "wisdom" is actually ignorance, giving great drafters false confidence and bad drafters a misguided sense of hopelessness.
Last year I competed in two leagues, as I always do, because I like rooting for players on game days, rather than "kinda rooting" for one player on one of my teams, but "not too much" because an opponent has him in another league. In these two leagues, I won one and lost in the finals in the other. The one I lost was a 2-QB auction league where I successfully acquired underrated players during the draft: Stafford, Romo, Chris Johnson, Dez Bryant, Antonio Brown, Seattle D, etc. In one stretch I scored the most points in 7 out of 9 weeks. But an elite-level draft wasn't enough to overcome a tough opponent in the finals--an opponent who assembled the right players who thrived in the week that mattered most.
In the league I won, this was my round-by-round draft:
7 C.J. Spiller, Buf RB
22 Stevan Ridley, NE RB
35 Larry Fitzgerald, Ari WR
50 Marques Colston, NO WR
63 Antonio Brown, Pit WR
78 Texans D/ST D/ST
91 Eli Manning, NYG QB
106 Daryl Richardson, StL RB
119 Jared Cook, StL TE
134 Patriots D/ST D/ST
147 Vincent Brown, SD WR
162 Rob Housler, Ari TE
175 Rob Bironas, Ten K
Pretty bad, right? I made a lot of assumptions that preseason--agreeing with most experts that Spiller was a 1st round-caliber player, trusting a highly ranked Texans defense, and taking risks on seemingly underrated players like Eli Manning, Daryl Richardson, and Vincent Brown, none of whom panned out. My draft made me look dumb.
Rather than gripe or quit, I set to work trying to improve my roster, one or two players at a time. Changes weren't going to come overnight. As you can see in the attached photo, it took seven trades and 51 pickup/drops--FIFTY-ONE!--to construct a championship roster. In hindsight, not sure what Matt Schaub was doing there.
Don't get me wrong: drafts impact results. But it's not as much as most people think. Through hard work and persistence, even bad teams can evolve into powerhouses.