Clyde Edwards-Helaire's stock keeps rising and falling. First he's drafted to complete with incumbent starter Damien Williams. Then he catapults into top-14 RB conversations with Williams bows out of the season. Then CEH somehow climbs into the top 4-6 of some draft boards. Then he produces more like a back-end RB1. Then KC signs Le'Veon Bell, and the ensuing buzz suggests CEH won't be a must-start option after Week 6. Then he dominates Week 6, and the new buzz is, "Bell might not play as much as we thought."
CEH's rise and (small) fall and rise again (for now) makes me think "player values" alone are not sufficient. A value is only useful when all conditions remain the same.
So what if we lined up the top 200 players on a grid and assigned each two numbers from 1 to 10. The first number would be "Production." So Russell Wilson might earn a 10 in this category, while Kenyan Drake might get, say, a 7. Maybe there are universal markers, like an 8 or above constitutes "must-start" and a 6 or above means "must-roster." There are no absolutes here; they're simply guideposts.
The second number would be "Stability." So Wilson might be a 10 because he's not injury prone, is at no risk of getting demoted, and has enough talent around him to ensure he remains relevant even if a starting receiver goes down. Drake, meanwhile, might rate at a 5 (and might have been at a 3 or 4 before last night's productive outing).
By multiplying the two numbers together, we get a value score. It's not enough to say, for example, Adrian Peterson is an RB3/4, making him roughly a 5 on Production. We also need to factor increasing competition from rookie D'Andre Swift, and the fact that AP's averaging only 3.1 YPC in his last three contests and is entirely TD dependent given his limited passing-game usage. Numbers alone don't tell the story. AP is a very "unstable" RB3/4, so let's say a 3. That means his total value is 5 x 3, or 15.
So there are two ways to buy low or sell high. First, you can wait for an opponent's player to have a bad game, or for your guy to have a surprisingly good game. Second, you could wait for news that makes an opponent's player's value less stable, or one of your players' values more stable.
Maybe some of you do this already, very deliberately. Or maybe many of us do it subconsciously. I think it would be interesting to plot values on a grid, take a step back, and try to find patterns. I imagine one obvious pattern is that RBs are the least stable position. And that's why I rarely trade for RBs: I'm being asked to pay for their production, without factoring the risk of the volatility of their position.