Yesterday a Top 400 Fantasy Rankings subscriber asked me if I update the spreadsheet on a daily basis. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that my rankings have been more consistent this summer than at any time since launching it in 2016. Two reasons -- one based on reality, and the other based on my not-so-humble take on reality.
First, there hasn't been a lot of major news this preseason. Sure, there've been hamstring pulls and suspensions and big-name holdouts / trade discussions. Some interesting depth chart battles. The occasional arm soreness and delayed offseason injury recoveries. But on the whole, this has been a quiet summer, which translates into more fixed values. While I've made the usual amount of tweaks, there haven't been many dramatic shifts.
The other reason (and I apologize that this is laced with more swagger than you'll normally find on this page) is that the rankings I released to early subscribers in July included assumptions about August, like placing Gardner Minshew comfortably ahead of Aidan O'Connell, despite the latter having a better ADP. Or keeping Jerome Ford narrowly below Nick Chubb, despite the latter's far better ADP. Or remaining seemingly outlandishly bullish about Brandon Aiyuk when a trade to a lesser offense looked inevitable, in the belief the Super-Bowl-aspiring Niners would, in the end, keep him. (We'll see if that happens, but it's more likely now than ever.)
The point is that rankings as a whole are commoditized. Whether you're a casual manager or a high-stakes competitor -- or if you have your own blog and happen to like hanging out here, too -- one of the keys to effective rankings is to *not* make a lot of changes . . . not because we're out to lunch, but because of the work we put in at the outset.
I'm not always successful. Was way too confident early on about Daniel Jones, Kendre Miller, and (quite possibly) Jalen Tolbert, to name a few guys I once thought were draft steals. Maybe one or more breaks through. But I've thrown in the towel on Jones and Miller and am more realistic about Tolbert's boom-bust outlook.
There is a science to this, and like any research-and-analysis approach, there's plenty of disappointment. But if there aren't many major injuries or demotions or suspensions, etc., then our rankings *should* be fairly static if we're doing it right.
Another example is Trevor Lawrence. He looked great last night. His ADP probably will tick upward as a result. His ADP has been at or around QB16 for months. That's where it is as of last night, with an overall-127 ADP. I'm betting he'll climb to QB15 / overall-119 by next Saturday.
As subscribers know, he's been inside my top 10 QBs and inside my top overall-70 all summer. In recent weeks he'll settled in at QB8 / overall-55. It seems ludicrous. But ADPs shouldn't matter to any of us, except when calculating how our opponents might draft. In 12-team leagues, Lawrence is coming off the board in the 11th round on average. I believe he'll climb into the 10th round within the week, and he's ranked on my board as a fifth rounder. So barring a huge and unexpected run on quarterbacks, I can pretty safely wait until roughly the eighth round to snag him.
Subscribers have understood this since early July. I'm not moving Lawrence all over the board depending on whatever random news report hits. I think he's going to have his best season ever. Unless he or one of his top receivers gets hurt, he's going to remain my QB8 / overall-55 (approximately) draft steal. The work that led me to that conclusion happened in the offseason. Everything else is simply observing shifting depth charts, tracking player health, and checking off the various outliers (suspensions, holdouts, etc.) that might or might not (or actually did) happen.
There are probably many ways to de-commoditize fantasy rankings. That's my approach. So if you see a ton of changes without external explanations (e.g. news updates), then something's gone wrong. the initial research wasn't good enough. And if you see a lot of stability, then hopefully it means the research was sound.
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