It was minutes before we started taping this year's Fantasy Football Preview Show when ex-NFL QB Steve Beuerlein looked at me and said, "If Fantasy Football's all about stats, then how come quarterbacks aren't at the top of draft boards?"
The answer was easy: Running backs who can run the ball and catch the ball and score often accumulate more points than quarterbacks, and most Fantasy leagues require at least two starting running backs versus one quarterback, so it's just a matter of supply and demand.
But between NFL clubs starting to rely on RB tandems and the league by and large leaning on throwing more than running (or at least being more effective throwing the ball), I think 2008 Fantasy drafts will start to echo what Beuerlein was saying, and they might look like this:
1. Tom Brady, QB, New England 2. Peyton Manning, QB, Indianapolis 3. LaDainian Tomlinson, RB, San Diego 4. Tony Romo, QB, Dallas 5. Joseph Addai, RB, Indianapolis 6. Randy Moss, WR, New England 7. Carson Palmer, QB, Cincinnati 8. Larry Johnson, RB, Kansas City 9. Adrian Peterson, RB, Minnesota 10. Terrell Owens, WR, Dallas
Now there's a lot of time between now and summer 2008, and things can always change, but we're most likely headed towards a new day in Fantasy Football.
Now this got me thinking:
#1, why is he bothering to do this before the season is not even half over? It's a futile exercise now because we'll have an entire offseason for this kind of stuff with a full season's worth of stats to examine.
Even though he seemingly understands and acknowledges the concepts behind supply and demand of running backs, he ignores them. With the proper league settings, if you select Tom Brady at QB in the first round you're still not going to win every week if you have garbage RBs.
He assumes that all of these elite QBs and WRs are going to maintain their stats through the rest of the season. How about in November and December when the weather gets really nasty and teams have no choice but to run the ball? What's going to happen when New England has little recourse but to establish a healthy running game, something they've so far been unable to do?
The Lung wrote:What's going to happen when New England has little recourse but to establish a healthy running game, something they've so far been unable to do?
Unable, or unwilling? I think the latter.
But other than that, I agree with you. Maybe his team is doing poorly, so he is trying to get a jump on all the offseason fun.
yea, the brady owners in two of my leagues are sub .500.
that said IF Brady keeps this up AND he could repeat, then he has to go first round. If you play 6 points per passing TD, and he gets 10 more than everyone else, that is basically making up for the RB Tds you would miss out on.
Lot of ifs though. 4 Qbs in the first round is inexcusable. Well I guess it would work if the whole league did it, because then you could get the same backs later, but that wouldn't happen, and its a disservice to list it like that.
The opening scene of the movie "Saving Private Ryan" is loosely based on games of dodgeball Brian Dawkins played in second grade.
eaglesrule wrote:yea, the brady owners in two of my leagues are sub .500.
that said IF Brady keeps this up AND he could repeat, then he has to go first round. If you play 6 points per passing TD, and he gets 10 more than everyone else, that is basically making up for the RB Tds you would miss out on.
Like I said, if you've got proper league settings that don't ridiculously favor QBs, then QBs still shouldn't go first round. If you only award 4 points per passing and 1 point per 25 or 30 yards passing, and give running backs 1 point per 10 yards rushing and 6 points per TD, then it's balanced. With balanced settings, even if Brady throws 50+ TDs this year, he still shouldn't go first round next year.
eaglesrule wrote:yea, the brady owners in two of my leagues are sub .500.
that said IF Brady keeps this up AND he could repeat, then he has to go first round. If you play 6 points per passing TD, and he gets 10 more than everyone else, that is basically making up for the RB Tds you would miss out on.
Like I said, if you've got proper league settings that don't ridiculously favor QBs, then QBs still shouldn't go first round. If you only award 4 points per passing and 1 point per 25 or 30 yards passing, and give running backs 1 point per 10 yards rushing and 6 points per TD, then it's balanced. With balanced settings, even if Brady throws 50+ TDs this year, he still shouldn't go first round next year.
there have always been arguments that peyton could be a late 1st rounder (10th-12th pick?), now the same will probably be said for brady........
Thanks to deluxe_247 for sig, he is welcome to sail with the Captain too! I will win all of the fantasy cafe games.....next year
The Lung wrote: He assumes that all of these elite QBs and WRs are going to maintain their stats through the rest of the season. How about in November and December when the weather gets really nasty and teams have no choice but to run the ball?
I think there is an argument developing, though, for not going RB, RB in the first 2 rounds. I know next year I'll think long and hard about going RB, QB (as somebody who's been stuck with the "emerging" QB duo of Vince Young and Cutler all year)
Personally, I think the days of automatically going RB, RB were over last year. I see his point about the proliferation of RBBCs devaluing most of the RBs, but that doesn't mean QBs should be first rounders, because lots of RBBC situations actually increase the value of the RBs that aren't in a RBBC, so it makes the first-round RB more valuable, not less.
What it means is that more QBs should fall into the second round than before. As it sits now, conventional wisdom is that there have only been a couple QBs worth taking in rounds one and two - Peyton and Carson Palmer. Now Brady's name is in there, and maybe Romo and Derek Anderson (just kidding with Anderson ). And if more teams are relying on the passing game, then you should probably have a mixture of the #1 WRs of those QBs and the normal stud WRs (Holt, Fitz, SSmith) being taken in the second round as well, so now you're talking about 5 QBs and 5 WRs being legitimately valued in the second round, so that only leaves room for 14 RBs in the first two rounds of a 12-teamer. Now I'm not saying that's how it's going to shake out because there are still going to be a ton of people saying to go RB, RB because that's what you always do.
If the above scenario does play out, then good fantasy owners will be making their hay in the sunshine of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th rounds, since that's when you will be targetting the RBs that could outperform expectations or get out of their RBBC situations by eclipsing the other guy. It will also lend a lot of flexibility because each owner will have different ideas about how to build around their first-round RB.
But whatever, this whole discussion is an academic exercise for the people who got Stephen Jackson, Ronnie Brown, Donovan McNabb, and Marques Colston in the first 4 rounds of their draft...
eaglesrule wrote:yea, the brady owners in two of my leagues are sub .500.
that said IF Brady keeps this up AND he could repeat, then he has to go first round. If you play 6 points per passing TD, and he gets 10 more than everyone else, that is basically making up for the RB Tds you would miss out on.
Like I said, if you've got proper league settings that don't ridiculously favor QBs, then QBs still shouldn't go first round. If you only award 4 points per passing and 1 point per 25 or 30 yards passing, and give running backs 1 point per 10 yards rushing and 6 points per TD, then it's balanced. With balanced settings, even if Brady throws 50+ TDs this year, he still shouldn't go first round next year.
The scoring system you show there ridiculously overvalues running backs, though.
You and I have had this conversation before, so I'll keep it brief, but I personally feel that the most important position in the game of football is the quarterback. By artificially devaluing a quarterback in fantasy (4 points per TD, for example), you're skewing your league away from what the "real" game is all about.
If you and your league think that's cool, that's cool with me too. But my league doesn't do that to QBs. We give 6 points per TD no matter who scores it, end of story. A TD is a TD is a TD.
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Maybe his team is doing poorly, so he is trying to get a jump on all the offseason fun. 
). And if more teams are relying on the passing game, then you should probably have a mixture of the #1 WRs of those QBs and the normal stud WRs (Holt, Fitz, SSmith) being taken in the second round as well, so now you're talking about 5 QBs and 5 WRs being legitimately valued in the second round, so that only leaves room for 14 RBs in the first two rounds of a 12-teamer. Now I'm not saying that's how it's going to shake out because there are still going to be a ton of people saying to go RB, RB because that's what you always do. 
