I was on Twitter the other day, and a very interesting
conversation caught my eye and fascinated me. It was between two very respected
Fantasy Football “experts” (for lack of a better word), and the topic was rankings.
It was an extremely detailed debate, but in the interest of space and time, I
will attempt to simplify it without losing much of the focus.
The one
guy’s place was that preseason rankings serve only to mislead people, and
had very little value at all, except to the people profiting from making them.
The gist of his argument was that at this point in the season, every ranking is
fairly arbitrary, and could even be misleading to the public; (unless it's #TheWhiteBoard) that at
this point some of the teams didn’t even have a clue about how their rosters
and schemes were going to fit, and that we in the fantasy football world
shouldn’t even begin to guess until well into camp and some of the cuts have
been made. The other place was that even though it is far from perfect, it
is a place to start making decisions. That for lack of a better system, it is
the best we have. Placing SOME value on
players is better than not doing anything. Both sides made very well assumptions,
and valid points.
So,
which one is right? Or is it somewhere in the middle? I guess, from my point of
view, it is somewhere in the middle. Even though you can look at ten different
sites and have ten totally different sets
of rankings, while the tiers are fairly close. I think this closely mirrors
the philosophy of Fantasy Football 1 on 1 and THE FANTASY TYPHOON. If you
take the simple and lazy route of just cramming the analyst’s values and
averaging them, chances are you will have an average team. Winning and
dominating your league requires hard work, and lots of it. You can glean
information, and pick the brains of the experts, but you still have to put the
work into research and coming to your own conclusions. After all, it is YOUR
team, not the analyst’s team. As is true for most things in life, you get out
of something what you put into it. So, don’t be the lazy owner with an average
team. Put the hard work in, and don't just win, DOMINATE!!
By - Tim Wutz
