PRE-SEASON RANKINGS: DO THEY HAVE ANY VALUE?

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

 

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