Assorted Notes
I posted my round by round draft targets yesterday, but have a few more thoughts that didn’t make it into that piece:
I’m warming up to Bijan Robinson with a top-three pick. This interview with Kay Adams (even though it’s just the usual talk) got my attention. Robinson is so relaxed, so even-keeled and yet he’s studying Christian McCaffrey’s every carry like a fanatic. Not that it’s going out on a thin limb as he routinely goes that early, but I had previously been wedded to taking a receiver (now that McCaffrey already has a calf injury.)
I said to Alan Seslowsky that Mike Williams was on my do-not-draft list because he’s so injury prone, but I double-checked and he hasn’t been that bad other than last year. Maybe I had him the year he did a lot early and then fell off steeply despite not missing many games. Maybe he was on the injury report a lot. I don’t know. But he’s actually not a bad value in Round 11 — he’s always been good when healthy, and the Jets are not deep.
I said yesterday I don’t have a strong preference in the first round, and the Robinson note aside, that’s still mostly true. I like all the receivers, and I’m fine with Breece Hall and Jonathan Taylor too. Of course, that doesn’t mean all of them will be fine — at least a couple almost surely will not — only that I can’t tell which ones. As important as it is to know your leans and act on them, it’s equally important to realize when you don’t have one and let ADP and positional need dictate your options.
I took Anthony Richardson in Beat Chris Liss 2, and while I don’t regret it as he really could be the QB1, I think the play in the Primetime will be to wait forever on QB and get some combo of Trevor Lawrence/Kurt Cousins/Justin Herbert/Matthew Stafford/Justin Fields, or even Daniel Jones. There’s just so much depth with upside. You could even take three QBs late.
The “hero” RB build (where you take a star RB in Rounds 1 or 2) and lots of receivers around them, before getting your RB2 candidates later is popular now, and you can see why. There aren’t that many top backs, so getting one is a big edge, and then you still catch up at receiver against all the teams that took a TE or top QB early. I just think this is mostly an on-paper exercise, and by mid-season the best teams usually have 4-5 surviving good players at all positions combined and have to cobble it to together with short-term fill-ins and waiver wire, i.e., build is overrated.
Both my drafts so far were from early (1 and 3), and I wouldn’t mind having one league from the back, getting Jonathan Taylor and say Puka Nacua. It would be cool to get Cooper Kupp in Round 3 too, but lately he’s moved up out of that range.
I stacked C.J. Stroud and Stefon Diggs in BCL1, but didn’t stack anyone in BCL2. Stacking is one of those things that’s great if no one else is doing it, but loses value the more it’s done. If you have Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes, but so do 25 percent of the Mahomes’ owners, is that really better than having Anthony Richardson and a random TE1 (in my case Brock Bowers). Sure there’s no correlation, but only 1 in 12 Richardson teams should be expected to have Bowers (even fewer if the Colts had a good TE as many would have paired them.) So yes, if Mahomes goes off, there’s a better chance he takes Kelce with him, but you still have to beat out 3x more teams with your same set up than I do if Richardson goes off, and Bowers happens to as well. Sure, the correlation makes your scenario more likely, but likely enough to compensate for its commonality?