Consistency is Everything
I’m going to start out but dropping a bomb on you. No, I am not personally going to visit your home, ask you use the facilities and drop and upper decker on you. Rather, I’m going to give you a heavy dose of reality right off of the top here.
Your first round pick will not win you a championship this year.
Boom. There it is.
There is way too much made over first and even second round picks in fantasy football year after year. Yes, first round picks are important but not for the reasons you think. These first selections are probably not going to lead your team in points, make it through the entire season without an injury and heck, they could wind up not even starting for your team every week this season.
Yet, each and every season 90% of our phone calls on the Fantasy Alarm Show on SiriusXM Radio want to discuss who to take in the first round at varying pick levels and formats. Well what inevitably happens is these first round picks go bust in the early part of the year which leads to so many folks just thinking that their season is over and stop paying attention.
Let’s take a trip in the Fantasy Alarm time machine (yeah, we got a time machine…wanna fight about it?) back to 2014. In the middle of June we took part in the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA) Fantasy Football League Draft which is usually the first football draft of the year and the unofficial start of the fantasy football season. I was fortunate enough to draw the first pick in the draft that year. After doing all of my research and going through each and every NFL team I realized that Matt Forte of the Chicago Bears was the obvious choice for #1 overall. After all, just a few days before this draft I had decided that Forte would be our cover boy on the Fantasy Alarm Draft Guide for the same reasons that I would now be taking him with the first pick.
The FSTA Draft was held live in San Francisco in front of hundreds of industry people, broadcast live on SiriusXM radio and filmed for television by the Fantasy Sports Network. When I went to the mic and announced Matt Forte as the #1 overall selection you would have thought that Melania Trump and Michelle Obama just walked in wearing the exact same outfit. There were, and I am serious here folks, gasps from the people in the room and I got pretty much trashed by the hosts on radio and TV.
That Monday morning our own morning show on SiriusXM radio literally attacked my credibility on the air saying that I drafted Matt Forte as a publicity stunt. Hell, members of my own team, co-workers here at Fantasy Alarm challenged me to bets over whether Matt Forte or LeSean McCoy would score more points. I am 100% serious here folks. You would have thought that I had drafted Chad Ocho Cinco or something with the way everybody was up in arms.
I will say that I was completely stunned by this reaction. To me it was an obvious choice with the only other consideration at the time being Jamaal Charles. The reaction to the pick and the reasoning I heard for guys like McCoy, Adrian Peterson and Calvin Johnson were completely nuts in my opinion. I felt as though these other guys hadn’t done any research since leaving their trapper keepers at the end of the 2013 season. The argument that so and so did <blank> last year is an awful point in fantasy football. Everything changes in a year in the NFL. You cannot assume that anything that occurred the previous season means a damn thing the following year. Remember how I started off these strategy articles with the note about not chasing previous performances?
Anyways, obviously the Forte picked worked out quite well for us and there are a lot of people who will be careful next time they want to call out somebody who knows the game of football as well as anyone in fantasy sports. But I wasn’t taking Forte that year thinking he would have 100 catches or anything that was outside of his normal output in Marc Trestman’s offense. I took him because he was the safest, most sure thing at any position going into the 2014 season.
Was Matt Forte the highest scoring player in fantasy football last year? Nope.
Did we win the FSTA Fantasy Football League that season? Nope.
Was it in any way, shape or form Matt Forte’s fault? Absolutely not.
Think back to your own leagues last year. Which player(s) were the ones who led the way to victory for you or whoever won the league title? Let me guess: Antonio Brown? Todd Gurley? Cam Newton? Julio Jones? Whether they won it all or not I can safely assume that whoever had these players in 2014 did quite well for themselves that is for sure. So let’s look at the tape.
Devonta Freeman and Todd Gurley were easily the #1 & #2 RB’s in fantasy football last year. But neither was drafted in the first round in any draft. Gurley’s average draft position (ADP) in 2015 was 54.9 and Freeman’s was 99.1 according to the National Fantasy Football Championship (NFFC). Cam Newton had an ADP of 115.8 (10th round) and was a complete afterthought for many behind Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers. How about the second and third best fantasy TE’s last year in Gary Barnidge and Jordan Reed? Barnidge was not even drafted in most leagues and Reed had an ADP of 241.6 which put him in the 18th round of a 14 team league! These guys were complete afterthoughts heading into the 2015 season.
What players like Freeman, Gurley, Cam Newton and Gary Barnidge did last year was fantastic but not uncommon in fantasy football. Year after year there are players that are mid to late round selection that breakout and lead our fantasy teams to championships. It is these late round picks that are the real keys to the draft and not you’re first and second round selections.
Am I telling you that your first round pick doesn’t matter? No, seriously…I want you to answer this question before I go on. Because if you think that is what I am saying, I would like to punch you right in the swimsuit area because you are not understanding what I am actually saying.
Of course your first and all of your early round picks matter. They are important but not for the reasons most people think. You don’t have to select the player that will score the most points with your first round pick. In fact, the last time a consensus first round pick wound up being the overall scoring leader in fantasy football was 2006 when perhaps the greatest fantasy football player ever in LaDanian Tomlinson achieved the feat. What you need to do is change your thought process for your first round and even your top three round selections.
The keys to winning in fantasy football are identifying breakout players late in your draft and building your team around the most consistent performers you can acquire. Overall points are wonderful but the fact of the matter is most of us play in head to head formats with little to no reward for scoring a ton of overall points. What we need to do to win is post consistently good scores week after week. Over the course of the season this will win us a lot of games, give us advantages like first round byes and tiebreakers and help pave the road to the league title.
Think of it this way. Aren’t the passing games of teams like the Packers, Broncos and Jets much more dangerous than that of the Falcons, Bills and Bears? Well every single unit of measurement would say so and thus it is correct. That is because they have multiple weapons at their disposal. As good as Julio Jones, Sammy Watkins and Alshon Jeffery are, they are not as potent as the combos of the other teams.
In baseball, Mike Trout is the consensus best player in the game. Yet, his team (the Angels) never win anything. In fact, they are in last place in their division right now. That is because the rest of the team and specifically the lineup stinks. Compare that to a team like the Giants who don’t have a superstar in their entire lineup. Yet, they produce at a much higher level because each player in their lineup is a difficult out. They can win so many different ways that they don’t need a big game from one or two stars each time out. That is how your fantasy football team should be built. That is what champions are made out of.