Entry #2 of 3 for The Fake Football's Writing Contest

{Current Mood: Ubiquitous}

Pond People,

Only four days remain until the second of my three entries into The Fake Football's writing contest is due. But, with the weekend approaching, I decided to not take any chances and submit my piece early.

The topic for round two is "Who is your top player to avoid in 2013 and why?" I decided to go in a direction that even I wasn't expecting myself to go in. Here is my submitted piece in blue text. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, enjoyz: 

The Face of Fantasy Football and Why You Shouldn’t Draft Him

So did you know that there’s such a thing as fantasy wrestling? As an independent professional wrestler, this pleases me. It also has a place in this article, I promise.

As the former #1 overall ranked fantasy wrestling player over at Real Fantasy Wrestling, I feel I’m as good a candidate as any to be able to accurately compare pro football players to pro wrestlers as it relates to their fake sports value.

For instance, I’ve decided that the Adrian Peterson of fantasy wrestling is a guy named Daniel Bryan. Bryan was a world-renowned wrestler even before coming to the WWE and is currently performing at a level akin to Purple Jesus last season, which has resulted in a boatload of fantasy wrestling points for me.

Daniel Bryan is also a vegan, which would make him the Vegan Jesus. This validates the comparison.

One thing fantasy wrestling and fantasy football have in common is that they both favor what their respective sports call “workhorses.” John Cena may be the face of the WWE, and a workhorse in his own right, but the fantasy game doesn’t favor his style of wrestling and doesn’t make him as good of a fantasy option as someone with more technical wrestling and striking ability, like Daniel Bryan, on most nights.

You can make a very strong argument for Aaron Rodgers as the proverbial face of fantasy football over guys like Drew Brees and Tom Brady due to the fact that Rodgers is usually inevitably the first quarterback taken in drafts, but that doesn’t make him as good of a fantasy option as Adrian Peterson or any workhorse running back for that matter.

Yet year after year people value Rodgers as such. These people will justify passing up the rarest and most valuable of all fantasy players, the true workhorse running back, to draft a player at a position most leagues only start one of. And they’ll draft him at a price that costs you depth at the positions where you’ll wind up needing it most.

Don’t make that mistake with Rodgers.

To be clear, I don’t think Rodgers will be a bust. Hell, I’m a big fan of his at it relates to both real and fake football. I’m a tad bit partial to him because I drafted him in the ninth round of my big money keeper league in 2008 to back up David Garrard who I had drafted two rounds earlier. 

Many people have subscribed to the theory that drafting your quarterback late is the way to go. Whether or not you’re one of these people, Aaron Rodgers is the top player you should avoid drafting in 2013 unless he somehow miraculously falls into the fourth or fifth round. Based on recent history, the odds of this happening are about the same as the odds of you pooping out a $1,000 bill unless you have a scoring system that renders quarterbacks practically worthless.

In the 2013 edition of his book, “The Late Round Quarterback,” JJ Zachariason writes: “Historically, top quarterbacks (top being the key word) don’t outscore the rest of their position by very many points. And as a result, their point values do diminish more linearly – or consistently – from one rank to the next.”

To help you visualize this information, I used my limited technological skills to create a chart with numbers that I pulled from the 2013 edition of “The Late Round Quarterback.” In the book, JJ took the average point totals for each positional rank, from the best to the worst starters in a standard 12-team league, from 2008 through 2012 and found the difference in point value as you moved from one rank to the next.

The numbers I pulled from his book only cover the best to worst starters at quarterback and running back since the argument I’m trying to make is that you should draft a top flight runner over a top flight passer (note: please bear with me and my technological illiteracy in case my attempt to bring the chart from Word to Blogger fails miserably): 

The first thing you need to take away from this chart is the huge point differential between the best and worst starters at the quarterback and running back positions, which is mainly a result of starting two runners as opposed to one passer. I also noted the difference between the best and worst possible RB1s, which is almost the same number as the difference between the best and worst starting QBs.

The argument made by these numbers is that top flight quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers, who you will only realistically be able to draft by sacrificing the chance to take a top flight running back, aren’t comparatively that much stronger than the middle-tier guys you can get much later in your draft.

And while the decline in points from one running back to the next becomes more steady and linear the further down the list you go, consider that the top 24 runners are usually all gone by about the fourth round of most drafts and the top 12 runners are usually gone by the middle of round two while the top 12 passers aren’t all off the board until somewhere around rounds eight or nine.  

You can see the variance here but JJ notes in the book that “you need to understand where the variance occurs. Once you figure that out, you can target players who are part of the more elite groupings within their position.”

And for those who want to make the argument that guys like Rodgers are more consistent than top flight running backs, I invite you to go to profootballfocus.com and search for the article that JJ wrote titled “Aaron Rodgers: Mr. Inconsistency.” In this piece, he compares the 2012 fantasy seasons of Aaron Rodgers and LeSean McCoy and looks at how they performed on a weekly basis. He notes that “McCoy played in 12 games in 2012, and the lowest rank he obtained in a given week at running back was 25. That’d be like ranking as the 12th- or 13th-best quarterback in a given week: something Aaron Rodgers failed to do in 7 of his 16 games.”

This despite the fact that Rodgers finished last season as the third ranked fake football quarterback.

Rodgers made up for the discrepancy by making sure he made his nine “startable” performances count. He ranked in the top three in a given week five times, although one of these instances occurred in Week 17 when most normal leagues are already done, while Shady only ranked in the top six once. It doesn’t change the fact that Shady wound up being a reliable and “startable” option more consistently than Rodgers. 

Speaking of running backs, Green Bay did draft two of the more highly touted runners from this year’s draft class in Eddie Lacy and Johnathan Franklin. This, more than anything else, should be a fairly obvious sign that the Packers plan on running the ball more than they have in recent years. And if someone like Lacy steals goal line carries and potential rushing scores from Rodgers, it robs him of the biggest quality that sets him apart from guys like Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Peyton Manning.

This isn’t an Aaron Rodgers hate piece and, again, I don’t think he’s going to be a bust. I’ve learned over the years that you don’t bet against greatness and Aaron Rodgers fits that bill quite nicely. But if you take him as early as you would need to do so to make sure nobody else does, you’re not only sacrificing the rare treasure of a workhorse running back, you’re also potentially sacrificing a more consistent option. That’s not the kind of uncertainty I need in my life from a player I pick that early in my drafts.

Maybe I’m just spoiled because I drafted Rodgers in the ninth round in his breakout year. But the risk was nonexistent at the time since it was so late in the draft and I took him as my backup. To me, the risk isn’t worth it when there are workhorse running backs on the board.

Let someone else take Aaron Rodgers and risk compromising depth at the more important fake football positions, or else Daniel Bryan will find you and kick your head off of your face. That would be a bad time.

No Tebow mentions this time around, but I can live with that. Once again, I'll keep the general populous posted as to how I wind up doing in this contest. Let's hope this article sparks a little debate and makes a little noise. And let me know what you think of it. 

Before we leave each other, I have one more picture to share. I almost used this one as the title picture.

KThanksBye

-Ray Ray Marz-