RFW Draft Results/Analysis for Week of 7/29/13

{Current Mood: Snazzy}

Hi,

So this is going to be an interesting week for RFW draft recaps and game analysis being that everything was pre-taped. Still, I’m here to drop some know off that ledge (see what I did there?) and try to inform you all as to the latest happenings in the world of Phantasio Wrestling (see what I did THERE?)

When we last left our heroes, Goatface Killa and Weed the People, GFK was staring helplessly at a 92.55 point deficit as it turned into a 120.5 point weekly game loss to WTP. A 103.35 to 75.4 loss on the blue show gave me my second weekly game loss to The Joan in as many weeks.

With the defeat, I received the first pick in this week’s Smackdown draft with WTP getting the #1 pick in our nightly draft. At least we both lost our respective games by over 100 points.

And with this week’s shows being pre-taped, the RFW guys decided to turn all the weekly games into Smackdown-specific games. This definitely caused us to draft our teams more strategically because our head to head game is a Smackdown-specific one. Only the freerolls with a maximum of 10 to 20 entrants were weekly freerolls. Everything else was Smackdown only.

MORE RECAPPING GOODNESS

Main Weekly Lineup (7/22/13 to 7/26/13): Daniel Bryan, Randy Orton, Alberto Del Rio, Curtis Axel, RVD, AJ Lee, Kaitlyn, Weekly Referee, Vickie Guerrero, Brad Maddox. Total Points: 253.85

Not a terrible lineup and not strong enough to defeat The Joan as she took the Reedy Show Weekly Freeroll with a total score of 260.5. Ken Reedy himself finished in third with 250.45.

This lineup also got me a second place finish in an eight-person freeroll that was won by current #1 ranked RFW player (as of this writing) TheGame316 and his 264.1 total points as well as a seventh-place finish in a 17-person freeroll that saw a winning score of 319.15. These things tend to happen when you have the guys who put up the highest (Bryan), second highest (Damien Sandow), and fourth highest (Orton) single night point totals of the week (unless The Ryback scored higher, which we’ll never know because he wasn’t on any teams that I logged for this particular week). Well done.

By the way, it’s likely going to be a while before Sandow comes anywhere close to the 50.65 point outburst he gave us on the blue show. His 12 talk points, seven additional TV points, and 10 points for opening and closing the show represented over half of his point total. His 10.4 total strike points and four power move points were promising though.

He seems like one of those guys who is a good play when you know he’s going to have a solid match. The trouble with picking these nightly and weekly games is that, for the most part, you never really know when that’s going to happen. Again I say it, proceed with caution. His match with Orton does give me hope that his moveset will be conducive to decent fantasy point totals if/when he either wins a world title or begins wrestling on television more consistently.

I tried to change things up a bit this week and roll with both GM’s in my flex spots to see what that would do for me. One got me 15 points, the other got me six. Not exactly what I was looking for but I guess I could’ve done worse.

And I guess I looked a little too much into Curtis Axel’s successful Intercontinental title defense against Chris Jericho on last week’s blue show as I put him in all of my main weekly and nightly lineups.

So I would like to note that The Joan and I drafted our teams for both our nightly and weekly games without any prior knowledge of what was going to happen this week on WWE programming. Figured it would make the drafts more interesting and we were definitely correct about that.

And now… WE DRAFT!

RAW DRAFT

Joan (1st pick)

1) Daniel Bryan (#1 pick) (36.95 points)

2) The Ryback (20.6)

3) Christian (20.2)

4) Alberto Del Rio (30.5)

5) Paul Heyman (9)

6) Brie Bella (12.4)

7) Justin Roberts (6)

8) Jerry Lawler (7)

9) Fandango (7.7)

10) Cameron (0)

Total: 150.35 points

Ray

1) Randy Orton (#2 pick) (0 points. Joy)

2) RVD (17.9)

3) John Cena (31.6)

4) Brad Maddox (9)

5) Kane (28.35)

6) Sheamus (0. Ouch)

7) Stephanie McMahon (4)

8) Dean Ambrose (21.4)

9) Eva Marie (0. That’s three g00se eggs if you’re keeping track at home)

10) AJ Lee (12)

Total: 124.25 points

Analysis: I’ll give her a kudos (but just one) for defeating me in this head to head battle. She picked a nice team but I did what I could to help out by drafting three people who didn’t get me a single point. She didn’t draft a zero-point scorer until the final round.

And after a week of settling for being picked #2, the Adrian Peterson of fantasy wrestling has returned to #1 pick status. His 87.2 point night on last week’s red show probably had a little bit to do with this.

I find it funny how nobody has rostered The Ryback since MITB when he scored 24.5 points in a win against Chris Jericho. He main events Raw in a tables match against John Cena, which is eight points right there plus the two talk points he obtained, and only scores 20.6. I find this slightly disappointing. His price may have dropped a bit but he’s still not producing a number of points that I’d feel comfortable dropping money on him for. Even with all the peripheral stats.    

By contrast, RVD is still less expensive even though his price tag finally cracked $10,000, wrestled a much shorter match than The Ryback did, didn’t get any peripheral stats, and still finished with 17.9. I haven’t decided yet whether this says more good about RVD or more bad about The Ryback as it relates to RFW.

Thankfully The Joan drafted The Ryback when she did because it reminded me that he was facing Cena in a tables match and that it would likely be the main event. And any time I know Cena is wrestling, I do what I can to get him into my lineups because he always finds a way to give you a good amount of points.

Can’t say I was happy to get Justin Roberts swiped from me in our seventh round because it almost made me unable to fill out the rest of my roster the way I was hoping to. Thankfully Stephanie McMahon was inexpensive and likely to appear on TV so I took the risk there. I only lost out on two points so again, it could’ve been worse.

By the way, if WWE programming is pre-taped, I would highly advise against playing any commentators because they won’t be seen on camera enough times to get you the TV and talk points needed to live up to their hefty price tags.

Before we move on, we need to pour one out for Kaitlyn being that this was the first time she went undrafted. Pour one out figuratively, I mean. Because usually, when you say that, you’re talking about beer (mmm, beer) and I don’t advocate wasting beer under any reasonable circumstance.

My Main Lineup: Bryan, Cena, Ryback, Del Rio, Christian, Kane, AJ, Brie, Roberts, Vince McMahon. Total Points: 207.6

REJOICE! My nearly one-month drought of Reedy Show nightly freeroll wins has come to an end! I went very top heavy with this lineup and it payed off with a first place finish. This lineup actually netted me first place finishes in all the games I entered it in.

I think the point that this unique week of RFW action drove home is that you don’t necessarily need to know who’s going to win matches in order to maximize your score. What you need is a knowledge of how to find and maximize value in your lineups, a knowledge of the movesets of the players you want to rely on and if/how they can translate to high fantasy point totals, and just a basic understanding of the way professional wrestling works, especially professional wrestling for live and/or pre-taped television.

Picking the guys who have the commercial break matches also helps. You never really know who that’s going to be but, from analyzing certain trends and point outputs, I can sometimes get a pretty good idea.

SMACKDOWN DRAFT

Ray (1st pick)

1) Daniel Bryan (#1 pick)

2) Randy Orton

3) Christian

4) Weekly Ref

5) AJ Lee

6) Lilian Garcia

7) Zeb Coulter

8) Kaitlyn

9) Jack Swagger

10) Fandango

Joan

1) RVD (#2 pick)

2) Alberto Del Rio

3) Damien Sandow

4) Vickie Guerrero

5) Antonio Cesaro

6) Cody Rhodes

7) Naomi

8) Eva Marie

9) Dean Ambrose

10) Kane

Analysis: Since these results won’t be tallied until the blue show airs this Friday night, I might as well talk about the draft.

An unusually high third round pick was used by The Joan on Sandow which I find very interesting. I then decided to be a dunce and spend almost $12,000 to draft the Weekly Referee not remembering that this was a Smackdown draft and not a weekly draft.

The Raw Ref got 15 points which at least gives me hope for a double digit total from the Weekly Ref, but I’m quite upset that I had to drop as much money as I did for those points. If I wind up getting swept by The Joan this week, this will go a long way towards that.

I wanted to atone for that mistake by grabbing Lilian Garcia on the cheap and then hope that WTP would let Cody Rhodes fall one more round to me. You can see how that one turned out. So I had to settle for Zeb as a consolation prize which, in turn, convinced me to draft Swagger because she had already drafted Cesaro and I wanted to hedge my bets.

My final pick was either going to be Ziggler or Fandango. My gut kept telling me Ziggler but I couldn’t shake the fact that Fandango just recently put up 20.4 points against Randy Orton. Plus, I feel like I know what I’m going to get points-wise from Ziggler so I took a chance.

And just like we poured one out for Kaitlyn earlier, we need to pour one out for Paul Heyman whose streak of being drafted 15 straight times came to an end.

My Main WEEKLY Lineup: Bryan, Orton, RVD, Cody, Christian, AJ, Kaitlyn, Weekly Ref, Roberts, Lilian. Total Points after Raw: 139.85

This week I’m reverting back to my Weekly Ref/ring announcers strategy to fill my flex spots and hoping it pays off. Everything else is your standard mix of value, high scorers, and high upside.

I’m currently in fourth place in the Reedy Show weekly freeroll behind Mr. Trivia, Michele, and Kenjamin Reedy and right in front of The Joan. This lineup was entered into two other weekly freerolls and, after Monday night, has me currently sitting in sixth place in a ten-person game and also in fourth place in a five-person game.

ADP UPDATE

Without any more of this ado nonsense, an updated list of the top 20 RFW competitors by draft position:

1.1)  Daniel Bryan

1.2)  Randy Orton

2.1) RVD

2.2) Alberto Del Rio

1.3) Ryback (+9)

2.3) Christian

1.4) Weekly Ref (-2)

2.4) Curtis Axel (-1)

1.5) Chris Jericho

2.5) Roman Reigns

1.6) Seth Rollins (+1)

2.6) Paul Heyman (+3)

1.7) John Cena (+6)

2.7) Dean Ambrose (-3)

1.8) Kane (-7)

2.8) AJ Lee

1.9) CM Punk

2.9) Brad Maddox

1.10) Bray Wyatt (+1)

2.10) Vickie Guerrero (+1)

The Joan’s drafting of The Ryback at #3 overall for our nightly draft shot him WAY up the board. I’m not good enough at math to be able to figure out how to accurately weigh this sort of information out in order to prevent a lot of this data from being skewed being that he’s only been drafted two out of a possible 16 times. But I do know that both times one of us has drafted The Ryback, it’s been early enough to ensure his place in the top five of this list.

Of course, this basic ADP list also doesn’t account for the fact that you need a non-wrestler and two female wrestlers on your roster. It’s just a broad look at how we’ve been valuing certain people during our drafts. The way I’ve put this together though will definitely cause some huge ranking swings.

For instance, Kane was drafted twice this week and dropped seven spots on this list. Doesn’t seem to make much sense until you see he was drafted tenth and last which attributed to the fall. On the other end of the spectrum, my drafting of John Cena at sixth overall shot him six spots up this list even though he had only previously been drafted twice.

These are the faults with doing the list in this fashion. You also have to consider that this is an extremely small sample size. Once live drafting becomes an RFW feature, we’ll have significantly more data to go off of.

People drafted 16 times out of 16: Bryan, AJ, & Orton,

People drafted 15 times out of 16: Ambrose, Heyman, Kaitlyn, & Del Rio

First time draftees: Stephanie McMahon, Eva Marie, Jack Swagger

People finally drafted more than once: Ryback, Brie Bella, Fandango, Cody Rhodes

LEADERBOARD UPDATE

Following Monday night’s festivities, I dropped back to #2 on the overall leaderboards despite my nightly score being the high tally of the week. As it stands, I only sit 89 points out of first place following Monday night. The Joan keeps on holding down that #3 spot, PSS’s Daniel stays at #6, and the rest of the Reedy crew retain their previous standings.

FINAL NOTE

This:

KThanksBye

-Ray Ray Marz-