A Football Life, Draft Evaluations

I am finally back after a long absence from blogging. I’m not back to blogging about the NFL, at least not for the time being. I plan to cover the NFL playoffs this year, but until then I’ll be limited to updates for my fantasy league.

Speaking of which, we held the draft for the AFL on Sunday as we get set to start our second season. This year each team was allowed to select one player from last season’s roster to keep for this season.

There are two new members this year. Andrew Perez is taking over Mike Washington’s team as Mike turns his attention to playing football for the Maryland Terrapins (Good luck, Mike!) and Nolan Soter will be in my division as he took over Andrew Olsen’s team.

Thanks to the holiday, I had a day between the draft and classes starting to do some work on ranking each team’s draft. The first thing I had to do was figure out what the best way to rank a draft is. If an owner drafted Stevan Ridley after all his fumbles last year, that had to be a poor pick, right?

Actually, it turned out that when Sean Kennedy took him in the 9th round of the draft, it was an excellent pick. Why? Because of the value he got. So my goal when I set out to evaluate and rank our teams was not to look solely at which players they selected, but where in the draft they selected those players. In other words, value-based drafting is what I was looking for.

For each evaluation, I included the biggest catches and biggest reaches. All catches will be assigned a positive value (i.e., a +37 Knile Davis). In that example, Knile went 37 picks after his rank. All reaches have a negative value (i.e., a -84 for Eli Manning). In that example, Eli went 84 picks before his rank. Catches and reaches are based on overall rank, not positional rank.

Disclaimer

Now, before I continue and evaluate each of the AFL’s 12 teams, let me first say this: all of these evaluations are based on the pre-draft rankings I devised before our draft. I have not modified these rankings since the draft began, but I also had the advantage of using these rankings. So when we get to my team, keep in mind that it will be a very biased evaluation.

When looking at other teams, keep in mind that their owners may have valued certain players more or less than I did, so if you or someone else doesn’t agree, that is your opinion, just as this is mine, and that’s a good thing. You wouldn’t like it if we agreed on everything. You don’t read columns ranking teams so that they’ll be the same as your rankings. You read them so that they’ll be different because then, at least in your mind, you’re more correct than the author.

Unbiased Opinion

In order to make sure that not everything is based on my personal rankings, I’ve included at the end of each evaluation the playoff chances of each team, computed by FantasyFootballGuys and based on all of our league settings.

I’ve rambled enough, let’s get to my evaluations. You can find each team’s evaluation at the links below:

No. 1 pick overall, Team Battle (William Battle)

No. 2 pick overall, Raging P****** (Eric Meyer)

No. 3 pick overall, Los Pollos Hermanos (Nolan Soter)

No. 4 pick overall, Washington RedCapWizTerps (Saswat Misra)

No. 5 pick overall, Team Massimini (William Massimini)

No. 6 pick overall, Project Mayhem (Andrew Perez)

No. 7 pick overall, Mud City Manglers (Sean Kennedy)

No. 8 pick overall, Missing Rings (Cory Puffett)

No. 9 pick overall, Jack Gasses (Anthony Battle)

No. 10 pick overall, Balt/Atl Engineers (Evan Ash)

No. 11 pick overall, Believe in Drew Breesus Christ (Brandon Saunders)

No. 12 pick overall, Team Awesome (Danny Hatcher)

Thanks for checking out my fantasy football team evaluations. Check back throughout the season for my weekly AFL updates, as well as weekly NFL game predictions by the Football Freaks!