Sunday, August 8, 2010

This Draft is Mocking Me! Part One


"Run it again until we get Dallas Clark and Billy Cundiff, damn it!"

Springboarding off Chris's post about the Yahoo! auto-draft, we here at Renal Failure have gathered the maddest scientists we could find to run a little mock draft experiment to see if we've learned anything over the past two seasons when it comes to achieving maximum auto-draft success, or at the very least avoiding auto-draft catastrophe.

Our testing parameters for the first mock draft: Ten team league. Lineups consisting of QB, RB, RB, WR, WR, WR, TE, K, DEF/ST, and six bench spots. Autopick is on, using the Yahoo! suggested rankings. We modestly placed ourselves as the seventh pick, which alternated us to the next round as the fourth pick in even-numbered rounds. Here's how that went:

1. Andre Johnson (Hou - WR)
2. Rashard Mendenhall (Pit - RB)
3. Miles Austin (Dal - WR)
4. Jahvid Best (Det - RB)
5. Vernon Davis (SF - TE)
6. Brett Favre (Min - QB)
7. Jeremy Maclin (Phi - WR)
8. Minnesota (Min - DEF)
9. Garrett Hartley (NO - K)
10. Fred Jackson (Buf - RB)
11. Visanthe Shiancoe (Min - TE)
12. Donovan McNabb (Was - QB)
13. Eddie Royal (Den - WR)
14. Johnny Knox (Chi - WR)
15. Rian Lindell (Buf - K)

Not bad. Top tier WR's, something our teams in the past have lacked. Strong at TE. And two quality QB's. RB a little iffy though, very unlike our previous teams.

We decided to branch out in our second mock draft experiment, moving up to a 14-team draft, positions remaining the same, and still using the Yahoo! suggested rankings. We took the eighth pick, alternating us to the seventh pick in even-numbered rounds. Here are those results:

1. Andre Johnson (Hou - WR)
2. Roddy White (Atl - WR)
3. Jahvid Best (Det - RB)
4. Joseph Addai (Ind - RB)
5. Jeremy Maclin (Phi - WR)
6. Eli Manning (NYG - QB)
7. Visanthe Shiancoe (Min - TE)
8. Stephen Gostkowski (NE - K)
9. San Diego (SD - DEF)
10. Clinton Portis (Was - RB)
11. Julian Edelman (NE - WR)
12. Devin Thomas (Was - WR)
13. Matt Cassel (KC - QB)
14. Benjamin Watson (Cle - TE)
15. David Buehler (Dal - K)

Amazing one-two punch at WR and decent enough QB's for such a deep league. We hope Javhid Best is the second coming of Barry Sanders because he keeps popping up in the later early rounds to us. And how Jeremy Maclin keeps getting on our team we have no idea, but obviously Yahoo! is keen on him being on our roster.

In part two we'll go over our mock drafts using the super secret Renal Failure preferred player rankings to see if we can do better than random fate. And considering that Renal Failure is known throughout the Fantasy Football universe as The Wild Card (bitches!), that's some tasty irony right there.


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---Renal Failure provides a full serving of vegetables every time you lose to him.

1 comment:

Chris Cameron said...

Nine out of ten times your rankings will draft a much better team then the default rankings ever would.

One reason is because the default is based on the standard scoring system.

Another is the fact those rankings are awful. Ryan Matthews at #9 overall? I'd take S Jax and his injury/playing for a crappy team potential over a rookie RB no matter how good the scouts say he is.

Rookie RB's, even the best ones almost always hit the wall at the 10-12 game mark.

Whatever third-party service does those rankings is damned lucky Yahoo pays them to create crappy rankings.