When I first played fantasy football in the mid-90s, I looked forward to the summer when the magazines would come out, and I could pore over each publication's rankings, seeing who in their wisdom they had in that year's top five or top 10. Not that I always agreed with them, but it was interesting to have a professional perspective on this hobby with which I was rapidly becoming obsessed.
Fast forward 15 years, and 10 RotoWire magazines later, and I now suspect my excitement was misplaced. It's possible back then, before the web made rankings and cheat sheets ubiquitous, those magazines operated independently of each other, i.e., there was no consensus back then, and therefore more capacity for original thinking. But knowing how these rankings are formulated, it's funny that I considered them so seriously. Players don't have real rankings - any list we create is a total fantasy. We consider a bunch of factors (past performance, health, team context, skills) and we form an impression. We turn that into a projection, then justify it in words. That's all there is to it. A bunch of people with experience who have exhibited good judgment in the past trying to divine the future and required to quantify it as if it were a science.
That everyone has agreed Maurice Jones-Drew should be No. 2 doesn't change anything about the player who has never eclipsed 200 carries. If you were to take Steve Slaton over Jones-Drew, or Matt Schaub over Kurt Warner, that doesn't mean your team won't do well. It just means you're out of step with the consensus, that people will accuse you of reaching, that you're not a real expert because you made a novice move. Dalton Del Don and I talked about it yesterday on our Blog Talk Radio show
But why does it matter whether your views are in step with those of other experts? Did last year's consensus preseason rankings have Thomas Jones in the top 10 or DeAngelo Williams, Calvin Johnson or Philip Rivers in the top-5 at their respective positions? Did they see Braylon Edwards slipping out of the top 30, or Jay Cutler and Aaron Rodgers outperforming Tony Romo and Peyton Manning?
There's little evidence that what everyone agrees upon, i.e., the consensus cheat sheet with some minor variations across difference sites, is anything close to optimal in predicting what will happen in an NFL season. Just because everyone thinks it doesn't make it so. Now Average Draft Position (ADP) is worth knowing because you have to decide who you need to pick now, and who will be available on the way back, but it should otherwise not influence you one bit.
For example, in last week's Yahoo Friends and Family Draft, I picked 13th and took Calvin Johnson and then Pierre Thomas on the way back at No. 16. For the second pick, I was choosing between Thomas, Kevin Smith and Frank Gore (Greg Jennings was the top receiver available). I knew Gore's ADP was easily the highest, and in most cases Thomas' was the lowest, but I also knew none of the three were coming back to me should I pass on them. In that case, I had simply to pick the guy I wanted to own, and that was Thomas because of the system he's in. (I almost took Smith, but I had trouble with the idea of two Lions in the first two rounds). Unfortunately, no one (except Mike Salfino, God bless him) criticized the Thomas pick, and I take that as a bad sign because my best picks are usually the most ridiculed, and my worst almost universally praised.
Of course, it's not necessarily wise for novices who haven't played for years and don't know the player pool well to go off the reservation with Troy Williamson in the eighth round (watch, now that I mocked him, he'll actually have a good year - or at least he would if it were not impossible given he's got Darrius Heyward-Bey polish after four years in the league), but once you have the foundation - the requisite fantasy football database in your brain and in-depth knowledge of recent developments - there's no reason to care what anyone else thinks.
The longer I do this the more I realize how much we don't know - the more I see how flimsy the basis for any set of rankings is and how deluded we are to constrain ourselves by it. If you're a fantasy football veteran, the best advice I can give you is to throw out the cheat sheet and take whichever player you most want on your team each round that you're fairly sure won't be available on the way back. That and to check out my RotoWire 150 - which I'm updating later tonight. Hopefully, it will be so out of step with conventional wisdom it'll break you of any attachment to anyone's list, including mine.