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Catching up on fantasy football

I have a confession - I've let fantasy football slip to the back burner. When the off-season began, I vowed to blog several times a week, and now I see that I've let that fall a bit. It has been a crazy past few weeks for me (and is only getting busier!) and I think I've been neglecting the football in my life. So my apologies - with the NFL Draft now about a month away, I'll try to pick up my posting steam a little bit here. Read on for news and insights from the football world this week...
  • Football Outsiders's Four Downs: NFC South - part of a series that offers a concise summary of each NFC South team, their free-agency acquisitions and 2008 draft needs.
  • Those who know me and/or my blog probably know that I was very sorry to hear about Jason Elam leaving the Broncos to kick for the Falcons instead. The photo of me on this blog is from a Broncos game this past fall - it's probably to hard to notice, but I am wearing an Elam jersey. Yup, my one and only jersey is that of a kicker. That says a little something about how awesome Elam is, I think. So while I find it hard to imagine 1) why he would prefer to play for the Falcons or 2) who we will get to replace Elam, I do wish him all the best.
  • FFXtreme's Fantasy Football Players to Monitor is a list of possible gambles like Donovan McNabb and Todd Heap that you may want to keep an eye on before draft time arrives.
  • Football Jabber has some interesting QB analysis of Brady, Manning and Romo in Who's the Top Fantasy Dynasty QB in 2008?
  • I love reading the Jay Cutler love in Bruno Boys's Who Would You Rather Own in 2008?
As I've mentioned before, I'm very slowly working on an update to my How Accurate Were They in 2007? spreadsheet - I think I am trying to address too many concerns and please all commentors from my NYT blog...apparently, that just might not be possible. So it might be another week or two, but I will get an update up soon with a new overall ranking of how experts fared in ranking players during the pre-season. A position-specific ranking will also be included.

On a related note, I've been having some philosophical debates (mostly just with myself, yes) over what exactly a Top 100 ranking is actually capturing. In my accuracy analysis of these rankings mentioned above, I'm treating the rankings as though the experts are predicting the order of fantasy performers by fantasy point totals at season's end. Meaning that the ranking isn't supposed to be used as a blueprint for drafting - but clearly that's not exactly the case since most of these rankings stick to some combination of overall points and positional scarcity analysis. If they didn't, you'd see more lists that took slightly different approaches to their lists like Football Outsiders who - gasp! - ranked a few kickers in the Top 100. I'd be interested in hearing what the rest of you think a Top 100 ranking represents - or even hearing from some of the experts who compile these lists.

Comments

Football Jabber said…
Thanks for the plug nice lady.

I think the kicker thing has to do with how they score them. Some leagues get higher points by length of field goal.

In one of our re-draft leagues thata gives only 3 points per FG the top three kickers were just out of the top 100 in scoring for that league.

Gostkowski: 134 points 116 overall
Crosby: 133 points 117 overall
Bironas: 129 points 121 overall

Comparing that to some of the other players you would find in a Top 100, Lee Evans was at 115, Laurence Maroney finished at 125.

Now if these guys got 4-5 points for longer FG's like some leagues give tey could have finished in the Top 100 in 2007.

With that said, you won't find me drafting a kicker in the top 100...lol.

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