If we execute our draft strategy correctly, we’re going to have a number of guys on our team that think are undervalued.  We’re getting these guys cheap because we believe the market isn’t realizing all of their value.  So basically when we draft them, they don’t really have any positive trade value.  Go ahead and try to trade them and you’re going to find a limited market.

But eventually they will have trade value, so we have to give our losers time to turn into winners. 

Let me tell you a little story about when I first started approaching drafts from a heavy value standpoint.  In 2008 I drafted Roddy White as my 4th WR.  I had Braylon Edwards as one of my keepers, drafted Andre Johnson (the Johnson owner from the previous year had a stacked team) and Greg Jennings, and then took Roddy White as my 4th WR.  I knew that over the last half of the 2007 season White had been one of the top WRs.  But the market was not high on White given the fact that Matt Ryan was going to be starting as a rookie.  If you go back and look at ADP, White was coming off the board as as WR 26 or so.

My problem though was that I saw White as expendable because he was my 4th WR and I felt pretty strong with the others.  I was also a little worried about White getting the ball from Ryan, so I think I ended up dropping him in Week 1 for another RB.  It’s one of my all time bonehead moves!  I still get shit from my leaguemates about it.

I dropped White after he had 2 catches for 54 yards.  But had I stuck with him through Week 3, he would have turned in a 5 catch, 119 yard, 1TD performance and I would have had a huge trade chip.  Roddy White has pretty much been a stud ever since.

The moral of the story is give your losers time to turn into winners.  After this bonehead move with White (and a similarly painful dropping of Thomas Jones the same year) I have a rule that I need a really good reason to make any roster moves through about four or five weeks.  I have to make this rule to keep me from going after the “Deal of the Day” on the waiver wire.  Even if we execute a value based drafting strategy that we believe in, it’s still easy to see a shiny new object on the waiver wire or a trade and forget about the value that might be sitting on the bench.

So don’t make the same mistakes I have.  Be patient and wait for the values of your guys to top out.  Then move them in opportunistic deals for guys whose value is beaten up a little.

This is a very simple strategy that I don’t see talked about nearly enough.  Draft a deep team that will give you lots of options through the bye weeks and where you can win head to head games against your league mates who are operating at partial strength.  Then going into the last few weeks of byes look for trades that you can make in order to top load your team for the playoffs.

This strategy works the best in a keeper/dynasty format where there will be more trade interest later in the year.  But it can work in re-draft leagues as well.  You just need to start trading a little earlier in that case, before other owners have checked out for the season.

So if bye weeks run from Week 5 to Week 11, that’s six weeks where you have opportunities to play against partial strength opponents.  Those are the weeks where you have a chance, even if things don’t go well, to beat the guys who drafted QB, TE and defense early and aren’t sufficiently deep at RB and WR.

Why does this work?  Because the guy who drafted QB early has to deal with his QB’s bye week, as well as the bye weeks of his RBs and WRs who were weak already.  If you are deep at RB and WR, you’ll have options that will give you 90% of whatever production you were getting from your starter.  This strategy is also likely to yield two mediocre QBs (maybe Flacco and Cutler, or Freeman and Cassell) where you won’t have a dropoff really from option #1 to option #2.

It’s very possible to employ this strategy and have your playoff spot essentially locked up through 2/3 of the season.  Then you can make trades that will be attractive to other others, and yet will yield you a guy who has an extremely easy playoff schedule.

This is a hang around strategy.  You’re hanging around in order to play in the playoffs.  When the run of bye weeks is ending, you can either look to make moves that will give you a better shot in the playoffs (your deep team won’t help you then), or you can cross your fingers and hope that you get lucky.  Either way, it’s more fun to be in the playoffs than out.  So focus first on compiling a 5-1 or 4-2 record through the bye weeks, then worry about the playoffs later.

So to summarize, our strategy is as follows:

• Draft a deep team that will have more relative strength during the bye weeks than our opponents
• Draft two mid-level QBs who we can play matchups with, and who will not have noticeable dropoff during the better QB’s bye week
• Be able to play matchups at each position with that deep team
• Look to make trades at the last viable week to trade.  Make deals that might even look attractive to league mates but that will give you a top heavy team during the playoffs.  Essentially trade our deep team for a shallow one.
• Cross our fingers that our hang around strategy does more than just get us into the playoffs.

Even if you’re not familiar with the tenets of value investing, you’ve probably at least heard of value investing’s most famous practitioner Warren Buffett.  Buffett is one of a number of investors who seek to acquire stocks for less than their intrinsic value, and then wait for the market to recognize the stock’s value.  The cornerstone of value investing is the Margin of Safety.

From Wikipedia:

The margin of safety protects the investor from both poor decisions and downturns in the market. Because fair value is difficult to accurately compute, the margin of safety gives the investor room for error.

Benjamin Graham is commonly known as the father of value investing.  Again, from Wikipedia:

Value investing was established by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, both professors at Columbia Business School and teachers of many famous investors. In Graham’s book The Intelligent Investor, he advocated the important concept of margin of safety — first introduced in Security Analysis, a 1934 book he co-authored with David Dodd — which calls for a cautious approach to investing. In terms of picking stocks, he recommended defensive investment in stocks trading below their tangible book value as a safeguard to adverse future developments often encountered in the stock market.

Like the stock market, fantasy football requires that we make picks with imperfect knowledge of what the future holds.  There are a number of risk factors which impact fantasy football.  You have schedule risk, age risk, usage risk, and injury risk.  Reducing the potential impact of the negative effects of risk is what the Margin of Safety is all about.

If we acquire a player at a discount to that player’s prior production, and we require that the player has a schedule that will provide a number of good matchups, we are on the way to having an acceptable Margin of Safety. 

We have no idea what the future will bring, we only know that if we reduce our exposure to risk factors, we’ll be ahead of our league mates who pay no attention to acquiring players with a cushion built in.  Ideally, we want to avoid drafting a team that requires that everything go well.  Instead, we want to draft a team that will still be ok even if a number of things go against us.  By thinking of our draft in terms of requiring a Margin of Safety we can do this.

Nothing is as thrilling as being able to get a guy on the cheap.  In 2008 you could have picked up Kurt Warner as the 22nd QB taken in drafts.  He went on to finish 2nd in passing yards to Drew Brees. 

If you picked Kurt Warner that year you didn’t know for sure that he would finish 2nd in passing yards.  You only knew that you could get him as your 2nd QB and that he had finished the 2007 season just barely behind Tom Brady over the last 8 weeks of the season.

The same year you could have picked Roddy White as the 26th overall WR.  He went on to finish 4th in receiving yards.  If you picked him 26th you knew you would have to deal with White being on the receiving end of a rookie QB’s throws, but you also knew that over the last half of 2007, White was top 10 in receiving yards and the Falcons leading passer that year was a guy named Joey Harrington.

All of our analysis starts with how cheap we can get a guy.  Most draft experts start with the top of the draft and start going down the list.  We start at the bottom of the list and try to identify guys who we can get cheap.

We’re not taking flyers on unproven guys.  We hate the term sleeper because most draft expert sleepers are a spin of the roulette wheel.  We’re making educated guesses on guys we believe we can get for less than their inherent value.

The downside of this strategy is that the top of the draft board isn’t exciting to us.  We don’t get excited about taking a guy 1st overall and then hoping that he lives up to that draft pick.

When one of your cheap picks comes through you’re on your way to having a top team.  But if we do our homework we can often get 3 or 4 of our cheap picks to come through in a single draft.  That’s the situation we’re looking for.

The key test of the success of our strategies is what happens if some of our assumptions turn out not to be true.  Basically, what happens in a worst case scenario? 

If we have initiated a robust plan, then we will still be ok.  If we have initiated a plan that is subject to fragility, like taking a QB early, then we are screwed.

Our draft rankings will rely not just on one measure, as most draft rankings do (usually simply last year’s performance).  Rather, we will seek to be robust.  We will grade players based on last year’s performance, similarity to other players, their last season strength of schedule, their career trajectory, their next season strength of schedule, as well as their advanced metrics.  We’re going to select players who represent value based on those combined criteria, and in the process we’re going to create a robust plan.

We’ll take robustness one step further and we will draft as if everything is going to go wrong.  How many guys have you seen really excited after their draft and then inconsolable just a few weeks later when their first round selection goes out for the season?  We’re going to draft as if we plan that our first round pick will get hurt for the season.

How different would your past drafts have been if you had pretended during the draft as if your first round pick would be unavailable to you?  Well, in a lot of years your first round pick does essentially become unavailable to you!  They either become injured, or they revert to the mean and they have a “bust” season.

Because most leagues start more RBs and WRs than QBs, taking a QB early in the draft means that you are at risk of having a fragile team.  If that QB goes down, your QB position is now weak, as are your RB and WR positions (because you took the QB early).  Taking RBs and WRs early and often though is a recipe for robustness.  You’re planning for them to be busts and get hurt, and if they turn out not to be busts because you’re demanding value from each pick, then you can trade them into a QB.

Everybody talks about busts every year, but usually not until the season has started.  If you value robustness, you’ll start thinking about busts before you draft.

If the choice is between a talented player and a guy that produced last year because of opportunity, draft the talented player and worry about the consequences later.  Before 2009, Chris Johnson was a change of pace back.  Before 2010 Darren McFadden was a talented bust.  Until Week 5 of 2010 Mike Wallace was just a deep threat who overran the arms of the Steelers backup QBs.  Going into 2007 Randy Moss was the most talented to wide receiver to be passed over multiple times in fantasy drafts.

The lesson is to draft talent first and worry about production later.  If you have a roster full of talented guys, even if they haven’t been given their chance to shine, you’ll be alright.  Enough of the talented guys will emerge to get you the production you need.  If they all come through, you’ll win your league.

It’s not always easy to figure out whether a guy is talented or not.  We can look at combine numbers (McFadden), we can look at college production (Arian Foster), we can look at things like yards per carry (Jamaal Charles), and we can look at things like per game comparisons to other players of his age (Hakeem Nicks) to get a sense as to whether a guy is talented ahead of his breakout year.  You’re not always going to have an absolutely clear indicator, at best sometimes you’ll be making an educated guess.  But if you fill your draft with educated guesses in favor of talent, you’ll be alright.

Get ready for some really simple logic.  If you follow the same advice that everybody else in your league does, then you’re going to get the same results.  Which is to say that you’ll have an average team most years and randomness will cause you to have a really good team one or two years and a really bad team one or two years.

To have uncommon results, you have to go against the crowd.  You have to trade players away when their value couldn’t be any higher.  You have to pick players up when their value couldn’t be any lower and your trading partner has capitulated.  You have to have a contrarian approach. 

It’s not as easy as it sounds.

It might be a little easier if you remember that value in FFB is temporary.  Player results typically see a reversion to the mean.  If you look at the top 20 fantasy seasons among running backs over the last 20 years, and then look at each of those players’ next season, they lost an average of 25% per game in fantasy points in year two and also played on average two fewer games in the second year.

So when you’re evaluating players, forget about last year and tell yourself that you’re not getting last year’s player.  The player you’re getting this year is whatever happens when you mix that player’s ability with their opportunity, strength of schedule, and a certain amount of randomness.

Try to clear the hype out of your head and look at things objectively.  Being a contrarian isn’t about always doing the opposite of conventional wisdom.  That’s called being disagreeable.  Being a contrarian is about arriving at separate conclusions because you’re evaluating facts independent of hype.