Fantasy football: How much is luck?

Spot on. As the NFL becomes more and more a passing league, RBs are losing their premium value, and that's translating in turn to the WR position.

 

Like getting laid

 

Obviously, luck is involved... One of the first years that Yahoo was locking in the rosters, you had to have a certain number of players at each position or it wouldn't let you finish the draft. I wanted a third tight end. They were making me take a third quarterback. One of my friends yelled, "Just give him the guy replacing Trent Green on the Rams." and I waved my hand as if to say, "Who gives a shit?" and with that, I got Kurt Warner and needless to say, I won that year... So, yeah, luck can play a big role...

I've always found that with every league I ever do, the people who usually do the best are the ones who follow it the closest and are aggressive on the waiver wire, especially in football, as injuries take place. That can sometimes make up for a bad draft or having a key player injured early in the season.

 

Agreed. I've had years where I've been very good at the draft, but the players get hurt and I'm out of luck. And I've had years where they get hurt, and I happen to pick a guy up off waivers and the guy ends up helping me have a good season (i.e., Dominick Davis, Michael Pittman).

But all in all, a lot of it is luck. I've had weeks where I've had the second most points among everyone in the league. But it turns into a loss because the top point scorer was my opponent.

 

This. Considering I scored 15 points more than anyone in my league this week, EXCEPT for the guy I played. Lost by 4 points. Had I played anyone else, I would have won easily. Happens a lot too. I prefer football, but in fantasy I prefer baseball because it is far less luck-based and you can make up for a bad day.

 

The other thing is the waiver-wire situation sucks compared to baseball and basketball.

The setup is you have to wait until Thursday to have every single player clear waivers. So people that pay attention early in the week aren't rewarded with picking up someone who has a breakout game or will now be a starter due to injury based on waiver seeding.

Unlike in baseball when a pitcher has a great start or a closer gets replaced, you can go pick that guy up immediately. But if Russell Wilson goes down on a Thursday and no one has Matt Flynn, you have to wait a week to claim him

 

I have found that this makes it more fair. I think the teams with the poor records should get first crack at a guy like that. We have done it both ways, and invariably, it's the teams who are most obsessed with the game getting all the players while I'm out drinking with my buddies and enjoying the game. I understand the flip side, that the players who are paying the most attention should be rewarded, but I like having to wait and letting the crappy teams with waiver priority get the first shot.

 

Ah, the Kurt Warner season. Everyone who's been around long enough has one like that.
I drafted Vinny Testaverde in 1999. First game of the season, he blows out his Achilles. One of the few starting quarterbacks on the waiver wire was some chump named Warner. I picked him up and ended up winning that year.
Similar story the year before. I plucked Randall Cunningham off the waiver wire sometime around Week 5, once he had replaced Brad Johnson and had a couple decent starts. Combined with a shrewd sixth-round draft pick named Randy Moss, I crushed everyone.
Those are the last two titles I won in that league.
Where fantasy football has gotten tougher is that more people play it and know what the hell they're doing now. When I won those two years in our 10-team work league, I had been playing for a couple of years and did my homework. I felt like I had a headstart on at least two-thirds of the league. The internet was also in its infancy. Now, everybody gets the same magazines and reads the same websites. You think you've glommed onto a 12th-round sleeper of a running back? Screw you. The schmuck playing for the first time just picked him off the pre-arranged list because he was the only one not crossed off yet.
There are no more secrets. There's some strategy in keeper leagues and the early rounds of the draft, but after that it's more or less picking in whatever order the magazines and websites tell you to.

 

Randy Moss slipped to the sixth round in 1999? Sounds like your league was full of idiots.

 

All of it.

 

That was in 1998, his rookie year. He went much, much higher the next year.

 

All you need to know:

I'm in a 16-team league. I've won the championship once ... the year I drafted Tom Brady and he got hurt.

Matt Cassel and Shaun Hill led me to my victory.

It's almost entirely luck. Very little skill.