RADIO
It's #SFBX SZN, y'all! For those of you who don't know, the Scott Fish Bowl is a yearly charity league featuring the best analysts in the fantasy football game plus a lot of fans. The primary goal of the Fish Bowl is to raise money for Fish's Fantasy Cares charity, but a secondary goal is to, well, win the Fish Bowl.
This year's game features some really interesting scoring. If you're playing, you should take a moment to go look over the scoring settings. In particular, the quarterback scoring is fascinating. Players lose four points for an interception and an additional two for a pick-six, while also getting 0.5 points per completion and losing a point for incompletions.
As is customary, the RotoBaller crew got together to do a mock draft for #SFBX, and now I'm going to take that mock and the results of it and talk about some various strategies that were at play during our draft. View the full draft board on Sleeper right here.
Editor's Note: Our incredible team of writers won two writing awards and received 12 award nominations by the Fantasy Sports Writers Association. A big congrats to our very own Byron Lindeque (Golf) and Jordan McAbee (NASCAR) for both winning Writer Of The Year awards! Be sure to follow RotoBaller's analysis and advice all year long, and win more. Win More With RotoBaller!
The Draft Board
So, there are the choices we all made. As you can see, lots of different strategies emerged over the course of the draft. Let's talk about some of my observations.
Where Are Quarterbacks Going?
One difference I'm seeing in the mocks this year vs. the mocks and the real draft in SFB9 is that the bottom-end quarterbacks are now significantly less viable as fantasy options, which means the top quarterbacks are going earlier than you'd expect even in a Superflex league.
By the end of the second round of our mock, half of the teams had quarterbacks. By the end of the fourth, only one team hadn't taken one, and we were already getting second quarterbacks going off the board.
What seems clearer than ever before: you can't wait on quarterback this year. I remember last year, I got Russell Wilson in the fourth round of my division's draft as the seventh quarterback taken. This year, I'm not sure if the seventh quarterback will even be available when I make my third pick, much less my fourth one.
In terms of which quarterbacks are going where, you can see that the negative points for sacks is causing a guy like Deshaun Watson to drop, with him being the seventh quarterback taken despite going top five in most redraft drafts under normal scoring settings.
And the lost points for incompletions has hurt guys whose accuracy is in question. Josh Allen went as the 11th quarterback when he's going much higher usually. Drew Lock's a popular sleeper pick in a lot of settings, but at 9.02, he went after a significant number of the league's starting quarterbacks. Same for Sam Darnold, who was taken at 10.03. Worries about their completion percentage drops them down draft boards.
I Don't Want The 1.07 Anymore (and Other Thoughts About Wide Receivers)
So, in my actual SFBX league, I ended up with the seventh pick. That seemed fine -- any draft slot can be fine, right? -- but then we did this mock and I did another mock and both times didn't go well for the seventh spot.
The quarterback scoring, the Superflex spot, and the points per first down for running backs have pushed up the value of the top four running backs and top two quarterbacks. That likely leaves the person picking seventh in a precarious spot.
You can take the best wide receiver, Michael Thomas. You'll be happy with the performance you get out of Thomas in 2020, but you also open the draft by filling a position that might have the least scarcity in this draft. There's a reason only four wide receivers went in the first two rounds of the mock: the scoring setting makes it important to fill out other positions first.
graph courtesy of Rich King
I think there's a viable strategy for going against that grain and taking a wide receiver early, but I'd much rather do that from 1.11 or 1.12 than 1.07, because by the time things circle back around to 2.06, the top tight ends might be gone and you could find yourself on the bad end of a quarterback run.
Some other options that might be worth trying at 1.07: Travis Kelce (he fell to 1.11, but I know there's been a lot of talk about taking advantage of the TE-premium scoring and going with Kelce here), Dak Prescott (take a quarterback here to avoid being on the wrong end of a late first/early second run on the position), or take the best remaining running back. That last option is my least favorite idea because you can probably get someone in the Josh Jacobs/Kenyan Drake/Miles Sanders tier in the second round still.
The Fade Approaches
Zero RB
No one completely faded running backs, but Collin Hulbert out of the 1.11 took just one in his first eight picks, grabbing Leonard Fournette in the fourth round.
One reason that I think Collin took this approach was that it allowed him to start with a double tight end look, with both Travis Kelce and George Kittle. This move took advantage of the bonus points for tight ends, which could definitely be a winning strategy, especially if you take a TE/TE approach at the end of the first, when going Kelce/Kittle is viable. I'd be less thrilled to start Kittle/Ertz.
Anyway, because Collin waited until Round 9 until taking a second running back, his non-Fournette players at the position were: Zack Moss, Damien Harris, Justin Jackson, Nyheim Hines, Lamical Perine, and Rashaad Penny. That's a lot of "ehh, maybe someone ahead of them will falter" guys, and I'm not sure the path to Fish Bowl success is to rely on "ehh, maybe someone ahead of them will falter" guys. I'd posit that a 22-round draft makes Zero RB harder, because the kind of breakout guys you might grab off the waiver wire early on are getting taken by someone else in Round 19. I don't love this approach in this kind of league.
Zero WR
Now, Zero WR is something I can dig.
Chris Mangano took this approach to the extreme, taking his first receiver in the 10th round. Maybe my Zero WR approach would have ended in the seventh or eighth round, but Chris still managed to get some solid players despite waiting so long. His final wide receiver group: Will Fuller V, Marvin Jones Jr., Darius Slayton, Sammy Watkins, James Washington, Kenny Stills, and Chris Conley.
I love this approach because the level of wide receiver available in the later rounds is higher than the level of running back or quarterback. Chris took Darius Slayton, a potential No. 1 receiver for the Giants, at 13.01. The next running back taken was Chase Edmonds at 13.08, someone whose path to fantasy relevance is significantly more complicated than Slayton's.
Chris took James Washington at 15.01. Washington's got good potential to be the No. 2 receiver in Pittsburgh. The next running back taken was Antonio Gibson at 15.03, who enters a huge mess of a position in Washington.
Even his last receiver pick, Chris Conley, can be productive. Conley caught 47 passes for 775 yards and five touchdowns last year. The next running back -- taken a pick later by Chris -- was Malcolm Brown, who is likely the third back in Los Angeles and had 255 yards last year. His five touchdowns helped buoy his overall fantasy score, but on a per-play basis, he was significantly less productive than Conley.
Going Zero WR and trying to get value late means you're getting playable guys late. You miss out on the top receivers, but it's a trade off that feels significantly more workable than a Zero RB approach does.
A Tight End Premium Means...
The tight end premium scoring means that tight end is obviously more important than it is in normal leagues, as evidenced by Travis Kelce, George Kittle, and Zach Ertz going in the first two rounds.
But maybe the most important thing about drafting a tight end in the Fish Bowl is figuring out where the run on the next tier of tight ends starts. After Mark Andrews at 3.05, no tight end went until Round 7, when five of them went.
In another mock I did, Darren Waller, Rob Gronkowski, and Evan Engram went in the fifth and sixth rounds, and there wasn't a huge run on tight ends, as they were fairly evenly spread between the seventh and eighth round.
The point of this is that it seems like there's a three or four-round window where tight ends aren't being drafted. Once Mark Andrews is gone late second or early third, we don't start seeing a lot of tight ends go until the late sixth or the seventh. If you miss out on a top tight end, you need to start being aware once we get past the middle of the sixth round that tight end could suddenly dry up as a huge run starts. If you don't want to be stuck on the wrong side of a run, you have to be ready to take one around 6.09 -6.12 if you're picking there.
Final Thoughts
Instead of summarizing the mock or anything of that nature, my final thoughts are this:
Scott Fish has put together a great, great thing. If you're playing in it, you should donate to FantasyCares.net or to some other charity of your choice. If you're not playing in it, you should still donate to Fantasy Cares or some other charity of your choice.
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