In what has become an offseason tradition, my RotoViz Report co-host Hasan Rahim and I joined up with the boys from Ship Chasing — Pat Kerrane, Peter Overzet, and Ben Gretch — to co-draft and co-manage an FFPC Main Event team. In past seasons we’ve drafted live on stream. This season we’re trying something different: a slow draft.
The chaos of trying to mesh five different opinions in the span of a one-minute timer all without giving away players we want to pick later makes for an entertaining stream. But the ability to discuss our picks and our structure in more depth should make for a stronger team. As we will see, chaos still ensues.
Round 1
In what also seems like tradition, we drew the 1.09. Bjorn Yang-Vaernet makes an effective case that the back half of Round 1 is where you want to be this year. It still stings when you watch powerlessly as Ja’Marr Chase falls to the fourth overall pick. Round 1 followed ADP most of the way otherwise, until the drafter at 1.08 took Amon-Ra St. Brown, who would have been one of our top targets. St. Brown has gone at 1.08 or earlier in just a handful of Main Event drafts.
In the vast majority of cases he will represent the top available WR for the 1.09 drafter. Alas, we had to look elsewhere. The top player by ADP was rookie RB Bijan Robinson. The top WR on most of our boards was Garrett Wilson. It was at this point we hit an impasse.
Three members wanted to reach for Wilson. In the days leading up to this draft, Wilson had been going around Pick 16 — exactly where our second-round pick was.
This meant there was a roughly 50-50 shot he would make it to us in the second. However, the area around the 3/4 turn is a WR wasteland with multiple intriguing RB options. The prospect of taking Wilson in the first and following that up with a WR in the second fits what we like to do from a structural standpoint. As Ben explained, it’s suboptimal to feel like we have to take WRs at the 3/4 turn considering the players available in that range.
On the other hand, two members of the group wanted to draft Robinson and see whether Wilson would make it back to us. Robinson fits Pat’s legendary upside profile to a tee, and looked great in limited preseason action. Pat pushed the hyperfragile mentality, pointing out that taking Robinson doesn’t preclude us from drafting RBs in Rounds 3 and 4, as there are multiple WRs we like in the next several rounds. The force of the Robinson argument was strengthened by the fact that Wilson was not even the top WR on everyone’s board. Getting both Robinson and Wilson on the team was close to the dream scenario.
