The Lesson of Cam Akers
(Posted July 23, 2021)
The first major fantasy-relevant NFL injury of the 2021 season occurred earlier this week when L.A. Rams starting RB Cam Akers tore his achilles, ending his 2021 season even before training camp started. This devastating news rippled through the fantasy football community, and removed one of the top “breakout performer” candidates from the discussion. It also sparked some immediate debate about how this injury will impact other Rams players, principally backup RB Darrell Henderson.
More injury news with significant fantasy impact came earlier today, with the Saints announcing that star WR Michael Thomas had a setback in his recovery from surgery to ligaments in his ankle, and will not be ready for the start of the season. Early speculation is that Thomas could miss as many as 4-6 weeks of regular season games, or perhaps more.
And sadly, as camps open and then preseason games get underway, the injury news will keep coming. It’s football. Guys get hurt. And one very simple and obvious lesson we can learn from all of this is as follows: Hold your fantasy drafts as late as you can.
If one thing is clear from this blog’s previous articles on how to improve the game of fantasy football it is this: The Pigskin Papers believes that fantasy leagues should do whatever they can to maximize playing a game that is as fair, sensible and merit-based as possible. And one way to help with that goal is to hold the draft as close to the start of the season as is feasible. Why? Because playing fantasy football is about assessing and managing uncertainty and risks and rewards, and there is no period of uncertainty as great as the preseason. So it follows that fantasy leagues should let as much of the preseason play out as they can before drafting, to alleviate that uncertainty to the greatest extent possible.
A lot happens during the preseason. Players get injured. Other players get opportunities to replace the injured players. Players lose their starting job to a backup. Players get cut. Players get signed. Players get traded. Trades and cuts create opportunities for other players. Players don’t themselves get injured, but injuries to other players in the same offense impact their values. The roles of certain players get more clearly defined (or not). The list goes on and on, and the preseason showers us with so much daily news, it gets hard to keep track and to decipher what really matters from a fantasy perspective. As the preseason rolls on and the start of the season approaches, there is increasingly less uncertainty about players and their roles. The uncertainty never gets anywhere close to zero, of course, which is why fantasy managers are making a series of risk/reward evaluations and educated guesses when they sit down to draft their team. But it does decrease with each passing day as Week 1 approaches, so the fairest thing to do is to take as much of that uncertainty away as you can, for the equal benefit of all owners.
A couple of the articles that I read right after Akers went down said things like “if you drafted Akers, you need a plan B.” This made me scratch my head and ask aloud, “who in their right mind already had a draft for the 2021 season?” I can only hope this kind of statement was directed at those in keeper leagues who drafted Akers last year and planned on keeping him, and nobody else. Players already have average draft positions, or ADPs. At this stage, ADP should be based entirely on mock drafts and not actual drafts. There is absolutely no reason to draft fantasy teams at any time in July or early August. None.
So when should a league hold it’s fantasy draft? I would say that ideally it should be held on the Tuesday or Wednesday after Labor Day, one or two days before the regular season kicks off with the Week One Thursday night game. I realize this may not be feasible for some leagues. Schools often start that week, people have family plans for Labor Day weekend, and other scheduling conflicts are present. The main challenge in drafting that late is presumably just scheduling. Loading in lineups and other set-up should not take more than a few hours, tops, so that is not the barrier. Some leagues have people traveling long distances for drafts, or other scheduling issues or traditions that result in leagues drafting well before Labor Day weekend and otten by the middle of August. Doing so just exposes owners to unnecessary risk (or benefit, depending on who gets hurt or cut), on top of all of the attendant risk associated with the game. This should be avoided! And if you establish that the draft is always on a particular date, and let people know far enough in advance, it should not be that hard for most leagues to push things back to where it is held no more than one week before the season starts, at worst. And for leagues that draft online, or that have some owners who habitually draft online, there really is no excuse.
This one is pretty simple and uncontroversial - hold your drafts right before the season starts, and it will improve your league.
