Real Men Cry Football: June 2013

Jose

My uncle is a learned man. He never went to formal college, but he’s read a lot, learned on the streets, and generally just soaked everything in. I mean, if you can be the mediator between Chicago street gangs on the North Side, you’ve got to have some type of level-headedness and smarts to, what’s the word I’m looking for here…oh yeah, STAY ALIVE.

Point is, he’s told me a lot in my lifetime. But for some reason, the one thing that has stuck more than anything else has been this little tidbit of information:

The Bears, historically, have always been trading partners with the Denver Broncos.

I don’t know why that is so branded into my mind, but there it stays, in all its charred, burnt fleshy glory. And so in the aftermath of my trade with Katarya, it got me thinking. Our league is going on its fifth year (in its modern form. I’m not counting the year before Ed). What trends have we seen in our league in that time? More specifically, who trades, and who trades with who?

It really wasn’t a difficult thing to look up, but it’s interesting to note nonetheless. All in all, there have been thirteen trades by eight owners. Only Jeff and Bryan have never made a trade with anyone in the league. All eight of the other owners have made at least two trades. Baron actually was outpacing the league at the beginning of last year, as he was the only owner to make at least one trade in the first three seasons. Thanks to his being gone during a chunk of the summer though, he didn’t make it four in a row. He and Tim have the honor of the most famous – or infamous depending on your viewpoint – trade in league history: Ray Rice for who-knows-or-cares.

Meanwhile, over 53% of the league trades have come from one person: Moi. Now, this is highly skewed because of the four rapid-fire trades I made last year, but seven of the thirteen have come at my hand. And in there we find our Chicago/Denver love connection. Of my seven trades, three have come with Katarya. So there you have it, the biggest bro fest in the league comes from one-and-a-half of the league’s minority influence. Brothas stick together. Meanwhile, does this mean I need to move to Denver ASAP since Katarya is in Chicago?

Here’s some other interesting factoids –

· - Ed, Tim and Katarya have only ever traded with two people: Baron and Jose. They’ve each traded with Baron once, but one, two, and three times respectively with yours truly.

· - Baron, despite being involved in four of the thirteen trades, has never had a repeat trade partner.

· - Danny, Dan, and Sean have all traded with one of the Daniel’s, but not the other. Their second trades have not been with the same person (Dan/Baron, Danny/Sean, Sean/Jose)

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, by Unknown

Arun

Report: Demarco Murray to Swan City

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D12

Final Fantasy Football XXX

First I’m going to include the too long didn’t read version for those of you who don’t care as much:

I think our keeper prices should increase based off of percentages instead of flat rates, so that we don’t skew toward high priced keepers. This way we could keep low-mid value picks at a reasonable rate, thus increasing owners strategic options.

Someone who drafts a player for $5 and gets $60 production is similarly as lucky as an owner who picks up a player with free agent cash and gets big production. Thus I don’t think we should discredit them. The above suggestion does temper the luck factor as well (read long version for more details).

Disclaimer: I haven’t discussed 3-year contracts here, we can figure something out for those or just get rid of them, but that’s a different convo.

Anyone who doesn’t want to read more right now, skip to the bottom and look at my two easy questions. Respond with two yeses, noes, or a combination please!

For the rest of you, this is my proposal that will forever* fix our fantasy keeper framework. I say framework because we may want to modify the numbers involved, but our system would be in place. I think it will also really fix the whole keeping pick-up issue. I didn’t want to separate this from that issue because I feel like this really affects it. People who care give to read it all, I welcome feedback/concerns/questions. Without further ado:

I believe that our current system of flat rates of increase unduly favors high priced keepers. It isn’t possible (or at least reasonable) to keep low-medium price players at a value rate (a player you spent $10 on last year who is going for $15 this year). Really it removes flexibility in keeper strategy, unless you got an unbelievable deal in previous years, you have limited options.

To fix this I propose we use a system in which your price increases according to x or y, whichever is higher. In this equation, x would be a fixed percentage of what you paid last year, while y would be a fixed percentage of the difference between what you paid last year and the average going rate on espn 7 days before the start of the NFL season. Don’t be too put off, it’s really not that complicated. Example (x = 20%, y = 30%): Last year, Dan drafted Jordy Laforge for $10, this year Jordy is going for $30 a week before season start. If Dan keeps Jordy it will cost him $16 (20% of 10 = 2, 30% of 30-10 = 6). If Jordy was only going for $15 on average this year, Dan could keep him for $12 (20% of 10 = 2, 30% of 15-10=1.5). So it isn’t over complicated, all that we need to do is figure out what percentages we want.

What this does is brings players up to market value faster if there is a giant discrepancy (that doesn’t mean it has to be “fast”). Someone can still get very good value for a pick who outperformed his prior year draft position. Also, it makes it possible to keep low-mid “value” keepers without being charged an unproportionate sum. If you drafted someone for $10 last year and they are going for $15 this year, I feel you should have a reasonable option to keep him. The other thing this does is temper the effect of keeping a wire pick-up who is all of a sudden valued at $50. In my mind we would use the 50% baseline and then apply our keeper system. We just need to figure out what numbers we want, i.e. how fast we want the gap to close/how many years we want certain keepers to be kept.

On the topic of pick-ups, there is enough luck in drafting in the first place that it seems silly that pick-ups should be so severely discriminated against. In the draft there are plenty of random names that people get lucky on when they blow up. Most picks are in the $1-$15 range, and if a player blows up from there it’s similar luck to a well executed waiver pick-up. Waiver pick-ups are an integral part of the game, and they often require a good amount of thought and foresight to grab a high potential pick. I’m all for cutting out some of the giant benefit by creating the 50% baseline, and doing the percentage based increases but everyone gets an equal shot at every pick up and limiting people in that way limits people's ability to strategize. We could even do something crazy like not do secret auctions. We could have the option of putting up any player up for a live-ish auction (i.e. post on an auction page). If there is a lot of interest we could have a facebook multi chat to settle it. It could get pretty intense, maybe even have live deals being done, “Billy Noname is at 65! Shit I only have 64 dollars! Jose I’ll give you MJD for Johnny Knox and $100 Free Agent Cash right now!”.

So in the interest of getting things done, I’m going to ask two very straighforward yes-no questions that everyone should be able to answer without too much thought. We then can move on from there to actually accepting specifics.

Question #1

Should we be able to keep pick-ups to some degree?

Question #2
Should we move away from the flat rate keeper pricing in favor of a simple percentage based system?

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, by D12

Jose

Now For My Favorite Part

You shouldn't be surprised by what I'm about to tell you, but I LOVE stats. I've said before and I'll say it again: If I could go back to school, I would study interior design and statistics. They'll never cross over in the real world, but there's physical and spatial beauty in interior design, while stats provide a beauty in truth.

Stat don't lie.

One could easily misconstrue the meaning of the stat being presented, but they can't lie about the actual number it arose. And that's why stats are so powerful and beautiful. They can take the abstract and make it concrete, and then we have the power to make it abstract again. They aren't a meaning to an end, but merely a powerful, powerful tool to help us come to a conclusion (or at least think we did).

That's why this entry is so exciting for me. If you go to the Stats tab, you'll now see a fresh new stat sheet for you guys to play with all season long. It only took me about four to five hours to make the doc (the beauties of funemployment), but it was completely worth it. Let's go over a quick rundown of what you'll find on this here stat sheet.

You'll immediately notice the colored tables. The black one will display overall stats throughout the season. The blue ones will be stats for individual weeks as evidenced by the upper left headlines.
There are some new stats for this year. ESPN just doesn't know what they're doing with stats, but NFL.com does. They introduced some fun stats last year, and I've mimicked these in our spreadsheet.

The first new stat is the Breakdown Rank. The Breakdown Rank is basically what I like to call the Screwed Factor. It looks at the total amount of points you scored and compares it to everyone else's for that week. So, for example, if you lost 111-110, but had the second-highest Breakdown Rank of anyone else, you're rank would be 2. That means you would have beaten every team except one for that week. It's an insult to injury type of stat at times.
The second one - and my personal favorite - is the Coach stat. This stat tells you how many points your optimal lineup would've gotten you. So say you scored 78 points, but your bench QB outscored your starter 15-5. Your optimal lineup would've gotten you 88 points, so the 88 would show up in your Coach stat. 88 still may not have gotten you the 105 needed to beat your opponent, but hey, that doesn't mean you couldn't have played your lineup better.
The final stat is a summation stat. The True Rank factors in your Breakdown Rank, Coach stat, Points Scored, and actual record to help determine your overall positioning in the league. Think of it as the most unbiased way to show how good your team is. And it makes sense. If your team is scoring a ton of points, your putting in your best possible lineups to do so, and it's showing in the win column, then you're True Rank will be pretty darn good.

On top of those direct rip-offs from NFL.com's fantasy page, I've added a breakdown of your points by position over the course of a week and season. So if you want to see if you're running back tandem outscored the league for X week, then you can see it. Or you can check to see if you've gotten the most TE production even if you've been switching TE's every week. You can also check to see how many points you've left on the bench.

I've popped in two fake weeks worth of data so you can get an idea of how this will all go down. Check it out. It only takes me about twenty minutes to a half hour to update the data, so it really isn't the biggest time investment in the world. That makes this all the more fun and easy.

I'll have to manually update these stats every Tuesday after all the games are said and done. And I'll love doing it because I get to look at stats. However, and I've mentioned this before, this means I won't be writing many, if any, previews for the following week. I'm going to be spending more time doing background stuff, but I'll still use these stats for the recap in the Danny Devito Power Rankings every week. So if you're going to want to do a preview, then by all means I would love to see it.

Put it on a spreadsheet if you need to

Now for some quick housekeeping notes:

I'm legitimately worried about why pictures won't show on the main page in a post. You'll see my last two posts only show gray boxes. While this isn't an end of the world thing, I'm not sure what to do from here. This is a heads up to you guys who will be posting.
This stat sheet affects the standings on the sidebar. So you'll see those updated when this updates.
This might not be the last of the spreadsheet that I work on. If I can find a relevant stat and actually program it to calculate on the doc, I'll make it happen.
Next up is the trophies section. I won't have a write up for that, but I'm hoping to have it done by the end of the day tomorrow or Friday.