Team Kicker Draft Champions Rehash

[eliasond]

But tom, you're lobbying for a strategy that applies more to weekend one high stakes drafters than 2nd weekend drafters. First weekend drafters and early high stakes drafters should take a 2nd kicker in case one gets cut or hurt that last week, while 2nd weekend drafters can take only one and be 99% confident that one will kick in week 1. Or even just take Thursday's opening night kicker after he's already kicked. That's one thing I still don't like about the current high stakes setup. Not all leagues and owners are drafting with the same set of information. Different leagues in the same contest shouldn't have to use a different strategy to account for unforeseen events due to the timing of the draft. In the first years of the nffc all leagues in the same contest drafted at the exact same time, and starting times were even adjusted in the different time zones to ensure that. That was the ultimate in drafting with the same information. Anyways I digress. I'll post another paragraph about my DC thoughts later.

[eliasond]

In DCs for sure I am in favor of team kickers. Last year I drafted an early DC with Parker, bullock and forbath. Parkey was drafted as a top 10 kicker in most leagues so should have been safe. Even so, I know the risks with kickers so I drafted 2 more K that were expected to start at the time. By Week 4 I was taking zeros at K due to cuts and injuries. Later on bullock got another job and I got a few pts. The rest of that team sucked so it didn't matter in that particular case. But gees that would have sucked had 3 unexpected events at K cost me several thousand dollars by the end of the year.

[morons]

The obvious solution....

Eliminate individual kickers, Include kicking points with Defense and Special Teams. Duh!

-Aren't kickers "special teams players"? Couldn't their points count with Defense and Special Teams??

-We don't draft individual defense players to get defense stats, so why do we need to draft individual kickers to get special teams stats??

-Seems like a great opportunity to fix something that has been wrong all along....

[moyer1313]

I have had DCs that have entered the season with all three(one time actually 4 k's done) but never once thought I want a Team K. The reality is that K is another position that makes the DC Strategy so much fun. You are subject to runs and decisions like Do you wait and collect better RB/TE/WR or maybe draft your K's early for those that are more locked in? Do you take the young rookie with the big leg who get those extra points or the grisly vet who wont ever miss an extra point and chip shot FG?

As much as many consider the K a throw away position, I actually do research them, rank them and view them as relevant. Having them get hurt or suspended is no different than any other position where it can happen. Nothing says you can't handcuff your K's as some do RBs just to be safe.

Scott

Exactly!

Heck No! to Team Kickers in DCs.

If you're worried about your Kickers, then draft them early and draft them often.

If you want to draft just 2 of them, and take a flyer on some RB or WR instead, then go right ahead.

If you want to wait on a Kicker, and then try to draft 3 of them with 2 of the 3 fighting for a job, then go right ahead.

If you want to wait on a Kicker, and take the chance of getting stuck at the end of the Kicker run, then go right ahead.

If you want to take a chance on the Rookie Kicker with a big leg, then go right ahead.

Nothing is full proof in DCs, but drafting Kickers late and/or drafting only 2 of them, is asking for trouble.

There is a strategy to drafting Kickers in DCs.

Drafting Kickers in a regular league, less so.

I never take a 2nd Kicker in a regular league, but then I never whine about it when he gets cut/hurt/suspended, either. It is my own fault for taking the chance and only drafting one. But, that is a chance I will take every time.

Mark
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[DrEvil1996]

It's interesting to me that this came up again because of Josh Brown and talk about suspensions/injuries. That can happen at any position, obviously, but there are some differences at Kicker.

I support team kicker or elimination of the kicker position in Draft Champions because it feels like a waste of my time to try to handicap whether Connor Barth or Kai Forbath is going to be the Saints Kicker this year (and following the latest kicker battle news on a daily basis). While it's annoying to deal with 50/50 battles like that, it's true there are plenty at other position battles up til week 1 (49ers QB, etc) and that is a fair argument. But with kickers, you have teams like the Browns a few years ago that cut both their kickers who were battling and pick up someone off the street, and teams that make decisions out of left field to cut a seemingly safe veteran kicker to save a couple million bucks.

No one notices this in roster management leagues because you cut that guy and pick up someone random off the waiver wire and move on. In Draft Champions, The bottom line for me is this - do I really want to win/lose a league over being lucky/unlucky with the random decision of choosing kickers? No - I'd rather spend my time preparing and coming up with strategies for drafting a position where the results are essentially random (http://www.foxsports.com/fantasy/footba ... ion-011916) and many teams could replace their starter with little/no warning based on short term results.

Last point here - if you want to talk about Draft Champions, look at what MFL is doing and the massive volume of Draft Champions leagues they are running. They took out kickers for their 2015 drafts and continued it for 2016, and I hear no one complaining about how taking away kickers has somehow hurt their experience in the leagues. I don't know anyone playing in MFL10s who thinks removing the kicker position has been a negative.

[moyer1313]

I don't know anyone playing in MFL10s who thinks removing the kicker position has been a negative.

Well, now you do.

Removing the Kicker position removed another layer of strategy for the draft.

Please, see my previous post as to why.

Thank you,
Mark
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[DrEvil1996]

Was it part of your strategy to project that a safe kicker not thought to be in a battle like Robbie Gould would be released? This is a great example of why drafting kickers is pointless in draft-only.

[moyer1313]

Was it part of your strategy to project that a safe kicker not thought to be in a battle like Robbie Gould would be released? This is a great example of why drafting kickers is pointless in draft-only.

Nope.

But, then I usually have my 3 Ks before I have to resort to drafting Gould.

I also didn't plan on Forsett getting cut.

I vote for Team RBs now, too.

Mark
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[Sandman62]

Was it part of your strategy to project that a safe kicker not thought to be in a battle like Robbie Gould would be released? This is a great example of why drafting kickers is pointless in draft-only.

Nope.

But, then I usually have my 3 Ks before I have to resort to drafting Gould.

I'm not looking to relaunch a rules discussion amidst this wonderful draft season and with the regular season just around the corner. I'm simply responding to the premise that anyone should've known not to draft Gould. Perhaps next off-season, if/when this topic comes up again, we can search past posts and consider this one.

Though he apparently had a bit of a rocky summer, I don't really think it was that clear that we should've known better than to draft a kicker who finished 6th last year, and whose ADP this year over 121 DC drafts is 15th, which equals a high-end K2 to most. Fortunately, in the two DCs that I drafted him, I also have a 3rd kicker. Whew.

While it's true that any position except DST can get injured or be cut, it sure seems that, among the positions at which most people only draft 2 or 3 - kickers, QBs, TEs and DSTs - starting kickers whose jobs looked secure to the public seem to be much more expendable/interchangeable to NFL teams and are more frequently cut.

That said, I learned my lesson 5 or 6 years ago, when in my own DC, I lost Hartley and Kaeding in the preseason and had to take zeroes for the entire season. Now I always try to draft three in DCs. But as someone else mentioned, MFL and DraftKings don't have them. And in my work league, we got rid of them (and DSTS) - and no one has complained a bit.

[DrEvil1996]

I also didn't plan on Forsett getting cut.

I vote for Team RBs now, too.

Forsett is a moot point and bad comparison, because he's getting re-signed and will be in the same situation that people who were paying attention knew he was in already - vying for playing time in a muddled RB situation with 3 others. Could Gould be given another chance when another team gets mad after 2 extra points in a row are missed? Sure, who knows, but then some other kicker like Kai Forbath that people are drafting will be kicked to the curb (pun intended) and we'll be in the same place as we were as a kicker everyone was drafting is now worthless.

The difference between kickers and the other positions is that it's a waste of everyone's time to spend the offseason paying attention to this stuff when individual kickers are expendable and interchangeable within the league (as the last poster just noted), and kicker production is random (reposting: http://www.foxsports.com/fantasy/footba ... ion-011916)

Would you rather spend time looking through analysis and stats on the Ravens RB situation and trying to gain an edge on the competition by projecting that, or reading whether Travis Coons or Patrick Murray missed more extra points in training camp practice only to find out that they both end up getting cut for a random guy off the street no one expected. That hasn't happened yet, but would anyone be surprised if the Browns cut Murray or Saints cut Forbath for Gould or someone else off the street?

A big draw for the NFFC is that they do some unique things to take out some of the randomness that is usually present in fantasy football and put it in the player's control. It's why we have KDS and 3RR rather than normal snake drafts with random draft order. It's why they have an admin on every online draft for situations where something outside the player's control causes them to get a player they didn't want. It's why we have 35 round Draft Champions drafts - results are less random and more skill-based in a 35 round draft than a 15-20 round draft, all other things equal. Taking out kickers would be another step in this same direction, in my opinion - making the game even more skill-based and slightly less random.