Well that was one weird year.
Seriously. Just look at the first round guys and their production. If you picked in the top half of your draft, you weren’t very happy (well you were for the first half of the year if you took Derek Henry… sigh). Such is fantasy football. But in the spirit of full transparency, lets look at the good and bad calls that we made this past year.
Where we were right.
- We avoided most of the land mines. And I’m not counting the guys who got injured because you can’t blame the guy who drafted McCaffrey, Henry, etc. Injuries happen. I’m talking about the guys like Saquon Barkley, Allen Robinson, Kenny Golladay and Miles Sanders. We mostly stayed away from those guys and for good reason.
- Our late round running back targets did well. We loved taking guys like Damien Harris, Javonte Williams, and Leonard Fournette late and they helped your team all year long.
- The Colts and Patriots defenses were popular picks (usually because we waited on D) and those two defenses ended up being two of the best all year long.
- Tom Brady. We knew he had one last hurrah in him and we’ll miss him next year. He was often the 10th or 11th QB drafted and we loved to scoop him in the late rounds.
- Deebo Samuel. We loved the value of the San Francisco wide receivers and usually tried to snag one of the two. Hopefully, you were lucky to get this one and not…
Ok, now where we were wrong.
- Brandon Aiyuk. Woof. I blame the San Francisco beat reporters for not giving us a heads up that this guy was in the dog house. He showed a little life late in the year but nothing close to the 5th round pick return that we expected.
- If you had a pick after the top 5, chances are we reached on Travis Kelce as your first pick. After the first couple of games we looked like geniuses, but Kelce (and the rest of the Chiefs) hit a mysterious mid-season lull and he did not return the numbers that we hoped for. He was still the overall TE2 (missing TE1 for the first time in 5 years), but we won’t be drafting him the first round next year.
- Cooper Kupp. Didn’t see it.
- Calvin Ridley was one of our favorite early wide receiver targets. Hopefully he gets back to playing at a high level once he gets everything sorted out because he’s a great talent.