Splitsville: The DeMarco dilemma

Let’s start Splitsville in Dallas, which has multiple fantasy football wild cards in Championship Week.

DeMarco Murray was thought to be out for sure with a broken hand. But then Stephania Bell at ESPN reported expertly that this injury had an average 2.8 day recovery time for football players based on a recent medical study. This was within minutes of the news breaking. So then it was bettable that Murray was going to play as normal and I proceeded that way. I did not waste a waiver claim on Joseph Randle knowing my championship game opponent would block me. That resulted in me adding two players I wanted on waivers instead of just one, completely closing the projected points gap. It could still blow up in my face, of course. There is no guarantee that Murray will play. But I thought it was bettable. The process is correct, regardless of the results. Remember, this is an elimination game, essentially, for Dallas.

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Murray will face a Colts team with nothing to play for, as they are locked into the No. 3 or No. 4 seed, where both teams get a home game and no bye. So do not expect injured players like T.Y. Hilton (hamstring) to go. And it’s possible the Colts will pull some starters like it’s the preseason. Again, there is no inside info here — the Colts say they will play normally. But what’s bettable? (The Cowboys and Murray of course, can’t take the chance that the Colts won’t play normally.)

The best argument against taking a QB early is that five have already thrown 30 touchdown passes (Andrew Luck, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Drew Brees) and four more are on pace to: Ben Roethlisberger, Tony Romo, Matt Ryan and Philip Rivers. That doesn’t include Jay Cutler, who has 28 but who is now benched.

Eight quarterbacks have scored over 250 points, all within 80 of Andrew Luck. Yes, 80 points seems a lot, but this is where value based drafting falls apart. You could have grabbed one of these guys within 80 points of the top spot for basically zero cost. Even in leagues that overdraft QBs, we’re talking a middle-round player or lower. So getting Luck, for example, gains you 80 points plus whoever you would have drafted in the third or fourth round at another position. The guy who waits takes whichever QB is left, probably gets within 80 points or just goes to the waiver wire if that doesn’t work out and rinses and repeats. The value of Luck is thus lower than the 80 points because his replacement cost is so low — essentially free.

Some quarrel with this type of analysis because we play a weekly game. So who cares about cumulative points? But if you are playing in a league that doesn’t have at least one total points playoff team and ideally two, you are playing it incorrectly. These are easy fixes in all the scoring formats. The commissioner can just put playoff teams in, ignoring the standings. We did it in the Stopa 10K league.

[Week 16 rankings: Quarterback | Running Back | Receiver | Tight End | Kicker | DST]

What we really need data on, however, is the number of quarterbacks drafted on average in 12-team, one-QB leagues. It should be 12. I suspect, however, it’s 20-plus. This changes the calculus, of course.

There are some freely available defenses this week to stream and I’m happily playing the Jaguars in one championship game. Jacksonville is sixth in sack rate and the Titans, who should be tanking, quite frankly, are 26th offensively in sack rate allowed. That’s the most bettable thing about fantasy defenses — sacks. Of course, sacks lead to the turnovers, too, often directly (about 30 percent result in fumbles). I’d rather have Baltimore against the Texans off-the-street QB, but the Ravens are not readily available. Neither are the Lions (against Jimmy Clausen).

One of the foundations of the zeroRB theory is the expected value of running backs available in the late rounds or on the waiver wire. This year, we have RB8 (Justin Forsett), RB9 (Jeremy Hill), RB11 (Joique Bell), RB14 (Mark Ingram), RB16 (C.J. Anderson), RB17 (Chris Ivory), RB20 (Matt Asiata). That’s over 33 percent of the top 20 backs who were undrafted or drafted past the point where we expect to keep guys rostered. That scoring is the default used by Pro-Football-Reference, which is non-PPR. But PPR isn’t going to swing that much and will just put some different scrubs in there.

The highest ranked 30-year-old RBs are 13th (Steven Jackson), 16th (Frank Gore), 18th (Fred Jackson), 20th (Darren Sproles) and 28th (Pierre Thomas). I guess they all technically came in at about ADP, but talk about your low ceilings.  Next year, avoid Matt Forte in the first round, especially with the new coach/system that’s likely to be there, and pay nothing of consequence for Forsett, Rashad Jennings, Chris Johnson and Reggie Bush.

The tight ends other than Rob Gronkowski are closely bunched. Other than Gronk, it would have paid to wait — and that was basically my strategy. When I lost Gronk in the second-round in this FLEX industry league, I just waited forever and took Travis Kelce, which at least has resulted in my Twitter avi.

You could make the same argument with Gronkowski that I made earlier with Luck. I’d disagree with it somewhat. I felt certain about Gronk, though certainty is a very dangerous thing. I may not be so lucky again. There’s money to be made in ignoring tight ends, no doubt. But it’s another season-long headache and hit and miss with streaming as tight ends are very difficult to project. Plus we cant “zero” every position.