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Challenge Contests — by Justin Eleff

It ain't bragging if you back it up.

It ain't bragging if you CAN back it up.

The difference between those statements is bigger than it initially appears, certainly bigger than the inclusion or exclusion of one word. The forgiving editors here at Fantasy Index have asked me back for another year, and I've accepted, and here we go with a flurry of new columns about the national fantasy football challenge contests. But after two solid years of slump -- two years of middling finishes by my challenge teams, sub-middling advice dished out here -- I've decided to raise my level of accountability.

From now on, it is bragging if I merely can back it up. It will cease to be bragging only when I do, finally, produce another good season. Until then I want you openly questioning my authority, doubting my expertise, aiming to run me out of this space. When I'm wrong, I want you to say so. Two years of slump says my readers can use all the doubts our Thomases can muster up. Two years says my challenge teams can use your help, not the other way around.

So I thought we'd start this year with a look at what's gone farthest wrong for me recently, figuring that knowing my usual mistakes is the key to avoiding them. It's a wise approach, says me, especially because it dovetails with the one most troubling observation I've made over the last several years (across NFL, MLB and even NBA seasons):

More and more, the challenge standings seem to stagnate from the middle of the season on. There's little movement in the typical league of 25 teams once the season hits its midpoint. The standings lock up, seem to be locked in.

We can speculate together, if you want, as to why that might be. My personal theories go something like this:

One, the challenge makers aren't doing a great job of setting player salaries. More and more of the player pools in each fantasy sport sort themselves easily into must-owns and must-not-owns. One right approach to building a roster outs itself early on -- well before the season starts -- and there are relatively few differences between the teams owned by those challenge participants who have a clue about how the games work.

Two, more and more challenge participants have that clue. As the years have passed, most of the bedrock strategies at play in the various challenges have become widely known. I, for one, give away much of the store in this space year after year. CDM / Fanball's bulletin boards are jammed with posts by players at all skill levels, and the veterans often take the rookies at least partway under their wings. So most challenge players are playing the games the same way. It's more luck than obvious differences in skill that separate them.

Three -- maybe this is just me -- real players' hot streaks and cold streaks seem to last deeper into their respective seasons now than they did, say, a decade ago. No doubt there's a PED cause behind some of this effect; without naming names, I'll remind you of two baseball players, one catcher and one third baseman, who posted ridiculous monster seasons in their respective contract years not so long ago, thereby "earning" free agent deals they immediately proved unworthy of. You could name your own pet suspects, no doubt. Congress could. And when a guy starts a new season hot, maybe for our purposes it's not such a big deal. But when a previously reliable star player starts cold, the last few years I've tended to believe it was more than a slump. Strange days. Not much we can do about that.

But think through what I'm telling you. The standings lock up around the middle of the season. You need to be at the top when they do. But the early streaks last longer than they used to.

So?

So you have to react quickly -- more quickly than before -- to those early streaks. Better yet, you have to own the players who will have the early hot streaks. Not much of an insight, perhaps, but I have an idea about how to identify those players.

Maybe you remember that two years ago I decided not to own Robbie Gould (when everyone else did own him), then whined and whined as he blasted 143 kicking points. I proved to be right, eventually, that he couldn't stay hot forever; fully 90 of the 143 came in his first 8 games. But by the time he proved me right, he'd beaten my brains in and forced me to burn multiple purchases chasing KPs from other PKs.

Last year was worse. With Gould, at least, I'd had an excellent reason for avoiding the player: I thought the Bears' offense would be lousy, and it is generally true that bad offenses yield fewer kicking points than good offenses. Last year, though, I avoided Willie Parker, despite the fact that I had few real reservations about the Steelers' O, and despite the fact that, in a world gone lousy with committee approaches at RB, he seemed assured of near-workhorse duty. Indeed, Parker finished with 63% of the team's carries, with 321 overall (to runner-up Najeh Davenport's 107).

The smallest victory for me: Parker scored only twice all year.

The largest defeat: Rushing totals of 109 yards, 126, 133, 37, 102 before a Week 6 bye. He averaged a solid 4.2 yards per carry during that stretch, during which -- in an effort to catch up with teams that owned him -- I purchased Rudi Johnson for his 17-carries-for-9-yards effort at Seattle, then a never-fully-uncorked Edgerrin James. Fast Willie came off the bye with 21-for-93 at Denver and 22-for-126 (with his second TD) at Cincinnati, and my season was sunk. Right on schedule, eight weeks in.

The single biggest mistake in my two years of slump was not carrying Parker to start last season, on the principled grounds that I didn't think he was much of a football player. I still don't. Hell, his team doesn't seem to, what with Rashard Mendenhall the pick at No. 23 in the first round of the draft.

It didn't matter if Fast Willie was something less than Canton material. What mattered was that he had a job, nearly a full-time job, carrying the ball for a good offense that was going to open against a run of bad defenses. If that isn't a recipe for success, really, not much is. And if ignoring that didn't make me a deserving loser last season, really, nothing could.

So, you know. Never again.

As we come to the first real meat in our discussion of challenges present and future, let's make each other some promises. You'll tell me when I'm wrong, just the way I've asked you to. And I will tell you, looking back on the ways I've been wrong before, how to be right in 2008. Over the next few weeks we'll talk through the basics of building a challenge roster. This week we'll call the most basic of those basics the Willie Parker Axiom:

Own the likeliest fast starters, especially at RB, especially when they have full jobs.

This year that means owning five players, probably, maybe six, four of whom can be named without any hesitation right now.

Before we get to names, though, here's how I arrived at my list of five:

I started with last year's team defense statistics, and I used them to generate a ranking of which teams I'd most like my running backs to play against. The ranking came entirely from three numbers: yards allowed per game, yards allowed per attempt, touchdowns allowed. I weighted the two yards-allowed stats twice as heavily as TDs allowed, mostly because I see who-scores-when-against-whom as flukier than who-runs-wildest-against-whom. This analysis can, of course, be tweaked for challenges that don't include yards-per-carry as a stat category.

I wasn't looking for laser-like precision in ranking the defenses, and I won't pretend to have adjusted for player movement during the offseason (or the draft). I wanted a number, backed solely by unit performance, that answered this question: On a scale from 1 (least) to 10 (most), which teams do I want to go against?

The top and bottom of the resulting list look like this:

Top
OAK (10)
MIA (9)
DEN (8)
BUF (7)
CHI (7)
DET (7)
NYJ (7)

Bottom
PIT (3)
WAS (3)
BAL (1)
MIN (1)

Which leaves 21 of the league's 32 teams with a 4, 5 or 6 rating, which seems about right.

Then I made the simplest possible adjustment to account for the fact that I'd rather see my players face bad defenses at home than on the road: I added one point to the raw number when my player would indeed be home, and subtracted a point when he would face the same team on the road. The only exception is that I kept the scale running from 1 to 10, so going against Oakland at home = 10, not 11.

And then I looked at the early schedules, adding the 1-to-10 numbers for each NFL team's first four opponents (whether they'll come in Weeks 1 through 4 or, in the case of six teams that drew Week 4 byes, Weeks 1, 2, 3 and 5).

Assuming that the teams with the highest resulting totals have a single running back who might be worth owning -- as opposed to a true committee, or a remarkable lack of talent -- I figure I'll own their lead RBs, and that way will not miss this year's Fast Willie.

It so happens that the teams with the most favorable schedules to start 2008 also do, for the most part, have backs worth owning. In descending order:

SAN DIEGO

1st four opponents: vs. CAR (5), at DEN (7), vs. NYJ (8), at OAK (9)

So my first real recommendation of 2008 is that you own LaDainian Tomlinson, all $3500 of him in the CDM / Fanball Football Challenge. I just performed a series of calculations and thereby concluded that the one best player in fantasy football is ... indeed ... worth ... owning. This is why I cannot possibly answer all of my fan mail.

KANSAS CITY

1st four opponents: at NE (3), vs. OAK (10), at ATL (5), vs. DEN (9)

The line in front of him was putrid a year ago, and Larry Johnson ($2840) looked little like his previous self. Still, talentwise he remains among the very best runners in the NFL, and even at 28 he has relatively little wear on his wheels. So what is a player worth when his team works against him? Ordinarily, not $2840 -- but the schedule is a beauty. Sit him down Week 1, at the Pats in a game in which KC is verrrrrry likely to trail by 10 points after 15 minutes, and see what happens. If the O shows you anything at all, in goes L.J. against the Raiders in Week 2, in a move most challenge teams will have avoided. Even if New England makes KC look like a Pop Warner team, it's unlikely that Johnson will hurt you against the Raiders. And if worse comes to worst, two weeks in you'll know exactly which player to make your first drop of the season -- often a difficult choice, and thus, in a perverse sense, a solid argument in favor of L.J.

NEW ENGLAND

1st four opponents: vs. KC (7), at NYJ (6), vs. MIA (10), at SF (3)

I told you this recommendation was for five and maybe six players. Laurence Maroney ($1930) is the maybe sixth. No doubt he has a world of talent, and a world of talent around him, and the early part of this early schedule looks great. But the Pats have a Week 4 bye, and at SF is obviously not the best of their run, so you only want to own Maroney if you're comfortable using him from the opening kick. Given how he's been used so far in his career, I'm not certain you can be comfortable. Especially because something tells me a slightly shamed Tom Brady will throw 11 TD passes before Week 3.

OAKLAND

1st four opponents: vs. DEN (9), at KC (5), at BUF (6), vs. SD (6)

Ian Allan, lord of the Fantasy Football Index manor, has written many times that great RBs tend to be great from their earliest games. Adrian Peterson was last year. Reggie Bush was -- er, Adrian Peterson was last year. Darren McFadden ($1000) will be in 2008. I really doubt there's much to the concerns we heard on draft day -- that the Raiders ran the ball just fine in 2007, that DMC won't get as many touches in Oakland as he might have elsewhere. In games where yards-per-carry count, that last bit actually helps. Everywhere else -- everywhere, period -- special talents do not sit for the likes of Justin Fargas or Michael Bush. The Broncos' D, at home, on MNF, sets a nearly perfect opening stage.

BUFFALO

1st four opponents: vs. SEA (6), at JAX (4), vs. OAK (10), at STL (5)

He got a little lost behind Peterson, but Marshawn Lynch ($1370) was nearly great from the get-go himself, opening with 19-for-90 and a TD against Denver and finishing his rookie season 280-for-1,115 (4.0 AVG) with 7 TDs. The salary didn't move much, the early schedule looks good, the hit-and-run is settled up and Lynch is ready to run-and-hit. His home schedule looks especially favorable, not only in Weeks 1 and 3 (see above), but with three other games rating at least 7 on my venue-adjusted scale.

DENVER

1st four opponents: at OAK (9), vs. SD (6), vs. NO (5), at KC (5)

Yes, of course, I wish I could offer recommendations that didn't lend themselves so easily to disclaimer. Larry Johnson looks good early on if Kansas City has improved up front -- but we won't know if they've improved until Johnson looks good early on. Laurence Maroney should be golden in Weeks 1, 2 and 3 -- or maybe Sammy Morris will be instead. In Denver, as has too often been the case of late, I'm 100% certain that someone will be worth owning in Week 1, but only 10% certain I know who that someone will be. Call Selvin Young ($940) the likeliest member of an ensemble cast to look awards-worthy on Opening (Monday) Night, and watch closely in August. An injury here -- or in New England -- not that anyone ever roots for such things -- might provide needed clarification.

All told, call it three recommendations without hesitation -- Tomlinson, McFadden, Lynch -- and three with. If you find that underwhelming, add Joseph Addai ($2550, vs. CHI (8)) and Michael Turner ($1220, vs. DET (8)) to the without hesitation group for Week 1. After that ...

We'll talk more about this, I promise.

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