2018 Season Recap (pt2)
My goal is to be as transparent with my analysis as I can. I want to see what was a bad call, just as much as a good call. By reflecting on the start of season work and seeing where it ended up is important for this learning process. Below is my start of season rankings, before Week 1 started. These rankings is where I had each player finishing the season. Very seldom did I get the ranking right on the dot, but it did happen. I'll briefly highlight the best and worst calls from my rankings.
I was very high on both Andrew Luck and Deshawn Watson coming into the season. Although Luck was ranked one spot lower, his draft price was about 3 to 4 rounds cheaper. Both finished one spot higher than my rankings. I hit the mark for Philip Rivers. He was one of the more consistent QB this season. He didn't have those blowup games that we saw with Patrick Mahomes, but he got the job done each week. Looking at the RB, I really only had a couple people that my ranking was 3 spots off of where they were ranked. Many though were within 7 spots or fewer. Moving to the WR, Both Julio Jones and DeAndre Hopkins finished one spot away from my rank. Michael Thomas and Mike Evans actually were correct with there end of season ranks. My top 20 WR didn't have a huge variance in finish like the bottom half of the ranks does. Overall I felt like my QB rankings and my WR were the highlights of my rankings.
On the flip side there are quite a few misses. I wont go over them all as you will be able to see in the rankings below, but there are some outliers. Probably my biggest miss at QB has to be Baker Mayfield. My rankings reflected that Mayfield could get put into a developmental year, while Tyrod Taylor starts most of the year. That didn't happen. I also had Josh Allen as my last ranked QB. I didn't think he would do much this year, but his rushing ability sure proved me wrong. He finished as a top 20 QB. There are a few misses for my RB ranks. Just like everyone I am sure that no one really saw James Conner and Philip Lindsay coming. I barely ranked Conner and didn't rank Lindsay. T.J. Yeldon and Austin Ekeler both finished over 40 spots higher than I had them projected. The thing that skews RB ranks is the injury rate for the position, along with the use of multiple backs increasing. I'd say one of my non-injury misses has to be Royce Freeman. I had him ranked in the top 15 RB, one spot higher than Joe Mixon. There are plenty of misses for WR but most of them are either due to injuries or the WR that benefited from those injuries. I was wrong on a few notable names. I had JuJu Smith-Schuster 17 spots lower than what I was projecting. Others included Kenny Golladay and Chris Godwin. Both guys I liked a lot before the season, but I wasn't expecting that type of breakout so soon. My biggest TE miss was not ranking Eric Ebron coming into the season. I had him as a clear cut backup. I felt as these rankings were semi-balanced from correct and incorrect ranks.
It is always interesting to see where my advice actually goes when it is all said and done. Using some of the rankings while drafting, could have helped in many ways. My 2019 Rankings will come out by the start of the next season. The last part of the 2018 recap will be looking at the specific players that I recommended to fade during the draft.
Click Rankings to access as a spreadsheet.
