A look back at the Freakingbeastness Fantasy Draft of 2018: Gold Team

DISCLAIMER: 

• Position ranking is taken from the end of year stats from each player.
• Pick position ranking is referring to when they were selected in our leagues draft.
• I.E. Christian Mccaffrey being the 13th RB selected in the draft means he has a pick position ranking of 13.
• Kickers and Defenses are not taken into account for these reviews. In the draft overview section if it looks like a round is missing, that is where a defense or kicker was selected.

Bryce AKA Gold Team: 

• Rank 7/10
• Record 5-9
• Points Scored: 1,184
• Points Against: 1,283

It’s bold to take a TE in the first round, especially one as injury prone as Gronk. Even more bold to take three NE RB’s (two of them in back to back rounds). I guess if you can’t predict which back is gonna be featured each week you can just play them all.

Questionable decisions aside, Gold Team still ended up with the most players in the top-25 of their respective positions with Nine. Having a draft like this you might expect more than 5 wins for the year.
 
Unfortunately, poorly timed and flat out bad transactions doomed this team to mediocrity. Over the course of the season they…

• Traded Kirk Cousins (QB#13) for Carson Wentz (QB#23 and coming off ACL surgery)
• Traded Juju Smith-Schuster (WR#9) for Sterling Shepard (WR#29 who was dropped three weeks after the transaction) and jazz hand snapchats from his brother after every Steelers game
• Dropped Aaron Jones (RB#23) before the season started
• Dropped Andrew Luck (QB#5) and replaced him with Case Keenum (QB#19)

Without these decisions, Gold Team could’ve had a starting lineup of…
​

• Andrew Luck (QB#5)
• James White (RB#11)
• Mark Ingram (RB#28)
• Tyreek Hill (WR#1)
• Juju Smith-Schuster (WR#9)
• Jarvis Landry (WR#22)
• Rob Gronkowski (TE#11)
• Flex: Sony Michel (RB#25) or Aaron Jones (RB#23)

Another contributing factor to the 5 win season was the lack of lineup changes when the bye weeks and injuries hit.

From my previous article you saw the game where only 4 players in the starting lineup were active, there were a total of 5 games where Gold Team had at least 2 players in the starting lineup that contributed 0 points due to byes or injuries.

Gold Team Average Position Rankings

• QB Ranking: 3rd
• RB Ranking: 6th
• WR Ranking: 5th
• TE Ranking: 5th

The average position rankings have Gold Team in the middle of the pack however, they got good value throughout the draft and had 8 selections in the positive difference which was the most in the league.

​In fact, the only true misses of Gold Team’s draft were Mccoy in the 2nd, one of the Patriots RB’s, and Rishard Matthews in the 14th where the picks are mostly guesses anyways.