Your draft day arbitrage plan might include snagging New York Giants running back Andre Brown near the end of the seventh round instead of his uber-skilled backfield buddy, David Wilson, four rounds earlier.
This will be a quick addendum to my piece on what Tom Coughlin’s and Kevin Gilbride’s running back usage history might mean for Wilson in 2013. There has been somewhere around 10 million words written about the Giants’ backfield, so why not add to that Fantasy Football Tower of Babble?
This time of year is filled with fantasy football owners swearing off certain players – guys who they once loved, mostly. A scorned heart never forgets, and you might see that on draft day as pariahs like Darren McFadden and Ryan Mathews fall to spots that make them real-life values.
Read more about the Giants’ backfield…
Searching 29 Years of Coaching History to Gauge David Wilson’s Fantasy Football Prospects
Injuries are the reason we hate these guys with such white-hot passion. A whole cottage industry has sprung up around preaching against players with miles-long injury histories. It’s easier to dismiss them out of hand; it narrows our choices, and we like that.
The same owners who forsake Mathews—whose coach wants him to be “the guy” in 2013—as the 28th running back off the draft board are somehow willing to burn a seventh rounder on Brown (RB34), who will likely be in a true timeshare backfield and sports an injury history that looks a little something like this.
I don’t buy into the lazy injury-prone label so often slapped on guys. A player is healthy until he’s not, or injury-prone until, magically, he isn’t. Incorporating injury proneness into your valuation of a fantasy commodity is only adding to the guesswork we do in preparation for our drafts.
Fretting about injuries and deciding who you will and won’t draft because of said injuries, in many ways, is just multiplying a guess by another guess.
I can’t help but notice that many of the same owners who have sworn to every deity that they won’t draft guys like McFadden and Mathews are keen on drafting Brown as a value pick this summer.
