Deep Sleepers and The Experts Who Love Them
We’ve had a positive response to our objective way of finding the sleepers that individual expert’s love, so we’re continuing the series today with a look at Deep Sleepers. In the first post of the series, I laid out our sleeper pick definition and noted the need for a separate category for the guys that are being drafted at the very end of the draft (or not drafted at all).
To find these deep sleepers, I’ve gone through and filtered our ranking data by position. Let’s start with the WRs, since they typically have the deepest list of players. For WRs, I’m going to use the following requirements:
- Have an ADP outside of the top 60 WRs. In a 12 team league, that means an average of 5 WRs already on the rosters of each team. Deep enough, right?
- Have an ECR (Expert Consensus Rank) outside of the top 60 WRs. If all the experts feel like the guy is a sleeper, then he’s not really a sleeper!
- The expert making the sleeper prediction must publicly rank the player inside of his top 60 WRs.
- AND, the expert’s rank must be at least 24 spots better than both the ADP and ECR.
Here’s the list of WRs that made it through this filter. I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty small list which is a good thing (sleeper lists that have a long list of players tend to just put me to sleep!).
WR deep sleepers and the experts who love them:
[table id=16 /]
As you can probably tell, we try to do things objectively here by using an expert’s published rankings to give us insight on his opinions. Basically, we tell you who these experts love relative to the consensus opinion. Which experts to trust, however, is entirely up to you. OK, that was my way of saying these aren’t MY deep sleeper picks. Although as a Raiders fan (did I just admit that?), it would be pretty sweet to see Darrius Heyward-Bey turn things around from last year’s joke of a season.
Moving on to other positions… doh! Nada. Ziltch. The big fat zero. It may not surprise you that it was difficult (basically impossible) to find “deep sleepers” at the other positions using this construct. Even after reducing the requirements to reflect the smaller number of starting positions, QB and TE really produced nothing even close to a deep sleeper. I think there’s general consensus on which players make the top players at each position, and any sleeper picks beyond that are being ranked as merely undervalued. No one is going to put Jason Campbell (sorry, I know that’s two Raiders in one post, but the Campbell to Heyward-Bey double-dip is the ultimate deep sleeper combo!) as a top guy with a ranking way higher than the consensus no matter how much he thinks he’s a breakout candidate. The lists just aren’t deep enough to produce “deep sleepers” using my objective approach which relies on a rogue expert pick.
I’m guessing you want to see some more player picks anyway, so here are a few running backs that seem to have one or two experts backing them as potential late round gems. I basically looked for RBs that were ranked outside of the ECR and ADP top 55 RBs, but that had one expert ranking him at least 15 spots better than his ADP. Here’s the list I came up with:
- Jonathan Dwyer (PIT). FFToolbox has him as their RB 49 (ADP of RB 64).
- Javon Ringer (TEN). Sigmund Bloom of FootballGuys puts him at RB 47 (ADP of RB 69).
- Julius Jones (SEA). FantasySharks has him at RB 44 (ADP of RB 62).
- Mike Bell (PHI). Roger Rotter of Fox Sports has him at RB 42 (ADP of RB 58).
There are a couple of obvious handcuffs on this list and you could argue that their rank is dependent more on whether or not you believe in handcuffing (picking up a backup as an insurance policy), than whether you think he’s a real deep sleeper. But I think all handcuffs can also be seen as viable lottery picks – you don’t have to own Chris Johnson to be rewarded for picking up his handcuff. In fact, you could probably taunt the Chris Johnson owner every week until he gives you a nice trade offer for Javon Ringer. Sleeping better at night is worth something in fantasy football!
Note: This is the 2nd to last post in our series on 2010 sleeper picks, which uses an objective screening process to identify the sleepers that certain expert’s love. Next week we’ll wrap up the series with a refresh of our previous outputs based on the final rankings data we have for each expert. During the season we’ll keep track of how each expert’s sleeper pick is doing. Let’s see who gets them right!
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