What if we've Jumped the Shark?

The consensus among several leading best ball analysts is that the answer to Wide Receiver inflation is to swim with the tide... I agree... but what if I'm wrong?

If you’ve read my work - or frankly anyone’s work - on the 2024 best ball season, you’re more than familiar with the dominant theoretical question of this year’s campaign.

Wide Receivers are being priced up to the extreme… how do we respond?

I’ve made the case that we have to swim with the tide, due to the market’s tendency to price Wide Receiver upside efficiently, and the fact that we need to start three or four every week. In my view, the nature of the position is such that we need to reach a threshold of wide receiver firepower no matter what, and to do that we generally want 4-5 WRs prior to the close of the ‘WR window.’ Therefore, the best approach is to mostly forgo early RB opportunities - even if they project better than the WRs they’re being drafted beside - because we will have further chances to attack the RB position in Rounds 7-10 when the comparative advantage is potentially even higher.

However, it’s important to note two major caveats with this thesis:

Goodhart’s Law

The first is that “we just don’t know” if it’s correct. We know that historically, 4-5 WRs through seven rounds has been optimal, but that data is based on only four seasons worth of drafts, none of which have been conducted in a similar positional prioritization to 2024 drafts. Hayden Winks recently wrote - correctly - that simply applying a historical rule to a completely new environment is an insufficient reason for that approach to remain optimal.

We’ve talked a *lot* about proxy variables in my columns over the years, and it’s a consistent tenet of my analysis that a proxy variable is only useful for as long as the proxy accurately describes the causal elements. A common touch point on this is the ‘RB Dead Zone,’ in which avoiding RBs in Rounds 3-6 was consistently profitable until drafters became hyper-aware of this trend, to the point RB pricing was becoming influenced by drafters’ dead zone aversion. This distorted where those RBs would have been naturally priced, and rendered the ‘dead zone’ largely in-actionable, except as a more theoretical concept in terms of RB characteristics to target or avoid.

This phenomenon is known as “Goodhart’s Law,” in which a person (or group of people) accepts that a given measure is so indicative of the goal they’re trying to achieve that they begin to target the measure instead of the actual goal. Seth Partnow’s “The Midrange Theory” had an excellent chapter on this with respect to Russell Westbrook’s triple-double MVP season: in a vacuum, a player obtaining a triple-double is a strong measure of an elite performance. However, by setting the measure as the goal, the marginal assist and rebounding gains Westbrook made in that season to explicitly hunt triple doubles had little impact on team success compared to the baseline statistical profile that described Westbrook’s well-rounded game that made him valuable in the first place.

In a quote that was used in that chapter by Anthropoligist Marilyn Strathern, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

It may well be - and I think it likely is - that 4-5 WRs through 7 rounds remains optimal even in this draft environment, but simply saying “it is optimal because it’s always been optimal” is not compelling.

Optimal Does Mean Eventual

The second caveat is that even if we were certain that WR-heavy opens in this draft economy was the optimal strategy over infinite simulations of the 2024 season, that does not mean it will prove to be the winning strategy in the *one* simulation we will play out this year. By the same token, you could even argue that just because it has appeared optimal in recent years, doesn’t mean it was. Did 2023 demonstrate a vindication of Hero/Zero-RB despite WR price inflation or did Raheem Mostert, De’Von Achane and Kyren Williams just have outlier seasons in the same year?

To liken this to DFS, if player A is projected for 16 Points and 15 Points, it is optimal to play A 100% of the time in a cash game lineup, despite the fact that B will outscore him fairly frequently. Which player is optimal to play in a tournament depends on ownership. At equal ownership, you want A. However, if 80% of the field prefers A, you’re better off rolling with B.

Last year Sackreligious wrote an article calculating “Roster Agnostic Advance Rate:” an attempt to isolate the player’s actual performance as a factor of advance rate independent from other confounding variables such as common pairings due to ADP or team stacks etc. One interesting finding was that certain “Best Ball Cabal” favourites such as Skyy Moore (2022) had an artificially high advance rate despite being a complete bust, while Josh Jacobs (2022) was somewhat depressed relative to his status as a massive hit.

The plausible takeaway is that the best best ball players in the field are consistently drafting certain archetypes and fading others. While they’re often wrong on individual player takes, because they’re also more inclined to draft structurally sound teams and out-hit the field on player takes in aggregate, their preferences can marginally skew the expected performance of a given player. Because the edge is so marginal, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to leverage this phenomenon by intentionally going against the grain on player takes you don’t actually believe. However, there might be something to this concept on a more structural level.

The way drafts are structured this year, if you want to stay ahead of the WR avalanche, you have less flexibility in team construction than you may have in previous years. I suspect that most drafters who believe this is the optimal approach will have a lot of overlap in their portfolio from team to team, and that if twitter is indicative of real life (something that’s probably only true in best ball), most of the best drafters in the world are prioritizing WR firepower above all else.

For that reason, it may be worth considering whether there is leverage available in crafting a portfolio, or at least a segment of a portfolio, that swims against the grain at a structural level.

We know there is surely a glass ceiling to WR-inflation in which at a certain cost the prioritization of WR-firepower becomes an unworthy goal in the face of other options. For instance, if we were drafting Curtis Samuel ahead of Bijan Robinson, no reasonable person would suggest that it’s efficient to follow suit for structural reasons. Somewhere between 2023’s ADP and this ludicrous hypothetical is that glass ceiling, and we can’t say for sure whether 2024 ADP has already shattered it or merely encroaches upon it.

Likewise, we know that there is a stiff upper limit to any exploitative drafting strategy. The fact RB projects better than WR in nearly every round in 2024 is not a reason to draft 10 RBs and 4 WRs.

What the duration of this article attempts to confront are the following questions:

• What are the outer boundaries of a ‘what if we’re wrong’ strategy, beyond which we face diminishing returns?

• What are the conditions necessary for RB-heavy drafts to succeed in 2024?

• What areas of the draft, and which players in those areas, are most ripe for making a systemic bet on RB over WR?