From forty feet up you can see the whole board at once, and on Friday night the board disagreed with itself. One row carried a stale market rank of 88 and a current projection of 175 with a VOR of +21, and two seats at the same table walked past it four picks apart.
Segment two of the Desk Draft Special, as broadcast. Booger McFartland files from the cherry-picker, as is his practice.
Transcribed from the Desk Draft Special, segment two of six, with the analyst's notes. The panel are house bylines — parodies of a type of broadcaster, not of any person. Every number is read off the league's finished board; the podcast quotations are from transcripts held in this repo, dated in the text.
I am forty feet in the air. The bucket is hydraulic. The opinions are structural. The league has asked me, in writing, to come down, and I have written back, also in writing, that from up here you can see the whole board at once and that is worth a great deal more than a chair.
Here is what I could see on Friday night, and I want to walk it in order, because the order is the whole thing.
ADAM SCHNIFTER: BREAKING, and I mean this one. The NFL put Josh Jacobs on the commissioner's exempt list the week before this draft. The Fantasy Footballers covered it August 31st. Their words on MarShawn Lloyd: "far and away the back to roster there." One of them has him "about running back twenty-four"; the show's written range is RB24 to RB30, "with plenty of variability based on Jacob's availability."
IAN CRAPOPORT: BDGE was on him two weeks before the news, on the 17th, and called it handcuff territory — "consensus ADP of the RB fifty-six." But also, if Jacobs missed time, "a top ten ranked fantasy running back on any weekly basis right out of the gate." That was the conditional. Then the condition happened. I filed that. Nobody read it.
MEL KIPPER SNACK: THE BOARD SAYS REACH! Rashaud Express took Lloyd at 84! Market rank 88!
Mel, the market rank isn't stale. The analysts rewrote Lloyd's row on August 30th, the day the news broke.
Market rank is ADP, and ADP is an average of what rooms have actually done. Rooms move slower than analysts do. The projection on the very same row — 175 points and a VOR of +21 — is a forecast, and it had already moved. One line of one spreadsheet, carrying a price and a forecast, and no label to say which was which.
So Rashaud Express took the back who starts for as long as Jacobs is unavailable, at pick 84 — and the show that priced him said outright it could not date the absence.
And the part from the front, which is the part I actually care about: the beat writers in Green Bay were saying they didn't understand how Jacobs fit that offense — not his play style — while Lloyd had been excelling in camp in exactly that role. A scheme fit outlasts a suspension.
I AM GROOT picked at 83. He took KC Concepcion — 131 points, VOR -28.
Shut up Lige picked at 79. He took Michael Wilson — 155, a fourth receiver on a one-running-back roster.
Lloyd was on the board for both of them. The pre-draft brief for Groot named Lloyd at 83. In bold. Twice.
Four picks apart. Same table. Same sheet of paper. Nobody said grace.
SKIP BRAINLESS: Nobody wants to talk about the real steal. Rashaud Express, pick 98, Josh Jacobs. Market rank thirteen. That's the pick of the draft.
Skip. 38 projected points. Status: N-A. VOR -116.
And here is the league fact that finishes the argument. This league's reserve slots take IR and COVID only. Not Out. Not Suspended. Not N-A. The Ballers said the same thing on the 31st: "you can't IR him."
That is a bench spot — one of six — holding a player who is not allowed to play.
SKIP BRAINLESS: It's a stash.
It's a chair.
A board carries prices and forecasts side by side, and they do not move at the same speed.
The analysts rewrote Lloyd on August 30th. His projection moved. His market rank of 88 did not, because market rank is ADP — an average of what rooms have already done, and rooms lag the people paid to react. The tool showed both and said nothing about the difference, and two men with the forecast in front of them, in writing, in bold, twice, went past him four picks apart.
That is not a tooling failure. That is what happens when a plan's tier gets cleared and nobody wrote down what to do next.