Windy City Gridiron
As we wait for the next few weeks for the Chicago Bears training camp to fire up, we are going to take a look at the Windy City Gridiron Dynasty league, review the rookie draft that took place, and analyze the 14 rosters in the league.
If you missed the original introductory article on the league, you can check that out here.
This article will look at each team’s draft and how I, as a veteran dynasty player, feel they fared in the draft.
With this league, teams need a full roster of players at every position (even kickers and punters), except for the offensive line. Every statistic is tracked and counted. It’s the way fantasy football should be played!
Let’s take a quick overview of the draft and then grade each person’s performance.
Let’s start with the first two rounds:
The first 5 picks are pretty chalky in most drafts. Lemon and Tyson seem debatable at 3 and 4, but in most leagues, that’s how it goes. Things get interesting after that because there is so little depth of high-end offensive talent. That was reflected by a flood of defensive talent being selected 9 times between picks 11 and 24. This wasn’t the strongest rookie dynasty draft, so teams have to get creative in how they approach the draft.
Here’s a look at rounds 3 and 4:
In my experience, round 1 is usually all offensive players, round 2 a handful of defensive players go, and in round 3 is where we start to see a lot of quarterbacks and defensive players come off the board. This is not a superflex league; if it were, QBs would go much higher and go in round 1. In non-superflex leagues, you’ll usually see 1, maybe 2 QBs go in round 1, but in a draft like this, defensive talent was already coming off the board earlier, and there just weren’t QBs worth selecting.
Finally, here’s a look at rounds 5 and 6:
The last two rounds are usually lottery tickets, especially round six. Look at it compared to the regular NFL Draft. In the first 4 rounds, there were 45 offensive linemen and cornerbacks selected. CBs don’t have a lot of value based on how they score fantasy points, and they aren’t worth taking usually until much later in the draft. When you think of the idea that there are 140 total picks in the first 4 rounds, by round 6, you are usually looking at 4th and 5th round players becoming good enough to become impact fantasy players. There are always a handful of those, but most don’t reach those heights.
Let’s take a look at the individual draft grades.
I can’t be overly critical of myself because I did trade up to the number one pick prior to the draft to land easily the best fantasy player in this draft in Jeremyiah Love. But I got burned on a gamble. With only 1 defensive player...
