As a general rule quarterbacks run football and the NFL. Even in fantasy football QB’s run the day… so why is it that everyone waits on drafting a quarterback? I completely understand the reasoning behind this question – since they’re the highest scoring players, shouldn’t they be coming off the board first? Like anything, it’s just a hair more complicated than that.
Drafting your team is definitely about picking the players that put up the most points, after all, that’s how you win the game and like Herm Edwards says: “You play to win the game!” However, there’s another piece to drafting that goes along with picking the best player. That piece is called value. This can be a little tricky to explain sometimes, so I’m going to break it down as simply as I can: the value of a pick is determined by how much better or worse a player is than the players picked around him. For example, if I can pick one of the best players in the league, like Adrian Peterson, in one of the last rounds of the draft, I’m getting great value because Peterson scores so many more points compared to the other players picked late in the draft.
The reason people wait on quarterbacks is because even though they score a lot of points, there are a lot of them. Why pick one in the first round when someone almost as good will be there 5 rounds later? Value also comes from things like depth and scarcity. Since there isn’t a world of difference between players like Aaron Rodgers and Carson Palmer (Rodgers was one of the first quarterbacks taken in 2015 while Palmer went largely undrafted), people tend to draft players from positions with less depth early in the draft. There’s a big difference between landing Le’Veon Bell and Ryan Mathews – and that difference could cost you a championship.
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