Concepts

13 pages.

ADP as a market priceAverage draft position is what thousands of drafters actually did, aggregated — which makes it a price, not a ranking, and the useful signal is never the price itself but the gap between it and your own number.
Bye weeks as a roster constraintEvery player has exactly one week where he scores zero for reasons that have nothing to do with him, and covering those weeks is a packing problem competing for the same bench spots as everything else you want to hold.
Convex payoffs and roster varianceWhen the reward rises faster than the outcome that produces it, variance stops being a risk you tolerate and becomes a good you should buy — with one qualification large enough to reverse the advice in half the draft.
Draft capital dominanceIn football the draft establishes most of the season — but in this shallower league the waiver wire is a real source of repairs, not a reason to ignore it.
League size and replacement levelTen teams change the question behind every pick: not “is this player good?” but “how much better is he than the player I can still get later or from the wire?” The player pool has not changed. The number of teams competing for it has.
Opportunity shareSnaps gate opportunity but are not opportunity — a player has to be on the field to be eligible for the ball, and then the ball still has to come to him.
Positional scarcity as a supply constraintScarcity is a fact about the shape of a position's supply, not about how good its best player is — and in football the supply is constrained by how many roles exist, not by how much talent exists.
Replacement levelA player is worth what he scores above the best thing you could have had for free, and where that free thing sits is decided by the lineup, not by the player.
Sample size in a 17-game seasonThe football season is far too short for anything to average out, which is a structural fact about the sport rather than a complaint — and it changes what you are allowed to conclude from what you observe.
Streaming a positionRotating a roster spot through whoever has the best matchup this week instead of holding one player all season — a habit that transfers from basketball in its logic and not at all in its motive.
The conserved team touch budgetAn offense has a fixed number of plays to give away each week, so production inside a team is zero-sum — every touch one player gets is a touch a teammate did not.
The injury-inheritance asymmetryFootball does not divide a vacated role among teammates the way basketball divides minutes — it hands the whole thing to one person, overnight, and that single fact is the most valuable in-season mechanic in the sport.
Touchdown varianceA touchdown pays six points and happens a handful of times a season, so a large share of a player's scoring comes from a very small number of events — which is the single biggest reason football scores are spikier than basketball ones.