12. Trevor
It was the fall of 1939.
War had once again broken out across the European continent, but this time an even greater battle loomed. The spectre of the German offensive hung like a perennial cloud of dread o'er the British Isles. But across the airwaves, it was the voice of Winston Churchill that radiated through the fog, his nightly broadcasts providing buoyancy to a beleaguered island nation. "You ask, what is our aim?" Churchill began. "I can answer in one word: Victory."
No, 'twas not Victory in Europe to which Churchill aspired this night. But rather a greater, more significant victory, one that would bestow bragging rights upon his nation for generations to come. It was the victory of his fantasy football team.
Historians now know that Churchill had gone Zero-RB the draft prior, loading up on elite WRs, a TE and something called a wingback (WB). The problem was the forward pass had yet to be invented. (The man was lightyears ahead of his time.) Worse still he'd lost his high-upside RB to a bad case of polio. If you thought playing against Dunkirk Cousins was bad last season, try setting your lineup on the beaches of Dunkirk.
So as a new season approached with the draft looming, Churchill had his eyes on victory. He'd mock drafted on the beaches. He'd mock drafted on the landing grounds. He'd even mock drafted in the fields and in the streets, which was impressive in those days because the WiFi was truly hit-or-miss. And most admirably, he'd never surrendered a mock draft early.
The problem was Britain had been randomly selected to draft 11th, which was just before Russia. And nobody ever knew what the Russians were going to do. Sure, Churchill could predict the other team owners. The French would let the Germans draft for them. The Swiss had already decided to sit out the season. And the Americans would autodraft until about the sixth round, get angry when the Japanese made fun of them in the group chat, then save the day with a couple of late-round sleepers.
But the Russians? Nobody had a clue. They were an inscrutable, menacing team owner that at times struck fear into the hearts of its league mates and at other times simply struck out. They were both gladiator and doormat. The bear from The Revenant and Yogi's sidekick Boo-Boo. Sometimes they conscripted the finest RBs in the land. Then other times selected WR after WR after WR like some sort of sick matryoshka doll.
So as Churchill prepared to deliver his pre-draft remarks to the British faithful in the fall of 1939, he uttered these now famous words: "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia," grumbled Churchill. "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."
As the members of The Worst League prepare for its eighth annual draft, we too face a similarly perplexing enigma. To unravel its mystery, perhaps we must first begin, as Churchill suggested, by answering a riddle.
Let's see how you do:
There are two teams—Team A and Team B.
Team A is a member of The Worst League. They have been dominant. Over a four-year period, their overall record was 29-23 with a TW% of .620, which ranked second in the league, just a hair's breadth outside the top spot. Team A also ranked second in scoring, averaging 94.1 ppg while leading the league in scoring at RB with 34.3 ppg.
Team B is also a member of The Worst League. They have been abysmal. Over a similar period of time, their overall record was 9-29-1 with a TW% of .304, which ranked dead-last in the league by a healthy margin. Team B also ranked last in scoring, averaging 74.3 ppg including just 18.8 ppg from the RB position.
So Mr. Churchill, who are the two team owners?
It might surprise you to find out that Team A is Trevor. No doubt he was one of the most successful team owners in the early years of the league from 2011-14. But, would it also surprise you to find out that Team B is... also Trevor?!?
(Okay, maybe it didn't surprise you at all. I guess the long, rambling Russia metaphor or the fact that this entire meandering piece is written beneath a giant photo of Trevor might have given it away.)
But yes, Team B is also Trevor. From 2015-2017, Trevor has been, no question, one of the worst-performing team owners in the league. No, I take that back. He's been the worst. And yet, he was one of the best. He is champion and he is chump. He is Russia. He is the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
So what gives? How can we explain the wild swings in performance? And what happened in 2015 that flipped the switch?
We'll start, like with all of our analysis, with the draft, the foundation upon which success or failure is built for any fantasy football team owner. In terms of draft analytics, we don't have a lot to go on as it relates to Trevor's early success given that most of that occurred prior to the modern era for which I have data on VBD. But we do have one year—2014.
2014 was Trevor's last successful season. He went 7-6 and missed the playoffs, but finished with a TW% of .615, which placed him second in the final Power Rankings, one spot behind eventual champion Jess. His draft from that season was respectable, ranking fifth among team owners in 2014 and among the top-20 drafts of the modern era. Notably, he drafted very well in the early rounds (1-5), selecting two top-6 players by VBD with his first two picks in Arian Foster and DeMarco Murray, the latter of whom finished the season as the #1 RB in his last season as a Cowboy. From this data, we can conclude that an above-average draft, especially at the very top, resulted in a solid season.
While we don't have advanced metrics to measure the effectiveness of prior drafts, a look at his overall positional preferences reveals that Trevor drafted similarly. Here are Trevor's first 10 picks by position for his first four years in the league:
11: RB-QB-RB-WR-WR-RB-WR-DST-QB-TE
12: RB-RB-QB-RB-WR-WR-TE-WR-RB-WR
13: RB-RB-WR-RB-QB-WR-TE-WR-WR-TE
14: RB-RB-WR-WR-WR-QB-RB-WR-RB-TE
Notice a draft bias toward RBs and away from WRs. In each of his first four seasons, Trevor selected two RBs with his first three picks and in some cases three with his first four. Over time, we do see a general trend to wait on QB later and later, but the rest is relatively consistent. Trevor would draft two RBs early, catch up on WRs between rounds 3-6, select a TE late (rounds 7-10) and then mix-and-match with RBs and WRs to close out the draft.
But his drafts from 2015-2017 tell a completely different story. Each have ranked among the bottom 25% of all drafts in the modern era. His draft from 2015 was particularly bad, the second-to-worst in recorded history. In this bust-ridden draft, only one of his 16 total picks finished in the top-100 by VBD. That's hard to do even if you're trying.
Now let's take a look at his drafts from the last three seasons by position:
15: RB-WR-RB-QB-RB-WR-TE-WR-RB-WR
16: WR-WR-WR-TE-WR-WR-WR-RB-QB-RB
17: WR-WR-WR-RB-RB-RB-WR-QB-RB-RB
If you didn't know better, you'd think this was a completely different team owner. Or at the very least, a completely different strategy. And while 2015 is more similar to the drafts that came before, 2016-17 are remarkably different. Gone are the days of drafting two or three RBs early. Instead, we see a sharp shift in focus to the WRs. In 2016, in particular, we see the greatest positional preference ever shown to the WR in league history with six of Trevor's first seven picks used on pass-catchers.
The result, as we know, was not good. After winning 6, 7, 9 and 7 games with a TW% that hovered between .594 and .654 and a final Power Ranking always among the top-4 from 2011-14, Trevor won just 4 games in 2015, then 3 in 2016 and finally 2 last year. Put another way, two teams won as many or more games last year as Trevor did over the last three seasons combined.
Certainly, correlation does not imply causation. Drafting a slew of RBs would not, for example, have produced the opposite result. But... it's also probably no surprise that of the 19.8 ppg drop in scoring that Trevor experienced over the last three seasons, 15.5 ppg or 78% of the total decline came from the RB position. Meanwhile, for all the focus on drafting pass-catchers, WR scoring actually decreased by 0.7 ppg! It'd be one thing if you could make up for the decline at RB with an increase at WR. But to see a decline at both positions is especially tough.
But perhaps we're leaving out a fairly obvious explanation for what happened here—autodraft. At least as far as I can remember, the never-ending run of WRs from 2016 occurred while Trevor was on autodraft. I believe that's also what happened to begin last year's draft. By the time Trevor was able to join the draft, he'd already selected three WRs. By all accounts, 2015 just looks like a bad draft. (Hey, we all have them.) But it just goes to show how critical it is to be able to manually control your draft or at least set up controls for your auto-drafter.
Of course, we know the draft is only part of the story. Bettering your team through trade and free agency also plays a key role, one which Trevor has used to his advantage in the past. Perhaps, the most notable of which was the infamous 2011 trade of Eric Decker and Sidney Rice for Arian Foster. For his career, Trevor ranks second in points from trade and third in points from free agency.
But if we look at Trevor's activity over the last seven years, we see a significant decline starting in 2016. From 2011-15, Trevor averaged 2.2 trades per season with 2.0 free agent acquisitions and 4.7 bench activations per week. But over the last two years, those numbers have dropped to 0.0 trades, 1.2 acquisitions and 3.2 activations. In aggregate, Trevor went from 90 total transactions per season to just 56.5, a decline of 37%.
The fact that the decline started in 2016, the same year his team was autodrafted, confirms that 2015 was just one of those years in which a string of trades and free agent pickups couldn't make up for an exceptionally weak draft. But since then, it's been autodraft and not much else, including wins. Perhaps the sting of 2015's draft futility was so demoralizing that it pushed Trevor to the other extreme. But that strategy has not proven successful either.
There's a reason, I guess, that they say you should never invade Russia in the winter. But this winter, for Trevor, has been particularly long.
This year, the random draft order did Trevor no favors, giving him the 12th pick. It's his fourth-straight pick in the back half of the draft and his first time drafting from the caboose. But lest Trevor lose heart, Geoff won the championship as recently as 2016 with the 12th pick. It's really not as bad as it sounds.
As we enter the 2018 season, we puzzle again at what kind of Trevor we're going to get. Perhaps, winter will thaw and that once-formidable opponent and shrewd dealmaker will reemerge to reclaim his place among the league's elites. Or perhaps the gears of autodraft will grind silently on behind the Iron Curtain.
It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
But as we look ahead to another draft night, a longing for victory in our hearts, let us all remember the inspirational words of Winston Churchill:
"A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we foresake our trade partners and break all bonds of fellowship, when we leave our fantasy fate to the whims of machines. But it is not this day! This day we draft!"
(Okay, that last one was totally from Lord of the Rings.)
