Should You Draft Off Expert Consensus Rankings (ECR)?
TLDR: Expert consensus rankings (FantasyPros' ECR) are a fine place to start. Averaging a whole panel beats trusting any one analyst, so you get a sane baseline for free. But the experts miss, badly, every year, and you've got opinions of your own for good reasons. Draft straight down ECR and you never test them — you just end up with the same players everyone else pulled off the same list. Start there, then figure out who you want. Fantasy Joes makes that easy: duel to build your own rankings, and get graded against the experts to find out if you beat them.
What ECR is
ECR is FantasyPros' term for one ranked list built from a panel of analysts. Instead of one person's take, you get the group's average on every player, which softens any single analyst's worst calls and makes it a useful place to start.
It's not ADP, though the two get mixed up. ECR is what the experts think should happen. ADP is where players are getting drafted — the average pick across the drafts going on all summer, from best ball to mock lobbies. Experts and the drafting public don't always line up, and when they don't, it only means they see a guy differently. It doesn't tell you who's right, and that's the part you get to settle yourself.
Where ECR runs out
The experts are good. They're not oracles, and the list can't think. Some years the consensus is a step too high on a name-brand vet in decline, or slow to catch up to a breakout — and when it's off, it tends to be off the same way for everyone, because they're all reading the same beat reports. Sometimes you're the one who sees it first.
The bigger problem is that a borrowed list gives you nothing to stand on when the draft turns. Your guy goes a round early, or someone you'd cooled on slips to a spot that's tough to pass up, and if every name on your list is just the consensus, you've got no opinion of your own to break the tie. You take the safe pick, same as the person next to you working off the same sheet.
So should you draft off ECR?
As a starting point, yes — it's the best free head start there is. As the list you draft from, no. Use it as your jumping-off point, then go through it and decide who you want, especially on the guys you think the experts have wrong. Those are the picks that win leagues, and they can't come off someone else's list.
Build your own — and see if you beat them
Making your own rankings used to mean a spreadsheet you'd abandon halfway down. On Fantasy Joes you build the whole thing by picking between two players at a time (who would you rather have, this guy or that guy?), and the list orders itself from your answers. You start from ADP like everyone, and every pick pulls it toward yours.
FantasyPros grades its own analysts every year, but that's a closed list of invited names, and you're not on it. Fantasy Joes grades your rankings on the same scale, against what actually happens on the field, right alongside the experts' consensus. So you're not just making your own calls — you get to find out, with your name on it, whether you're better at this than the people who do it for a living.
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