I missed out on doing this last time in October, so here’s a Super Coach version of the “structure” posts, where I group together the most popular players in each position according to their price to give you a rough outline of what a generic fantasy team looks like, in this case in the Herald-Sun Super Coach competition. Let’s paint the picture of the early December Fanplanner Super Coach squads.
Players are grouped as “premiums†(highest prices), “mid-prices†and “rookies†(low prices). Note that fantasy coaches use the word “rookie†to mean any player priced very low in Dream Team or Super Coach, typically $150,000 or lower.
BACKS
4 premiums from: Chad Cornes, Lindsay Gilbee, Brendon Goddard, Luke Hodge, Sam Fisher, Chris Newman, Corey Enright
2 mid-prices from: Nick Malceski, Ricky Petterd, David Myers
3 rookies from: Michael Hurley, Jack Grimes, Alex Rance, Nick Suban, Mitchell Brown, Lachie Hill
CENTRES
3 premiums from: Chris Judd, Daniel Kerr, Jimmy Bartel, Joel Selwood, Brett Deledio, Shane Tuck, Joel Corey, Jordan Lewis, Kane Cornes
1 mid-prices from: Paul Hasleby, Bryce Gibbs
4 rookies from: Mark Coughlan, Daniel Rich, Hamish Hartlett, Stephen Hill, Steele Sidebottom, Liam Anthony
RUCKS
2 premiums from: Dean Cox. Hamish McIntosh, Brad Ottens
2 rookies from: Matthew Leuenberger, Tyrone Vickery, Ben McEvoy, Daniel Currie, Nick Naitanui, James Sellar
FORWARDS
3 premiums from: Matthew Pavlich, Nick Riewoldt, Steve Johnson, Lance Franklin, Jonathan Brown, Adam Goodes, Paul Chapman
3 mid-prices from: Shaun Higgins, Des Headland, Scott Lucas, Kyle Reimers, Jack Riewoldt, Josh J. Kennedy
3 rookies from: Chris Yarran, Jack Ziebell, Scott Gumbleton, Hayden Ballantyne, Sean Rusling, Daniel O’Keefe
Many players are shared between the DT and SC versions of this structure, of course, but there are some clear differences. Like the DT one, SC Fanplanner teams are becoming more and more stacked in their defences over time, but in the case of SC the forward lines are more stacked as well. The funding for this imbalance is coming mostly out of the centres, where very few mid-price improvers are being bought, with almost all those selected following the good old “guns-and-rookies” strategy apart from Hasleby.
One of the main differences between SC and DT is that key position players get valued more highly in SC, which is why Hurley, Mitchell Brown, Jack Riewoldt and Josh J. Kennedy appear here but not in DT. There are also certain players whose statistical history makes them SC specialists, and Gilbee is certainly one of those. One SC specialist who I expected to see a lot of here but did not is Nick Dal Santo. Judd is the most popular Fanplanner centre of all in this comp, which I think is a little overblown, but hard to argue with given his historical figures and the fact that he struggled mightily with injury this year. Add some glowing preseason training reports and you’ve got the recipe for a pretty popular fantasy player. I’m still iffy on he and Kerr, another SC favourite, who both need to convince me they have fully shaken off their chronic injury woes.
One name that did jump out at me was Chapman. Maybe it’s due to the smaller sample size in SC, but I thought we had all agreed that Chappy was too big of an injury risk to pick up at round 1. Also, as I pointed out in the DT post, fantasy coaches are still not trusting Gumbleton or Rusling in their 22s, even in SC where players of their type have a much greater upside. Also, can the person who picked Ashley Hansen please report to FanFooty for a frontal lobotomy. Thank you.
I’ll keep up with the SC versions of the structure when I post the DT ones in future. It will be interesting to see the opinions that fantasy coaches have in the two comps change as the preseason rolls on. Let me know what your thoughts are in the comments.
