Those of you fantasy nuts out there who are interested in American sports are well into the fantasy giridron season, with the NFL into week 6, with baseball just finishing up and basketball about to start again. One of the features that is a staple of fantasy analysis in the States is the team depth chart, and I’m wondering if something like that would be useful for Australian fantasy coaches.
The depth chart – an example at Rotoworld here – is a list of players for each real team sorted by position, and then sorted again by likelihood of playing in the next game. In baseball and basketball the positions are set which makes it pretty simple (i.e. the top player plays if fit), whereas in gridiron the amount of running backs, wide receivers, tight ends, linebackers etc change for each play so the depth chart is a guide only. One thing you’ll note in that Rotoworld chart is that players can qualify for multiple lists depending on their role.
In Australian football it would probably be silly, in these tactically advanced times, to rank each of the 18 onfield positions. Taking a bit of a leaf from the Champion Data positional designations, I think it would be more prudent to look at the following (with usual distribution in an AFL team in brackets):
- Key defenders (3)
- Small defenders (3)
- Key forwards (3)
- Small forwards (3)
- Inside midfielders (4)
- Outside midfielders (4)
- Rucks (2)
- Taggers (n/a… taken from other positions)
Alright, let’s use that as a template and see what we can come up with using a real AFL team. Why not my Hawks! 😀
No doubt this is a fun thing to do, and the comments will contain arguments over certain players’ eligibility and ranking, but is this table really worthwhile for a fantasy coach? In some ways it’s just self-evident. However, I reckon it might be valuable in figuring out who each rookie and draftee has to fight out for a spot in his team’s 22. What do you think?
