Welcome back everybody, hope you had good break.
It's still February, but for those of us who take it seriously the time has come to start planning our 2015 SC team. For me this meant logging into the SC website and attempting my first crack at selecting 30 players. After about my fifth selection, I realised that I needed a plan (because clearly I didn't currently have one).
Should I load up on elite midfielders, or make use of the extended 11-slot MID line to load up on rookie-priced players instead?
Set-and-forget ruck pariing, or mid-priced madness?
I needed to do some research.
Some Technical Stuff
The starting salaries for 2015 are (mostly) based on the 2014 SC average for each player, where each point-per-game (ppg) results in $5,375 worth of starting price. For example, a player who averaged exactly 96 last year (such as Paul Chapman) is priced at $516,000 for 2015.
There are exceptions of course. New draftees have been arbitrarily assigned a starting price, with senior-listed players starting from $117,300 (or an expected average of 21.8 ppg) and rookie-listed players starting from $102,400. First round draft picks attracted an additional premium starting with Laverde at $127k and adding $5k for each previous draft pick all the way up to McCartin at the top end of town on $222k. The difference being that McCartin is initially priced as a player who will score 41 ppg whereas Laverde is priced as a player who will score 24 ppg.
Then there also exceptions for players who missed a lot of games during 2014, or maybe even all of 2014. The way this has been determined is arbitrary in every sense, because not every injured player got a discount and not every discounted player received the same level of discount. Discounts range from 70% (Cameron Delaney, who played no games in 2014) to 10% (applied to a group of 20 players including Ben Reid (4 games), Daniel Wells (7 games) and Tom Clurey (1 game)). Where a discount was applied for a given player, the 2015 start price was reduced by a fixed percentage from the expected start price (using $5,375 for every 1 ppg). Where a player had no games in 2014, their 2013 average was adopted.
Some Subjective Stuff
Once I had a feel for the various 2015 starting prices, I took a look at each line (DEF, MID, RUC, FWD) to see what was available. For reference, the categories that I adopted to classify various levels of players were as follows:
Elite: >$600k or >111 ppg
Premium: $500k to $600k or 93 ppg to 111 ppg
Mid-price: $200k to $500k or 37 ppg to 93 ppg
Rookie: <$200k or <37 ppg
Each to their own if you have alternate categories that you like to use. But these are the ones that I settled on.
The DEF options in 2015 appear to be really poor. After player positions were reassigned (many D/M players are now M only) there are no elite players only four premium players based on 2014 form. If there aren't a whole bunch of DEF players who improve dramatically on their starting price this year, this line is going to score the least number of SC points for each SC team by a considerable margin. It is highly unlikely that there will be 6 elite DEF players this year and there may not even by a total of 6 premium DEF players this year.
The MID line has always provided the best elite SC options and this is still the case, with 13 elite starting-salaried MID players. The best teams this year will hope to have 8 elite players on this line by the business end of the season. Having premium (not elite) players in any of the onfield MID slots at the end of the season will likely mean that you are leaking points each week compared to a team which upgrades to 8 elite MIDs.
The RUC line is tricky to gauge, with the announcement of changes to the way in which SC points will be awarded from ruck contests. In general, ruck players will score less in 2015 than they did in 2014 if they repeat their performance level. The decline will affect ruckmen who get a decent number of SC points from disposals or tackles to a lesser degree than it will affect a mostly tap-ruckman who can't get hands on the ball around the ground. But I expect that it will negatively affect all ruckmen to some extent.
Ignoring the scoring changes for ruck contests for the moment, there were 3 elite ruckmen in 2014 and 6 premium ruckmen. The best teams would have finished with an elite R1-R2 combo if possible, but many teams probably had to settle for one elite ruck and one premium ruck. Will there be any elite rucks in 2015? Perhaps not due to the scoring changes. Perhaps we should only expect a RUC line to provide 1 elite and one premium level player this year.
Lastly the FWD line. Robbie Gray almost sneaks into my definition of elite based on his 2014 form, but not quite. There were a total of 12 premium FWD players based on 2014 scoring. An obvious parallel can be drawn to options in the DEF line, however the FWD line options look a bit healthier due to the larger number of premiums available.
In A Perfect World

If the spread of players (elite-premium-midprice-rookie) at the end of 2015 is similar to 2014, and accounting for a slight reduction in the level that RUC players achieve in 2015, I believe that the best SC teams in 2015 will probably finish with 9 elite players (8 MID, 0 DEF, 0 FWD, 1 RUC) and 13 premium players (6 DEF, 6 FWD and 1 RUC).
Why is this an important consideration? It all comes down to looking at your starting players and evaluating which of them you expect to need to upgrade across the course of the season. Upgrades require trades and there are only a fixed number of those to work with (unless you want to play that other fantasy game of course).
The Floggers Version 1.0
So I messed around with team selection for a while and this is what I came up with as a first pass. The intent was to follow guns-and-rookies approach as much as possible, avoiding mid-priced options. I nearly managed it. But then I had to put Bontempelli in the team, so Lycett went out. Sue me.
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All of the rookie-priced players are probably interchangeable over the next 4 weeks or so. Most will disappear at some stage and some will probably even reappear a number of times. [span style='font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; background-color: transparent;]We will have to watch the preseason to find out which line has the most rookie-priced options who are likely to play early games.
Some Thoughts About Team Structure
In my first attempt, I have a structure that is (elite/premium/midprice/rookie):
DEF: 0/0/4/4
MID: 4/1/0/6
RUC: 1/0/1/1
FWD: 0/2/2/4
Now assuming that I could get to an optimal final structure of:
DEF: 0/4/2/4
MID: 8/0/0/3
RUC: 1/1/0/1
FWD: 0/6/0/2
that would require either a serious number of upgrades or a lot of my initial picks to 'upgrade themselves' by showing a marked improvement in 2015 from the 2014 form line. Well, they do call this part of the footy year the season of optimism I guess.
I think I still have a lot of work to do. FFS I have Shaun Higgins in my team! Hopefully I have given those who have read this far some food for thought. It would be great to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
What structure do you think you will adopt this year?