Picking Dalvin Cook Over Derrick Henry Probably Cost You A Win Already – Fantasy Games Won (FGW) Week 5 Update

I had the 3rd pick in the first Fantasy Football draft I took part in this year. Was pretty excited when #2 took Derrick Henry over Dalvin Cook. Condescendingly excited. Doesn’t this guy know we play half-PPR? The Titans lost their coordinator! What a hype-chaser.

Wasn’t the first time I underrated Derrick Henry.

One of my eyeball metrics for measuring how good a college running back will do in the NFL is how hard they hit the hole. I ended up with a lot of Justin Forsett just before his breakout, having remembered his college tape. I had made the claim during a Bama game that Henry doesn’t hit the hole hard enough. On something like the next play, he picked up the easiest 8 yards up the middle I’ve ever seen; it looked like the defensive line was playing two-hand touch.

It was an optical illusion: Henry doesn’t need to try hard, at all, to slam it up the hole.

Let’s recap Week 5 before I start getting hits from incognito searches. Here is where I detail how the FGW metric works.

Week 5 Winners and Week 5 Losers

• Mark Andrews with the biggest TE week of the year. My wife was in and out of sleep during the second half of Ravens-Colts and it was confusing to give her updates:
  Andrews just scored for you again.
  “I saw him get the TD and the 2-Pt Conversion already.”
  Yeah, he…just did that.
  “Yeah, I already saw that.”
  I mean he did it when you were talking just now.
  “Scored a TD or a scored a 2-point?”
  Yes.
  “That doesn’t make sense, I’m going back to sleep.”
• Quite the Monday Night battle from Andrews, Lamar, and Ekeler.
• Jonathan Taylor officially emerges from the Round 1 basement here.
• The bizarro Week 1 for Justin Herbert and Josh Allen.
• 15% of Brady owners gave up on him too soon. As well as 21% of Justin Herbert owners.
• For a lot of weeks, the bottom 10 will be a Who’s-Who of pre-halftime injuries.
• Watching Hockenson fall like this is painful. It was nice to see a new Tight End emerging. At least his target share didn’t evaporate.
• Not sure what we’re going to get from Kyler this year. The underwhelming week feels like something we need to expect.

The MVP/LVP Watch

• Derrick “T-800” Henry is the first player to cross the 1.0 FGW threshold. He could hit 2.0 by week 8, easily.
• Austin Ekeler is coming on strong. If the Matthew Berry Ride or Die is the RB1 this year, we will be hearing about that fact for a while.
• Cooper Kupp, hanging in there.
• WHO INVITED TYLER BASS?
• Zeke looks like he lost weight this year. Losing weight for a RB (to get faster) doesn’t always work out (see: Marion Barber III), nor does putting on weight to gain power (see: Felix Jones). Cowboys running backs, I tell ya.

• I’ve renamed the rankings by negative number (so the worst QB is QB-1) because counting up the total number of “official” players in each position was kind of meaningless. It’s interesting to see the total, but I haven’t decided on what a “qualifying” player is yet, anyway.
• Ryan Tannehill taking the lead for LVP QB.
• Aaron Rodgers Update: He’s at -0.19, still at QB-2
• With JuJu done for the year, we’ll see if his inability to rebound will keep him on the radar for LVP.
• Having shares of CEH the past two years has been quite frustrating.
• 5% of Julio owners woke up this week.
• Another gut-punch from Miles Sanders. At least Gainwell didn’t gain well enough to steal his job. Har-de-har.
• In an upset, AJ Brown maintains his lead over A-Rob in the race for LVP! And wow, nobody else is even close.
• It makes sense that the top scorers in FGW are having a bigger impact than the bottom scorers. The fact that players don’t really go below 0 points, and also get benched after bad games, raises the floor for the metric.

Looking Back At The Draft

• It seems a bit surprising that there isn’t a huge Round 1 bust yet. Cook and Barkley have been beset by injuries, so there isn’t a read starting-lineup-destroyer.
• To be very specific here, as this is the featured comparison of the week:
  
  Derrick Henry has increased your win expectation by 1.13 wins versus an average starter in his place. Dalvin Cook has cost you 0.11 wins versus what an average starter would have done. The gap between the two players is 1.24 wins, meaning if you took Henry over Cook, you should have about 1.24 wins more than if you went with Cook.
  
  Since I don’t adjust for ADP (yet), you can use a thumb-suck and say a first rounder should have gotten you 0.4 FGW wins this year, on average. So Cook owners have a record of 1.99-3.01 on average, while Henry owners are at 3.23-1.77.
  
• Looks like there were definitely players that passed on Henry, then went and grabbed AJ Brown or CEH. That’s rough.
• Besides Brady, the QBs are exactly aligned right now – with Mahomes at QB1, Allen QB3, Jackson QB4, and Murray QB5.
• Round 4 is outperforming Round 3 right now. Thanks to A-Rob.

Here’s the data again. Good luck in week 6! I do not plan to take a bye week here.

Note: The last file had bad data. This is the correct one.