I am not a man; I am dynamite.
— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny,” 1
The RotoViz crew never backs down from a challenge, so naturally, trying to run a four-person empire startup was on our bingo card. Jesse, Kevin, Hasan, and I recently joined forces to draft an FFPC RotoViz Triflex Empire Startup. If you want to get a handle on the key differences between an empire league and a dynasty league, check out the introduction to Part I, my Nietzschean meditation on the first three rounds and the myriad trades we were able to pull off.
In Part II we’ll get to the portion of the draft where we have to actually start making picks. Don’t misread me: we are still trying to make a lot of trades. The difference is that now we are in the range where many of our breakout targets fall, so many of our trades were efforts to position ourselves to draft as many of these targets as possible. The four of us didn’t always have the same targets, so negotiating these differences of opinion while still trying to remain nimble enough to move around the board is the central challenge.
Round 4
We had previously made a trade to acquire the 4.01, and we picked Carnell Tate slightly ahead of ADP because we had planned to draft Luther Burden at 4.01 (also slightly ahead of ADP). When Burden went at 3.12, we had to shift gears. We briefly explored some trade options, but the format and the group consensus led us to Tyler Warren. Warren is old for a second-year tight end, but his rookie year confirmed that his final-season heroics at Penn State were more signal than noise. We don’t have many non-negotiables at RotoViz, but one of them might be: always chase rookie-year efficiency.
We had previously traded away the 4.07 in order to move up to 3.11 to get Tate, so we didn’t have other picks in the fourth. This was fine, as many of our targets were expected to go in the fifth round.
