#wfldraft

[idiotstats]

Playing catchup

Not catching up with the league; Chief has these notes sitting on his desk from draft night, and he’s not simply going to throw them away.

Number of kickers taken in the 8th round: 2

Number of kickers taken in the 9th round: 2

Number of kickers taken by Bob in first part of draft: 2

Number of kickers taken in the entire draft: 19

QBs taken in first round: 3

Number of teams taking their second QB in the third round: 2

Number of teams who took second QB in the first five rounds: those same 2

Round in which Drew Brees was drafted: 3

Previous year Brees was selected later than round 2: 2006

Round in which Aaron Rodgers was drafted: 2

Previous year Rodgers wasn’t a first-round pick: 2009

Round by which Ted had taken his third RB: 4

Number of teams taking their third RB by round 5: 4

Number of teams taking their first WR in round 4: 5

Number of times Tom Brady and Drew Brees have been drafted in the WFL: 18

Where that ranks all-time: 1 (tied with Peyton Manning, Adam Vinatieri)

Number of owners who have never drafted Brees: 2 (Bob, Rich)

Number of owners who have never drafted Brady: 1 (Kurt)

Before this year, number of times Jeff drafted Brady: 0

Of Kurt’s two starting QBs, number off the same week: 2

Of Rich’s four QBs, number off the same week: 3

Number of players drafted in 2019 who had never been drafted before: 38

Number drafted by Rich: 0

Number drafted by Bob: 8

Number of rookies: 7

Number of times Andy Dalton has ever been drafted in the WFL: 7

Of those, number of times Rich has drafted him: 5

Number of QBs taken in the 11th round: 6

Position selected by Bob with first pick of round 11: RB

Position selected by Rich with the final pick of round 11: RB

Position selected by Rich with the first pick of round 12: PK

Game of the Week, Week 1: SB champ Rich (0-0) vs. Jeff (0-0)

[idiotstats]

The date is chosen, the order is decided, and Chief has awoken from his slumber to provide some more useless insight as we prepare for the 30th season of the WFL.

Really, 30. That’s the only Idiotstat that matters right now. Our first WFL season was in 1987, when Tom Waddle was just a junior at Boston College. After John won the inaugural year and former owner Greg won in 1988, we took a year off; played once again in 1990 before two more missed seasons ... but once we started back up in 1993, we haven’t looked back. This will be our 27th consecutive season, and our 22nd with all eight current owners. That’s simply amazing.

So what can we expect? Well, Chief has taken a quick look at the numbers and does what he does best:

This marks the fourth straight year we’ll hold the draft on Labor Day.

We’ve never before held the draft on September 2nd (at least, not since Chief has tracked draft days since 2001)

The draft has been held on every day of the week except Friday and Saturday.

Last year’s Super Bowl champion, Rich, had the fifth pick last year.

Ted holds the fifth pick this year.

The last two times Ted has held the fifth pick, he either finished last (2000) or tied for last (2009).

Bob holds the first pick for the fifth time in seven years.

Bob has never had a winning record with the first pick, and twice had the league’s worst record.

The seventh pick has never won the Super Bowl.

Jeff has the seventh pick this year.

Rich has the eighth pick this year, the fifth time he’s closed out the first round.

Nobody has held the eighth pick more often than Rich.

Each of the last five years, Jeff has picked either 6th, 7th or 8th.

Each of the last six years, Ted has not had the same draft position twice.

Neither has Kurt.

Pat hasn’t had the first or last draft pick since 2006, the longest such streak in the league.

The next-longest such streak is Jim, who picked last in 2013.

Jim has the second pick, the highest he’s drafted since picking second in 2009.

Jim has never had the first pick.

John has never had the second pick.

Rich has never had the third pick.

Jeff has never had the fourth pick.

Or fifth.

Pat has drafted third seven times, the most any team has held any pick.

Now, some career Idiotstats just because:

In 384 regular season WFL games, Jeff’s team has outscored his opponents by a total 82 points.

In the same number of games,Ted has been outscored by his opponents by a total of 29 points.

Despite having the best career regular-season winning percentage (.573), Kurt hasn’t had a winning season since 2015.

John has only had one losing season in the past seven years.

Jeff hasn’t has a losing season since 2011, when he went 7-8-1.

Bob’s last two seasons with winning records were 2010 and 2007.

He won the Super Bowl each of those years.

Jim has four 10-6 seasons in his career.

He made the Super Bowl each of those four seasons.

If you’re thinking, “well, 10-6 is usually good enough to make the Super Bowl,” there have been 22 other 10-6 seasons, and only eight of those teams made it.

Ted’s career winning percentage is .4855.

Rich’s career winning percentage is .4849.

There have been 295,684 WFL points scored since 1995.

Pat (39,900) and Kurt (39,977) will each cross the 40k career point milestone in the first week or two.

Jeff (38,853) will likely make it by year’s end.

John (38,002) might make it with a superb season.

Ted (37,622) would only make it with a record offensive year.

We haven’t had a tie game since Week 12 in 2015, a stretch of 52 games, the longest streak since before our first-ever tie in 1998.

John is still the only team that has never played in a tie game.

[idiotstats]

If Chief Idiot loves one thing, it’s mushrooms on his pizza. Wait, no -- I mean, he does love that, but in the case, the thing he loves is history. The 2018 WFL draft was chock-full of interesting nuggets, and as the season hits the quarter pole, it’s about time lazybones takes a look at what all transpired in the biggest night of the year.

That’s Adam Vinatieri in the picture above, which might seem like an odd choice as the flagship picture for a fantasy football draft. But the Patriot-turned-Colt etched his name into the WFL history books when he was selected by Bob in the 16th round: that marked the 18th time in his career he’d been selected in a WFL draft, tying Peyton Manning for the most overall selections. 

Besides, kickers became something of a theme in this draft starting in the 7th round, when Jeff took Stephen Gostkowski with the 56th overall pick. That’s the earliest round for a kicker to be drafted since 2003, when David Akers was selected in the 7th round by ... well, by Jeff, with the 56th overall pick. The earliest a PK was ever selected was a 5th round pick in 2002, when Pat took Mike Vanderjagt. (Don’t laugh too hard -- the Nougats made the Super Bowl that year.) If you were curious -- and you must be, why else would you be reading this? -- that’s the only time a kicker went in round 5; it happened once in the 6th round (Jeff again, taking Gary Anderson in 1999. Um, Jeff made the Super Bowl that year too). We’ve now seen a kicker go in the seventh round a total of eight times, and Jeff’s pick started an early run on kickers as two more went in the eighth round. May seem like an early stretch, but in both 2004 and 2005, we had FOUR kickers selected by the end of round 8. Crazy times.

Of course we’ve seen seasons won and lost in the first round -- can we make any predictions based on those selections this year? Todd Gurley went to Ted first overall, and was a big part of his record-setting 220-point week early on. That’s the second time in three years Gurley went #1 overall. This year marked the very first time one player was ever drafted, let alone in the first round ... though Jimmy Garoppolo is now out for the season with an ACL, which means Bob may not be as excited about his historic pick. Same might be said for John, who took LeVeon Bell third overall, though the running back has yet to see the field this year. Jeff closed out the first round by taking Antonio Brown, marking the third straight year a WR was picked in round 1 (Julio Jones in 2017, Brown again in 2016) ... but just as notably, he took Drew Brees to start the second round. That marks the first time Brees wasn’t a first round pick since 2008. Still Brees has now been drafted a total of 17 times, as has Tom Brady (Pat’s first-round pick), which puts them right behind Vinatieri and Manning on the all-time appearance chart.

It’s not a draft unless we look at “guys,” the players who somehow end up being drafted by the same owners year after year. For example, Jeff has now selected Brees four times, though Pat has had him seven times. Other “guys” include Robbie Gould, who is definitely a Rich guy -- he’s been on the United six out of the eight times he’s ever been drafted. Kurt has drafted Larry Fitzgerald five times now, and in the four-pick club, we see Marshawn Lynch (Ted), Rob Gronkowski (Jim), and Joe Flacco (Rich). But the tail-end of the new 18th round saw a new record -- Kurt selected Carson Palmer for old times’ sake, marking the eighth time the retired QB has been on the Pirates, a new record for drafting a player. Of course, joke’s on Kurt, who wound losing his week 1 game with a dead spot on his roster, but oh well.

[idiotstats]

With Jim, Rich, and Bob completing their 20th WFL draft, CBS sure had some things to say about the picks. Of course, last year CBS gave Rich and Kurt each an A+, and that didn’t turn out so great. Besides, Kurt already lost the #1 overall pick for most, if not all, of this season. And something really looks wrong with the Ted’s Joey Jo-Jos getting a lower grade, but a higher points-per-week projection, than Bob’s Mulligans. But really, the reason we’re here is to determine what Chief noted about this draft, so let’s get to it:

Carson Palmer isn’t just Kurt’s guy, he’s now a Hall of Famer “guy” -- his seventh time as a Pirate matches the record of Drew Brees being drafted by Pat, and Ricky Williams as a Mulligan.

Other “guys” moving up the chart include:

Philip Rivers is a Mulligan for the fifth time.

Eli Manning was drafted by John for the fourth time. He’s also been a No-Name with Jim four times.

Andy Dalton is on the United for the fourth time, including the last three years in a row.

A.J. Green is with Kurt for the fourth time in the last five years.

Adam Vinatieri is on Jim’s team for the fourth time.

Vinatieri’s pick was the kicker’s 17th overall in the WFL, second only to Peyton Manning’s 18 draft day selections. The difference: Manning was drafted in consecutive years, while Vinatieri went undrafted five times. Now that’s longevity.

Drew Brees and Tom Brady were each selected for the 16th time in WFL history -- pretty amazing, especially factoring in that Brees has never been on Rich or Bob’s team, and Brady has never played for Jeff or Kurt. Brees’ selection in the first round marks the ninth straight season of being a #1 pick, which is a new overall record. Peyton Manning was a first-rounder eight times, and now Aaron Rodgers matches that mark with this eighth appearance in the first round. Rodgers is now near the top of the WFL’s all-time “highest average draft pick” chart:

Barry Sanders average draft round: 1.3 (3 selections)

David Johnson: 1.5 (2 selections)

Steve Young: 1.6 (6 selections)

Rudi Johnson: 2.0 (4 selections)

Aaron Rodgers: 2.1 (10 selections)

That chart includes players who have been drafted more than once; otherwise, Jordan Howard and Jay Ajayi would be on the list, as they were each second-rounders this year, the only year they’ve been drafted. Of course, they’d be listed along Steve Slaton, who was once drafted in the second round and was never heard from again, not that this could possibly ever, ever happen again. Ever.

Ajayi and Howard were two of 27 players never before drafted in the WFL... though only five of those players were rookies. Naturally, Jeff led the way by taking two of them, while Bob, Rich, and Jim each took one. All of those rookies were taken before the eighth round.

Other randomness:

Now that Jim drafted Jay Cutler, the QB has been on everybody’s team except Jeff’s.

Ben Roethlisberger was drafted for the 13th time, though he’s never been with the United.

Frank Gore has been drafted 12 times, but never by Kurt.

Brandon Marshall has been selected 10 times, though never by Jim.

Five of our first-rounders have never been first-rounders before: Le’Veon Bell, Julio Jones, David Johnson, Matt Ryan, and Kirk Cousins.

Jim had the opportunity to draft Tom Brady for his sixth time ever, but went with Rodgers instead. 

John took Drew Brees before Pat could have taken him an eighth time.

As always, Week 1′s Game of the Week is chosen by selecting the defending Super Bowl champ; but Jim got off to an auspicious start, losing to Jeff, 106-70. Week 2 features the lone matchup of 1-0 teams, in which Rich is blowing out Kurt, 125-70. (While Kurt still has Paul Perkins to go, please note nobody in the NFL is watching out for Paul Perkins, so you shouldn’t either.)

[idiotstats]

The draft email is here! The draft email is here! Nobody gets more excited about the intrigue and mystery of the WFL Draft than Chief Idiot. If you don’t believe me, then read on...

Bob holds the #1 overall pick... for the third straight year.

The team that finished in last place the last two seasons was Bob.

All told, Bob has had the #1 pick four times, tied with Jeff for the most ever times leading off the draft.

The only other GM to have the same draft spot three years running is Jeff, who had the #2 pick from 2006-08.

Jeff has had the #1 or #2 pick nine times in the past 17 drafts.

In the 18 years of recorded WFL draft history, Jeff has never selected third.

Or fourth.

Or sixth.

In the past 17 Super Bowls, the team holding picks 3, 4, or 6 have appeared 19 (out of a possible 34) times. 

Rich and Jim have also never held the third pick.

Pat has had #3 pick a total of six times, the most of any GM at any draft slot.

John has never drafted #2, and has only had the #1 pick once in the last 18 years. 

But this is the fourth time in five years John has the #3 pick.

Jim has never held the first overall pick.

Jim has held the #7 pick five times.

Jim’s average draft spot is 5.28, which is the lowest average among all WFL teams.

The owner with the highest average spot is Kurt, with a 3.94.

Kurt is drafting seventh for the first time ever.

The last time John had the #3 pick, he made it to the Super Bowl... and lost.

The last time Jim had the #5 pick, he made it to the Super Bowl... and lost.

The last time Rich had the #2 pick, he made it to the Super Bowl... and won.

Not counting the infamous “tie” year, teams with draft picks 1-4 have won the Super Bowl 13 times. 

Teams with draft picks 5-8 have only won three Super Bowls.

Two of those three times, John was the winner.

In the 15 years of recording such nonsense as the actual draft day, this is the second time we’ve ever held the draft on Thursday, September 3, the first time we’ve ever repeated the day and date of a previous draft.

Thursday is the most popular day of the week for WFL drafts, as this will be the fifth time, and the second year in a row.

Until Thursday!