Chris Harris' Fantasy Football Mailbag: Mock Drafts, Jamaal Charles, and LeSean McCoy

This week's mailbag includes worries about mock drafting, draft strategy, the departure of Karlos Williams and more. Let's get to it….

"As we all get ready to draft our fantasy football teams, I'm wondering: is mock drafting even necessary?"

—Jeff F.

Mock drafting helps folks. It helps translate the abstract notion of "what the market thinks about players" into context and maybe it helps remove initial jitters from the draft experience. For greener fantasy players, it hammers home some basic concepts: this is what happens if I take a bunch of running backs early, this is what happens when I take a bunch receivers early, this is what happens when I don't wait on quarterback, etc.

But yeah, too much mock drafting leads to paralysis by analysis. If you're counting the number of mock drafts you've done and you're into double digits, time to close the laptop and reintroduce yourself to your kids. Several constraints make most mock drafts very unlike what your actual draft will be:

• There are bots in the mock, taking kickers and defenses in the 6th round.

• There are knucklehead humans in the mock, taking kickers and defenses in the 6th round.

• The humans in your mock are cool, but they draft very unlike the people in your actual home draft.

• The flow of mocks rarely goes the same, and if you do a bunch of 'em, you just wind up confused.

• Everyone in every mock in history has gotten impatient and left by the 12th round.

• Nobody in your mock draft is swearing at you and pouring beer down your gullet. That's not realistic!

So are mock drafts necessary? No. If I didn't have to do them for my job, I probably wouldn't do them at all. But not everyone ranks players for a living. Doing a few mocks, just to work those muscles again, isn't such a bad thing.

"I was in a mock draft and wide receivers went flying off the board. Do you stick to your draft board, or adjust? I came away with subpar WRs and didn't like my team."

—Jesse A.

There's no "right" answer, Jesse. I think in early rounds, my tendency is to stick to my board, but I get that when positions become scarcer than I think they'll be, some adjustment becomes necessary.

A fantasy draft or auction is a marketplace whose guiding principle is scarcity. In standard leagues, where folks start one quarterback, one tight end, a defense and a kicker, those positions aren't scarce and so I'm likely to wait a good long while to draft them. My personal draft board is thus dominated at the top by running backs and receivers. And I've put great care into making my draft board by literally going player-by-player and asking myself, "Okay, if it was my turn and all these players remained, whom would I take next?" I'd rather not undo that hard work—especially in early rounds—because of what other people in my draft are doing.

But Jesse's right: we don't draft in a vacuum, and sometimes the draft-day market surprises us. Suddenly WRs are going way faster than we imagined (or in an auction maybe the price of great WRs is higher than we expected). What do we do?

In those first few rounds, boy, I still want to stick to my board if at all possible. (After the first few rounds, I take into consideration what players I've already selected, and adjust my board a bit on the fly.) If it's my pick and I have a choice between LeSean McCoy and Randall Cobb, and I've got McCoy rated a full round higher (which in standard leagues, I do), I don't want to reach for the WR just because I feel I've missed out on WRs. Hey, maybe this conundrum makes me readdress my draft board beforehand, and shuffle a few WRs higher? But the larger point is: I want to come away from my draft or auction with the best players possible. Your team doesn't have to be perfect coming out of your draft. That's what trades and waivers are for.

"Will the Karlos Williams news affect your LeSean McCoy rank?"

—Ross K.

It didn't, Ross. Shady has stayed locked in as my #9 RB in a standard league and #10 in a PPR for a while now: a second- or third-rounder in pretty much all leagues. That's where I had him all summer when people told me I was crazy for undervaluing Williams Karlos Williams (maybe not a great running back, but a great NFL poet), it's where I kept him when we heard WKW would be suspended the first four games of the year for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy, and it's where I kept him now that the Bills have released WKW.

The upshot is: based on film I watched, I didn't believe WKW would be a huge drain on McCoy. Most NFL backfields feature some sort of platoon, and even with Williams gone, I guarantee someone will annoy Shady's fantasy owners by getting more touches than we'd like: maybe Reggie Bush, maybe Jonathan Williams, maybe Mike Gillislee. But McCoy is the transcendent talent here, he's the one with insane lateral moves, and if he stays healthy, he's the one who's got a potential top-five season in him. So he's the one I want to own.

"I want to ask about the Jamaal Charles conundrum. In a 10-team league, do I really want to burn one-third of my bench on his two backups?"

—Zach W.

It's a bummer, Zach. Charles presents risk on a couple levels. First, obviously, he's returning from a torn ACL and turns 30 in December. I'm assuming he'll be the same guy he was before the injury but there's no guarantee. And second, who the heck is his handcuff?

I can't reassure you on the first point, except to say: ACL surgeries have come a long way, and Charles hurt his knee in Week 5 last year which gives him a leg up (I know, shut up) on getting healthy sooner than people like Dion Lewis and Joe Flacco who suffered their ACL injuries a month or more later. On the second point? Ugh.

Spencer Ware and Charcandrick West both had nice moments as understudies in Kansas City last year. West was first man up and showed some CharlesLite™ skills: elite long speed, decent quickness, good hands. But he got hurt, and Ware got a chance to play, and he produced two long runs in back-to-back weeks (Week 11 against the Chargers and Week 12 against the Bills) and suddenly the fantasy world loved him dearly. Plus Ware is the big guy here—228 pounds—so he's widely presumed to be the short-TD maker, perhaps even while Charles is healthy.

But what happens if J-Mail isn't healthy?

I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. You'll hear the media echo chamber hype Ware, but honestly I think it's mostly because of those two long runs, and I just re-watched them again: nice job, good effort, but in both cases the Red Sea parted for Ware and he didn't have to do much other than rumble. He reminds me of Jeremy Hill: a good player in certain circumstances, but a limited one. He can score on the goal line. He can bang. He's got nice top-end speed, but takes a while to reach it. And you don't want him running side to side. In fact, Ware and West are kind of perfect complements.

So if you're a Charles owner, would it even matter if you carried both handcuffs on your bench, as insurance in the event of a J.C. injury? I don't know the answer. I wish I knew the Chiefs' contingency plans, but I don't. In a 10-teamer, I can see the argument for not tying up two bench spots, and if I had to pick one guy to roster, it probably would be Ware because there's a chance he's a useful TD scorer even if Charles is healthy. But the short answer is: I don't know, and not having an obvious handcuff does probably put a slight dent in Charles's draft value.

(Note: For fantasy football advice based on film review every single weekday from now until 2017, listen to the Harris Football Podcast at www.HarrisFootball.com)