FreeRoll, the MGoFantasy Game: Week the Second

Late last year, and then again last February Draftstreet.com let us host a freeroll for those interested in testing out their daily/weekly fantasy games. Last week we brought it back.

Remind me what this is:

It's fantasy except instead of drafting one team at the beginning of the season you build a new one each week. Enrollment in our pool is free for MGoReaders, and there's $200 in the pool paid out among the Top 12 finishers as soon as each freeroll ends.

Note: you can't be eligible for prize money, even though entry is free, if you're from Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Vermont, or Puerto Rico.

You get a salary cap of $100,000 to pick two QBs, three RBs, two WRs, a TE, and two FLEX positions. You can adjust your roster up until the contest starts on Saturday 11/24 at 12:00pm ET at which time your rosters will lock and the Live Scoreboard will be available.

About last week:

Congrats to kenchenzo, aka kenfizzle in these pages, who rode Landry Jones, Collin Klein and Tavon Austin to run up the score like an Al Borges team in the one game a year he releases the Fritzcracken. Other winners were people with Tajh Boyd or who discovered Army's rush defense, or were rewarded for Gardner/Roundtree homer picks: unbwolverine, tpsimm, mattpergo, WindyCityWolverine, kdefoor, fhcstar8, gbizz34, jacobak, imsande17, jchood, and hurt36.

Gardner was by far the Big Ten player of the week, accounting for 51.26 points. Best WR was Allen Robinson (47.7), best RB turned out to be the Lions' Zach Zwinak (28.1).

Q&A:

I asked Larry from DraftStreet a few questions about how they create their valuations.

How do you evaluate guys who are injured, for example Denard, or Rex Burkhead.

The salaries are usually under the assumption that the guy will be playing. Once in a while we might factor in how many reps they are getting and we might give that player a slightly discounted salary if it looks like they are getting less reps. This is usually not the case though.

What drives the values for a player? Is it based on stats, or recent success, or upcoming opponent, or all of these?

What we do is take the fantasy production historically, but recent performances are rated more heavily. Then we factor in the opposing defense, which is a big deal. For example your Devin Gardner had a huge performance last week and is mostly expected to be the starter, however Ohio State's defense is expected to be a much greater challenge than Iowa's so he remains a value pick. Conversely, Iowa's implosion last week down-rated their defense and drove Taylor Martinez's price up. Once we are done with this we have a manual process where we look through player news and injury reports and factor those things in accordingly.

CLICK HERE to register for this week's league.