I suppose mock drafts are helpful. I used to do them to prepare for football redraft leagues but now that I largely do dynasty I don’t find much use for them. Whatever I need to know for my remaining redraft leagues I already know as part and parcel of playing dynasty football. More to the point, I know that with occasional exceptions at the tippy, tippy top, the differences between the picks is overblown. The way to win a fantasy football league is to draft well and get lucky, and it is much easier to draft well than it is to draft perfectly.
The exception, which I like, because I like thinking about drafts, are the First Year Player Drafts for dynasty, because the stakes are much higher on two separate fronts. One, you gain their services in potential perpetuity. Two, there is no professional track record in which to corral similarly proficient players. The picks are still a crapshoot, perhaps moreso, but a higher-stakes and thus more interesting one. The other benefit for someone like me, who does not follow college football very closely, is that I get to learn about the league’s exciting new players all at once.
It’s for this reason I generally enjoy mock FYPD drafts even if, per their self-selected dynasty nut constituency, are pretty chalky. Some people make waves by “selecting” a player a round earlier than normal, but these swings pale in comparison to the real draft, where someone paying half attention drafts a player from their favorite school, or your brother picks Mac Jones fifth overall on Patriotic principle, landing you Kyle Pitts (hypothetically) at six. Anyhow this all might be a long way of saying that the reason the Tiered Rankings system exists is because it’s by far the most useful. It does not claim to be comprehensive. It just tells you what you actually need to know.
I say all this because in our dynasty baseball chat we regularly complain (both the editorial and collective “we”) about trade negotiators who spit back industry rankings or mock draft results to counter our plainly good offers, or vice versa. I have been on both sides of it, and I have been on both sides of it for a good reason: Neither side is right all the time, and at the time of the deal, neither side is right whatsoever. It’s all speculation on the future when a trade goes down, full stop. It’s far more about what type of rankings you trust, how much you trust them, and and how much you trust yourself to deploy them effectively when dealmaking, rather than come out looking like a chump.
In general, I try not to break out rankings unless we’ve come to a near breaking point and I think the other side isn’t within a (one) general consensus Tier (I’m capitalizing because it makes it easier to read) and, frankly, I’m fairly fed up. A recent example is when an entrepreneurial manager and I mutually suggested it made sense to trade some of my relievers for one of his prospects, and I suggested trading two or three of my guys with a pick and someone else for Justin Foscue and/or Gilberto Jimenez. I’m airing this because he’s a good sport and good guy but also obviously an absolute lunatic, because he said he would only trade either of them for my Wander Franco, Jarred Kelenic, or Andrew Vaughn. This is a case where I didn’t actually bother busting out the rankings because his position was more about sending the message that we were done than actually staking out those claims, I think, and I understood that. This is a long way of saying that if you get to the point where you’re sending rankings, you’re probably done.
But… not always! Occasionally, an owner may have missed a key injury, a trade, a promotion, or something that is obviously fouling up the situation. In a trade negotiation, I want all public information to be in the open and on the level. Not everyone is like this and I can’t blame them, but I just don’t have the energy for the inevitable fallout following obvious deceit-by-omission. And, frankly, the “dynasty industry” is pretty much a self-selected group of dudes (near-exclusively) among a larger set in which, if you’ve read this far, you are a part. It’s still a pretty small group and they’re all pretty smart, so their general consensuses, per the Tiers system, all look more or less the same.
All of this is about when trade negotiations go wrong, of course, because all unhappy families are alike in their own ways. All good trade negotiations go smoothly: My rankings say A is more than Z, and yours say Z is more than A. Bing bang boom. If that doesn’t work, and a gentle reassertion of Tiers isn’t convincing, you’d likely best avoid dropping mock draft numbers, lest you become the mocked.