Guru:
My take on crazy football price changes:

In last year's SW Hoops, they updated prices every day, which, with only 50 trades for a season, meant a lot less trading for hot players, especially in an 82 game schedule. If a player scored 40 points in a game, most people wouldn't use a trade to buy that player, unless they really hopped up the top 50 list. Many trades had to be saved for injuries. In football, when there are only 16 games and a total of 64 trades, injuries are not even that much of a concern as far as conserving trades go. A player who gets injured is only one of four possible trades the user has to make. This leads to another point, about the 4 trades a week rule. This helps a lot of people as far as trading goes, because instead of making 5 or 6 trades a week, you are limited to four. This means there is nobody left in the cold at the end of the season, who used up their trades too fast.

In baseball this year, I also had a roster over $100 million, but I was barely able to get all the good players. I still had about 3 or 4 slots I wanted to change, but could not because of lack of trades (that I had used to build up the roster value), and because of the money constraint. The lack of huge price changes in baseball also caused the roster values to be much lower. For a player to have a good week and considered for buying before the price update, a player had to do well in about 6 or 7 games in a row. In football, just one big game causes big buying, and one weak game causes big selling. This especially works in favor to people who have players like Randy Moss, since a big game will cause his price to go up, but a weak game will cause his price to go down again, at which point people can now buy him cheap, with a few million dollars in cash bonus for selling him. No other sport had this type of trading.

Players can have one good week and hop into the top 5 or 10 of their position. In baseball, over a 162 game season, it was more consistent and the top 5 were usually the top 5 for most of the season, which meant their prices were always high. In football, players like Eric Moulds can have two big games, and because of his cheap price would cause major buying. This is the same case as that of defenses. The cheap defenses are often bought simply because they are playing a weak opponent. The San Francisco defense price of over 9 million vs. a team like Green Bay sounds ridiculous if you can get a cheap defense playing Philadelphia. Also, there are only 11 spots in football including two positions where a good player may be very cheap, tight ends and kickers. Shannon Sharpe may be the only exception, but the #2 and #3 TE's over the season have usually been quite cheap. The kickers are all basically cheap, and since they aren't that big a deal, you never know if a 2 million dollar kicker might get more than a 4 million dollar one, even if it's only a bit better. It's quite odd, a friend of mine in my division said to me how he was upset how the top 3 teams in our division all have the same team, except a few players, and how having a big roster value wasn't so much an advantage anymore. I then told him I thought the same thing about him, since he had basically the same team as me. - Sean C. (12/5)

So, I haven't yet had the gumption to drop Young and Davis, in spite of the obvious intellectual rationale for doing so. Instead, I've tried to focus on team defense, since that slot has a disproportionately high scoring impact, and seems to lack a widespread consensus from week to week. But it's certainly a different game than I've become accustomed to.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. . . . - Guru

Slot      Avg SWP  # players
QB5         341        1
QB10        266        8
RB5         296        1
RB10        219        6
RB15        170       12
WR5         279        0
WR10        221        0
WR15        187        4
TE-90        90        5
K-70         70        5
DEF5       -216        0

response from Guru:
Awesome work, Steve.

What this probably really demonstrates is that the week-to-week volatility for WRs and Defenses is much greater than for other positions. I suppose that's consistent with intuition. So, since the "frontrunner standards" for those positions needs to be relaxed, I guess the other positions need to be tightened up.

Here's another way to look at it. If you had the best YTD producers at each position (Young, Cunningham, Davis, Faulk, Anderson, Freeman, Moss, Owens, Sharpe, Anderson and Miami) and just held them throughout, this roster would have produced only about 25,240 through the first 13 weeks. Now, each of those players has had a bye which I didn't compensate for, but this team was also impossible to own throughout, since it would have cost $57 million on opening day. (Surprising how cheap it would have been isn't it?) - Guru