Fantasy Sports - Drafting vs Team Management

I have been reading the book "The Baseball Economist", this is another in a long line of theorists who take statistics to examine baseball from various angles...................I like reading different theories and seeing how arguments come about, how problems are solved, etc...................an interesting theory question came about the other day at my condo that overlooks downtown Chicago.............a few other fantasy enthusiasts were sitting around talking shop, mainly baseball, but the topic shifted to basketball, a sport in which my brother and I have teamed up to dominate the regular season portion of a league. The playoffs are still to come and actually contain far less of the prize money............anywho........our whole idea coming in, was to focus less on basketball and more on math.............granted the math focus varied significantly............for me, it was the draft, putting together a giant matrix of a spreadsheet which analyzed the individual values of sed players and set up an easy method of drafting for us..................my brother's "math" was finding situational weekly angles in which to exploit other teams, his was a form of arbitrage as well...............taking advantage of less attentive owners and owners that just don't understand (I would be in this group as well) the subtleties of running a team once the draft (the initial arbitrage session) has concluded. The whole situation was a thing of beauty and I learned a ton about running a team................but it brought about one important question, which I had asked earlier in the season...............WHAT PERCENTAGE WOULD YOU ASSIGN TO DRAFTING AND WHAT PERCENTAGE WOULD YOU ASSIGN TO MANAGING? There is probably a way to quantify this, which would take gobs of time and might even be worth doing, but in the end, both are important to winning a title.............my brother and I could not have won our title (regular season) if it were not for the expertise of each other.............but my question was one of ideas and less of getting an actual answer..........................this leads me to my brother's bold statement at our recent get together,.............."I want to do a league where everyone drafts and I pick up players at the end to see if I can manage them to some form of success", little brother, I can answer now, you might be able to do this a tiny fraction of the time, but those times would be more luck than anything...................I guess I look at the problem from a different standpoint.................my ideas are..............

Every team, assuming average expertise by every single manager, should draft an around equal team and manage an around equal team and each team would finish .500..............now, lets move out a little further (and this exercise assumes even luck, because we know good and bad fortune change the landscape of any fantasy season)..............assuming that we have 8 or 10 teams of average expertise ............now we add some expertise to a two teams...............one of these teams has expertise in player pickups and trading players, as well as lineup substitutions...........the other team has expertise in the draft....................which one would win more..............or in other words..........in which situations are there more to gain, in the draft, or in daily day to day management. Much of my argument for the draft being more important probably stems from the fact that I work a lot of data analysis for drafts, do many mock drafts to track the temperature of the market and try to distinguish in those mocks, where the players shelfs are and where I can find excellent opportunities. I think the draft takes less time to analyze and take advantage of and for more gain. One of my principle beliefs in team management and why I thought it was less valuable than drafting is that most pick up situations are quite obvious and don't take much expertise..........oh, Joe Montana got hurt, pickup Steve Young,.............injuries create obvious value situations and are generally first come first serve...................another reason you make pickups is due to injuries.........oh, Randy Johnson is hurt, I'll pick up Micah Owings the rookie hot shot who is taking his place (these are just examples for effect).............those situations are mechanical, take no analysis whatsoever and are done by the first person to get there, or by the team who happens to have the devastating injury.......................but I have found out that my thinking on team management was incorrect, there are many situations in which owners can take full advantage of the rest of the league, with their abilities....................for those ideas, I'll need a ghost writer, as I have only seen the surface scratched for those (as I can't execute most of them anyway).

So who wins the argument..................well, probably nobody, but it is a fun one to have, as I think it spawns new ideas on both ends of the spectrum.