Always Start Your Studs?

Prior to last night's Seahawks-Eagles tilt, my best friend texted me and said "Benching McCoy...he's supposedly limited today...DAMMIT".  My response to him, with very little thought behind it was "Start Him.  Doesn't matter."  So he put him back in.  I followed up with the playful "If you don't start him, he probably goes off for 250 and 3 scores".  He then went off for 133 total yards and 2 TDs (1 Receiving, 1 Rushing).  By halftime, McCoy had already hit his "projected" total (a feature I always find laughable on all fantasy sites) and I texted my buddy and said "The Rule for Stud RBs is Active = Start".  My interpretation (especially for RBs) has always been if your Stud RB is Active, it is because the team has deemed that player able to handle his usual workload and, barring reaggravation of an injury, will receive the usual workload.  I sat back and thought about the statement I made and asked myself "Does this rule really apply?" 

First off, let's define what a Fantasy Stud is.  A Fantasy Stud is a player who is among the top 5-7 at his respective position in scoring and performs at the highest levels regardless of matchup.  The number "5-7" is subjective, especially when talking about QBs and TEs, because there are far less of these players to choose from.  In my opinion though, players like Aaron Rodgers, Calvin Johnson, Arian Foster, LeSean McCoy and Drew Brees are players who you play every week, regardless of matchup, weather, or injury.  If these guys are Active on game day, you are leaving them in your lineup.  Obviously, there are other players who qualify as studs, but I didn't want to present this point as a debate on who is and isn't a stud.

Here's the twist: Fantasy "Experts" always tell you to start your studs.  This is their way of telling you not to overthink your roster situation and play those players who you spent a high draft pick on or traded for.  I always think back to the 2009 Playoffs in my League where my friend started Joseph Addai and Adrian Peterson at RB along with Beanie Wells in his flex.  Wells and Addai both outscored Peterson.  While Peterson outperformed his projected score, he was still the lowest scoring of the 3.  Why do I tell you this?  Wells and Addai started due to fantastic matchups and exceeded expectations and Peterson started because "You always start your studs."  On his bench that day was Jerome Harrison and his 47.8 standard fantasy points.  My buddy lost his semi-final matchup by 16 points and went on to finish 3rd (scoring the most points in Week 16, as has been the case in each of my league's 3 previous seasons).  The point is this: nobody in their right mind could possibly blame my friend for starting Peterson, Wells, or Addai over the previously unknown Jerome Harrison, who came into Week 15 of 2009 with 301 rushing yards ALL SEASON!!!  Had my friend thought outside the box and went against the "Always Start Your Studs" advice of the so-called "Experts", he could have coasted to an easy Championship.

You can also look back to just last week, Week 12, 2011.  Andre Johnson returned from his hamstring injury to put up 2.2 standard fantasy points.  Andre 3000 was the consensus #1 WR off the board in almost every draft I mocked, saw, or participated in, making him a surefire "Stud".  However, coming off an injury that cost him 6.5 games with a backup QB making his first start since 2008, was he really someone that should have been started?  In my league, 38 different WR are rostered (we play a highly competitive 8 man league) and Andre was the 31st overall WR of that group. 

My plea to fantasy owners is this: do your own research and make your own decisions when it comes to your lineup.  On NFL Fantasy Live on the NFL Network (2:00p/12a EST), I heard a statement that bugs the living crap out of me.  The statement was "You don't want to be the guy who missed the playoffs because you started Riley Cooper over Larry Fitzgerald".  We already know that Riley Cooper scored 9.4 standard fantasy points last night.  Fitzgerald has failed to exceed that total 4 times, 3 of those with Kevin Kolb as his QB.  That means in the 7 games Fitzgerald has played with Kolb, he didn't reach 9.5 points in 42.9% of those games.  So if Fitzgerald puts up a 2 catch - 29 yard stinker this Sunday against Dallas and you lose your matchup because you started Fitzgerald over Cooper, you're going to feel even worse if you had any inkling of starting Cooper.  Taking a chance with the roster YOU assembled should leave you with no regrets when the season is over because this is the point of playing fantasy football.  We spend weeks building a roster that suits the way we individually play the game and if you are unwilling to take a calculated late season risk, why own a player like Riley Cooper when you have a stud like Larry Fitzgerald?  We all know that as the fantasy season winds down, matchups do tend to come down to small amounts of points, so we know that every point counts. 

You want to start your studs TO YOUR BENEFIT...your studs come with an extra boost of confidence when you start them (because they've typically earned it), but most of the time, the savvy fantasy owner wins a championship because they find that one great lottery ticket type player on the Waiver Wire that they aren't afraid to bump a flat-lining "stud" (see Adrian Peterson, end of 2010) for along with a roster filled with consistency.

Going forward, here are the only players I deem as "unbenchable" under any Non-Injury circumstances:

Aaron Rodgers
Drew Brees
Tom Brady
Arian Foster (despite the QB situation in Houston)
Ray Rice
LeSean McCoy
Matt Forte
Wes Welker
Calvin Johnson
Rob Gronkowski
Jimmy Graham