ESPN analyst Louis Riddick went all-in while explaining why Jeremy Maclin was poised for a career season. My colleagues Tim Hasselbeck and Jeff Saturday thought Melvin Gordon would flourish immediately in San Diego. Matt Williamson, Field Yates and I lobbied for Adrian Peterson as the No. 1 running back, while Christopher Harris pushed for Marshawn Lynch.
These were some of the higher-profile subjects during the recently concluded fantasy football rankings summit at ESPN headquarters in Bristol. Perhaps most memorably, KC Joyner backed up his case for C.J. Anderson by selecting the Denver Broncos running back first overall in a post-summit mock draft featuring Matthew Berry, Joyner and eight other summit contributors. The debates might still be raging if Keith Lipscomb, ESPN's senior editor for fantasy football, had not kept on schedule the 14 voters and numerous other contributors who let their opinions fly.
"Just made a passionate argument for Jace Amaro as TE 22," Berry tweeted at one point, capturing both the thoroughness and occasional absurdity of the proceedings, which also featured Renee Miller, the neuroscientist and "Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports" author, along with ESPN injury analyst Stephania Bell, a licensed physical therapist.
With the rankings set for now -- here is the link to ESPN's Top 300 -- I've gone through and highlighted 10 players the rankings got wrong, from my perspective as someone who has covered the NFL since 1998 and first played fantasy football five years before that, when USA Today Sports' printed box scores were a commissioner's best friend.
1. Adrian Peterson is too low as the fourth RB