FanPost

YOUNG RIDERS (U-26) VDS DRAFT GAME

Sign up below if you're interested in playing the game.

After the great time we had in RollinRollinRolland's VDS Draft game, we're going to do another draft league - this time for young riders. For this game we will use the Cycling Quotient (CQ) point scores. CQ includes a wider universe of races, and scoring for the major races goes deeper. This means that many more U-26 riders can score good points in the CQ scheme (when compared to FSA-DS).

The best way to get a feel for how riders will score in this game is to look at how a game in 2012 would have turned out. In our U-26 draft game, riders scoring more than 600 points in the prior year are ineligible (that removes less than 20 elite young riders). Of the eligible riders for last year, the top scorers in a hypothetical 2012 game were:

Picture_5_medium

You can see that for the top riders like Henao, CQ points were similar to the FSA-DS points - CQ also gives big points for big races. However, in some cases riders with few FSA-DS points scored many more CQ points, for example:

Jerome Coppel scored CQ points for 11th in P-N, 12th in Romandie and 21st in the TdF, all just outside the paying places in FSA-DS. He also won the Tour du Doubs, which is not on the FSA-DS calendar.

Andrea Guardini scored CQ points for his many stage wins in Langkawi and Qinghai, also not on the FSA-DS calendar.

Marko Kump and Adam Blythe both scored wins and podiums throughout the season in minor European races, but got no credit for this in their FSA-DS points.

Andrea Palini is a promising neo-pro who scored top-5's in a dozen Italian races.

In 2012, 250 U-26 riders scored over 100 CQ points, but only 100 U-26 riders scored 100 FSA-DS points.

RULES

This will be a "snake" draft for about 10 players. In other words, after each round of 10 picks, the pick order reverses for the next 10 picks. The players' pick order will be assigned randomly before we start.

We will draft 10 riders per team.

Eligible riders were born in 1987 or later, and scored less than 600 CQ points in 2012.

SPREADSHEET OF ELIGIBLE 2013 RIDERS

The spreadsheet is comprehensive, including the entire rosters of all WT and Pro Conti teams, along with any other riders who have scored any points recently. But if you do find other interesting riders that are eligible they may certainly be picked.

Rider scores are the CQ points for the whole of calendar 2013 - including early season races. So if you're smart, you'll be wanting to check out which U-26 riders have already picked up points this year:
CQ Ranking page - select Year: 2013 and hit <Search>

The Cycling Quotient website contains details of the CQ calendar, the point scheme for various race categories, and of course the riders' historic performance data.

NOTES ON PLAYING THE GAME

We will begin the draft early next week. We will aim to make 20 picks per day (2 riders per team) to complete the draft in about 5 days. Picks will be posted as comments to a dedicated FanPost.

If you're planning to play the game, you should know that draft week is a lot of fun and highly interactive. It makes you think hard as the spectrum of available players shrinks, and takes time and energy to play well. To participate you should be a frequent visitor to Podium Cafe, and be able to check in at least every few hours during the day in your time zone during draft week.

After the draft is complete, I will assemble and publish a league table. The rider and team scores will be updated about every two weeks during the season, generally whenever CQ publishes an updated scoring download.