+1
Obviously I'm disappointed by the Akers game, but I'm still holding long term. It's a long season and it's easy to imagine he just starts slow coming back from an injury like that. I've just seen people cut bait on guys like that two weeks in only to regret it later, time and time again.
Definitely a bad start, though: Akers looked like a steal to me in the couple of weeks leading up to that first game. Particularly since I don't need him to be great, just to get a decent chunk of chances in what should be a good offense. At the spot I took him I had basically the same expectations as Spaulding: slight edge in a time share, which is fine for me for an RB2, particularly having gotten top-tier guys at WR/TE/QB.
We'll see how it shakes out. It does seem to me that coaches are being asked about--and are therefore more cognizant of--the kinds of things fantasy owners complain about, which is kind of amusing. I think the days of really talented players just inexplicably going unused are kind of coming to an end. Whether or not that ends up describing Akers this year is another story, but I'm increasingly a believer in coaches (especially the younger/savvier ones) being influenced by those kinds of social pressures, as weird as that sounds.
That was all a really long-winded way of saying to bet on talent and worry less about formal role than we used to. I think it's harder every year for coaches and teams to do the "yeah whatever Melvin Gorden is a Proven Veteran so we're going with him over this new kid who runs a negative-5.00 40," IE: the kind of thing that used to happen all the time.