That's an interesting concept...
Last year I was of the opinion that you needed to hit the At Larges as soon as you lost faith in what was available to you in the regualr leagues... Of course I also pulled a big CJ and fell in love with a couple of those teams and went too early.
In retrospect, I think waiting until the end is the far-and-away best idea... maybe not the last round, but certainly not before the last 3 rounds.
The difference is that in all the regular leagues there's a HUGE difference between the best team and the 10th-best team... IU should be good for at least, what?... 14 or 15 wins minimum (assuming nothing bad happens)? But Iowa or Northwestern probably aren't good for much more than 5 or 6 at best... So you do NOT want to be stuck with Iowa or Northwestern...
but in the At-Larges, I can come up with a list of 14 teams, the best of which might be good for 18 wins... and the 14th of which is probably good for 13 wins minimum.
I'm going to have to be REALLY sure there's nothing left in a regular league before I spend a 4th or 5th round pick on a team that I could get the same value with the final pick of the draft.
I just have to prevent myself from falling in love with any of those teams... so I'm not looking at them too deeply at the moment... I know that I think there are 3 really good, strong teams in the At-Large who just probably can't do worse than 16 wins... then there is another group of 2 or 3 I think are really safe...
After that they all look alike to me and I think all of them will get between 13 and 15 wins...
When you can have your pick of Gonzaga, Penn, Holy Cross and Bucknell with the LAST pick of the entire draft, I think its okay, even if Penn isn't going to get you the same number of wins other teams might.
I'm going late.
But like I say, there's still time for me to convince myself that some team out there is Jennifer Connelly... last year Maryland was Jennifer Connelly and Marist was Selma Hayek for me. And both turned out to be over-picks on my part.