Fantasy Football Draft Geek

Alright... I am horrible at this weekly posting thing. So that is the bad news...

Good news is so far I've had a pretty successful fantasy football season (all things considered).
Hopefully I can stay on that path [knocking on wood].

In my last post I left off with a recap of weeks 2 - 3 and I won 5 of the 6 matchups in those two weeks.

Well the streak continues!

In my 3 leagues over the past 4 weeks I've managed to go 11 - 1!

As you know fantasy football involves a little skill, a lot of preparation, and a lot of luck.
So I am done tooting my own horn for the time being... here is a breakdown of those 4 weeks:

Week 4 Results:

League 1: 3-1 (W)
League 2: 3-1 (W)
League 3: 2-2 (L)

Previous Week Combined Record: 6-3
Current Combined Record: 8-4

Week 5 Results:

League 1: 4-1 (W)
League 2: 4-1 (W)
League 3: 3-2 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 8-4
Current Combined Record: 11-4

Week 6 Results:

League 1: 5-1 (W)
League 2: 5-1 (W)
League 3: 4-2 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 11-4
Current Combined Record: 14-4


Week 7 Results:

League 1: 6-1 (W)
League 2: 6-1 (W)
League 3: 5-2 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 14-4
Current Combined Record: 17-4

17-4... I can't complain one bit. On a side note I did a little past research for "League 1" (my work league). I started that league (and my current job in 2005).

Here are the results from that timespan:
2005 13-1 (League Champion)
2006 12-1 (League Champion)
2007 11-2-1 (3rd Place)
2008 6-1 (Stay Tuned!)

Overall Record for League 1:
42-5-1 (Okay now I am done tooting my own horn!)

I know, I know.... it has been a while since my last post. Guess I'm not so great at this whole blogging thing.

Well when I last posted it was just after week 1. I had lost Tom Brady and Nate Burleson for the season and I had a 1-2 overall record for my leagues. Since then my fortunes have turned.

I've been very active on the waiver wire and free agent pickups. I also took advantage of some really horrible decisions in my work league. (someone dropped Steve Smith immediately after the draft!!! ... and someone else dropped Ryan Grant). With no waiver wire in this league it is first come first serve.... That, of course, worked out great for me (although I do feel waiver wire is the more fair approach).

I've been implementing a new strategy this season for choosing the players to start or bench. I have a couple of different sources that provide me with weekly projections for the players. I have an excel spreadsheet that takes those projections and uses my leagues scoring to calculate the projected points for the week. Now because the projections are shaky at best on a week by week basis, I certainly do not use this as gospel. That being said I believe it does provide some good insight about which players may benefit by their weekly matchup. Basically my strategy is to start my studs... always... no matter who they are playing. Then use a combination of research and your gut for the rest. The excel spreadsheet is handy when I am really torn between two players. So far this has worked out fairly well for me.

That's all for now... here are my results for week 2 and 3

Week 2 Results:
League 1: 1-1 (L)
League 2: 1-1 (W)
League 3: 1-1 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 1-2
Current Combined Record: 3-3 (Gaining ground!)


Week 3 Results:
League 1: 2-1 (W)
League 2: 2-1 (W)
League 3: 2-1 (W)

Previous Week Combined Record: 3-3
Current Combined Record: 6-3 (Awesome week... can't do any better!)

Oh Tom Brady.... Although I thought he was going WAY too early in most drafts, I did pull the trigger on him in one league where he was still there at the 11th pick.

I thought it was a steal... Not so much.

I'm off to a pretty slow start this year. Mr. Brady scored me all of 2 points before calling it a season. Despite that I only lost by 5 points. With Philip Rivers as a back up, I am optimistic that I can pick up the pieces and at least give it a good college try for the rest of the season.

I managed to eek out a win in another league by 1 point. But that is where my good fortune ended this week. Aside from Brady, I have Nate Burleson in not 1, but 2 other leagues. Unlike Brady he at least decided to stick around for most of the game and at least score me some points before getting injured and leaving (also for the rest of the season).

So... this week was a crazy first week. I am hoping next week is much calmer for me (but not necessarily my opponents).

Season summary:
League 1: 1-0
League 2: 0-1
League 3: 0-1

Combined Record: 1-2

Well... Draft #2 is in the books.

This league is a 10 team, Point Per Reception League (PPR). I was lucky enough to get the #1 draft pick. At first I was very excited about this since I was able to grab LaDanian Tomlinson with my first pick. The problem I had with picking first is that players never seemed to drop to me, or I felt like I had to make a pick too early for fear it wouldn't be there next time around. Aside from picking my QB hunch too early (David Garrard in the 7th round), I feel like I had a pretty good draft.

My strategy going in was to avoid the high priced QBs and go for more of a QuarterBack by Committee approach. The reason I opted for this strategy is that due to the scoring for this league, QB is not a high scoring position. Also this league rewards rushing a little more. Because of this David Garrard (more of a Rushing QB) ended up ranked 5th on my QB list. I knew based on my research that David Garrard is usually drafted late 8th round or early 9th. Because of my draft position I was not sure I would be able to get Garrard on the last pick of the 8th round. Since Garrard was pretty much a center piece of my strategy for this league I opted to jump the gun and grab him in the 7th round (1st pick). This, as expected, was met by many taunts. The same people who taunted me for taking Tony Romo in the 10th round last year!! We know how that ended up.

All in all I feel the rest of my draft went fairly well. Here are my picks. Feel free to let me know what you think!

1-1 LaDanian Tomlinson
2-10 Larry Fitzgerald
3-1 Larry Johnson
4-10 Plaxico Burress
5-1 Calvin Johnson
6-10 Tony Gonzalez
7-1 David Garrard
8-10 Julius Jones
9-1 Ronnie Brown
10-10 Chris Johnson
11-1 Vikings Defense
12 - 10 Jake Delhomme
13 - 1 Javon Walker
14-10 Sidney Rice
15 -1 Reggie Williams
16-10 LJ Smith
17-1 Steven Gostkowski
18-10 Jacksonville Defense

Probably the single most important thing you need in order to help you win your fantasy league is a set of good projections. How else are you going to rate a players performance???

As stated in a previous post, I decided to use several sources for my projections. This, in my mind, helps for a couple reasons:

1. Certain sources tend to go on a hunch in the hopes they are right and recognized the next year as the "go to" source. In reality, that player may be deserving of a slight bump, but not to the degree that the source is claiming.
2. If I tend to agree with one source more than another I can easily weight the averages.

Here comes the geeky stuff:
I take the projections I gather from various sites and import them into my excel spreadsheet on a new tab (one for each source). I then create a formula to calculate that players projected points using that particular source and my selected leagues scoring.


On each position tab I then do a lookup in the projection tabs and return the result.


As you can see this gives me a quick and easy view of the players projected points using each of my sources and an average. I have also added a "Quality of Projection"(QOP) score. If the projections are fairly consistant for a particular player it will have a higher QOP score. If the projections vary wildly then the QoP will be lower.

This can be important in deciding how risky of a pick you are making. If all of the sources project about the same number of points it is a safer bet that the player will produce around those numbers. If the projections are very different there is more uncertainty on how that player will perform.

I personally tend to go with more of the safer bet, but you have to go with your gut sometimes.

Projections are at the root of just about all analysis I do... which is why they are so important. Are they always right? Absolutely not... but there has to be a starting point, and this is it.

Well, my first draft is in the books!

If you read my last post you know that this was an online draft in which many people allow yahoo to pick for them based on a ranking list. As I mentioned in that post, yahoo picks starting lineups first and then fills in the bench. This means that kickers and defenses go WAY early.

I knew this would happen and came up with the strategy to pretty much take whoever was left at the end. I wanted to take my defense on my second to last pick, but I ended up taking it a couple rounds sooner because surprisingly Yahoo's logic started picking backup defenses before I had one!

This league has 14 teams (bigger than I prefer). I was picking in the 11th spot... a spot which I really dreaded until my first pick came up. The biggest shock of the night was that Tom Brady was still available at the 11th pick! A complete no-brainer. The reason this happened is because Brady was listed at #9 in yahoo's default rankings and the 10th and 11th picks in front of me were actually logged in, and intentionally passed on Brady. I personally do not believe Brady will repeat last year, but there is no denying he is an excellent QB and represents great value as the 11th pick.

In this league QBs are also more important than any other position (yes including RBs). In my analysis of the scoring system of this league, I realized that QBs score way more points than RBs and after the top 4 QBs there is a major dropoff in points. My strategy going in was to obtain one of my top 4 QBs. I thought at 11th pick I could grab Peyton Manning at that position... To my amazement Manning was taken before Brady. If both had been taken (as I was fully expecting) I probably would have taken the best RB and on my board and grabbed a QB with my second pick.

As with any draft, there are things you wish you could change. The pick I "might" want back was my TE. From my analysis, TEs actually score the least amount of points in this league. As expected (because of yahoo's draft logic) TEs started going way to early. In a panic, I chose to take the top TE on my list (Jason Witten). I don't necessarily regret this pick as I think he will have a good year. I think however I could have nabbed a perfectly decent TE a round later and had a little better depth... only time will tell.

For those that are curious here is my team in the order they were picked:

1-11 - Tom Brady
2-4 - Maurice Jones Drew
3-11 - Plaxico Burress
4-4 - Lee Evans
5-11 - Matt Forte
6 - 4 - Jason Witten
7 -11 - Julius Jones
8 - 4 - Nate Burleson
9 - 11 - Philip Rivers
10 - 4 - Chris Johnson
11 - 11 - Colts
12 - 4 - Sidney Rice
13 - 11 - Ben Utecht
14 - 4 - Shaun Suisham

Overall I think I did pretty well.... Keep in mind this is a 14 team league, so the team may not look as good as your 8 - 10 team league.

Time will tell... time will tell

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. My first fantasy football draft is coming up this Friday, so I am scrambling to make sure my research is in order and I am ready to go. This is my first year in this league so I am a little unsure of the competition.

It is an online draft. I prefer a live draft (actually sitting in a room with people), but I will take this over a auto-draft any day. I was talking to a friend of mine who has been in the league for a couple of years and he says only about half of the people even log in to do the draft. The other half just lets the site pick for them based on the rankings they provide.

This is an absolutely horrible idea for them... but great for me, since I will be facing them. The league is run using Yahoo. Here is my understanding of the logic Yahoo uses when drafting based off a members rankings:

1. It will pick the highest ranked player on your list who has not been selected.
2. It will fill your starting lineup first!!

#2 is an absolutely horrible idea. Think about it...
Say you have to start 2 RBs, 2WRs, 1QB, 1TE, 1DEF, and 1 K.
Since yahoo will fill your starting lineup first, you will actually pick your defense in the 7th round, and your kicker in the 8th!! This is an absolutely horrible idea. I never pick a defense before the 10th and the kicker is always my last pick of the draft.

Another thing I dislike about this league so far is how early the draft is. In an ideal world you will have your draft as close to the beginning of the regular season as possible. A lot can happen between now and opening day, including a dreaded season ending injury for your #1 pick. I am praying nothing like this happens... but it is certainly possible.

I will be posting again soon to talk about the process I use for my player projections.... So stay tuned. Also I will be sure to post the results of this draft to let you know how I faired.

While I don't believe past performance should be the sole basis to rank your players, it does provide some useful insight. Past performance is a tricky thing. A player’s situation changes from year to year:

1. The player could see more (or less) playing time.
2. The player could be with a different team or different team makeup.
3. The player could have been injured in a previous year which accounts for less productivity

My point is that many factors go into a player’s performance from year to year. Despite these differences I still include past performance in my ranking spreadsheet (MS Excel). I feel it can be one more bit of info that can be used when deciding between similar players.

One important thread that you will see run through all of my posts is that it is very important to make your rankings specifically for your leagues scoring system. Past performance is no different.

What do you really want to know when you look at a player’s past performance? You want to see how that player would have done in your league in previous years… Right?

Here is a screenshot of part of my “Settings” tab that I use in my spreadsheet. As you will see I have a column for each league I am in. That column contains info on that league and, most importantly, scoring rules. You will see here that “League A” only gives 4 points for a Passing TD (PaTD) as opposed to “League B” which gives 6 points for a Passing TD. This can be a huge difference in how you rank your QBs in your overall ranking list. The “Current Settings” column has a dropdown in which I can select the league I want the spreadsheet to calculate for.



I then have another worksheet (tab) that contains the stats of all players over the last 3 seasons. In that worksheet I have columns that use those stats, combined with the scoring system that is currently selected, to calculate how many points that player scored using this scoring system.


The relevance of Past Performance may be debatable, but I do find it useful when I go to tweak my rankings… Just keep in mind their limitations!

First a little background about myself:
I started playing Fantasy Football about 7 years ago and have been hooked ever since. I am an IT consultant for a small company in Baltimore (yes I love the Ravens). In the past 3-4 years I've decided to actually create my own drafting strategy as opposed to bringing a magazine to the draft and thinking I was prepared. I am a "numbers guy" (you may call me a geek), so I was always curious how I could leverage that knowledge to help prepare me for my fantasy football drafts.

In the Beginning:
In my first season I brought only a magazine to my draft... I felt completely unprepared. It amazes me that so many players still do this very same thing today. It was immediately apparent to me that I had to come up with a better way. For my second season, I decided to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to help organize my draft. It started out simple enough... it was just spreadsheet with a worksheet for each position and one for overall rankings.
I found 3 sources for player rankings (whether online or magazine). I entered all of the rankings in for each player/source. I then averaged out those rankings and sorted the player based on the average rank. My theory being that one source may be too high or too low on a particular player, and that by averaging them out we would come out with a more "likely" rank. In addition one source may be aware of some nugget of information that another is not.

Surprisingly, that strategy actually paid off the next season when I won one of my leagues. I say "surprisingly" because in hindsight, although it addressed one problem with player rankings, it was still woefully flawed. (More on this later)

Another flaw in the "bring a magazine to the draft" draft strategy is this. Magazines are outdated by the time they hit the stands!
In just about every case the magazine is printed before the minicamps even start. I do still buy a couple magazines, but one thing I always look for is free (or cheap) internet updates.

One Magazine that I use religiously is Fantasy Index Magazine. This magazine does provide a free internet update, however if you want the latest, greatest most up to date information you will have to pay. In my opinion it is well worth it to pay for these updates as it includes team/player insights, player rankings, stats and projections. (More on these later)

More recently:
Although my first crack at improving my draft was an okay start, I knew there was a lot lacking.
The problem became more apparent to me when I began to join multiple leagues. Each league had it's own scoring system and nuances. How could one list apply equally for all scoring systems? Answer: It Can't!

So I decided what was really needed was a way to project how many points a player would give me for a particular scoring format. So I did some searching and found projected stats for each player. Borrowing off of my idea from my first spreadsheet, I decided to find 3 projection sources and to take an average to avoid ranking a player too high (or too low).

I believe I left my spreadsheet this way for a couple of seasons with minor tweaks here and there.

Something was still missing...

Every year I had a good idea of how all my RBs stacked up against each other, how my WRs stacked up against each other, etc. When it came time to creating a merged list I always had problems.

You cant base it solely on the projected points because almost always QBs score the most points... So why do RBs usually get drafted first??? Answer: Supply and Demand.
There are less good running backs to go around, especially considering in most formats you must start at least 2 RBs. To make the situation worse there is a bigger drop-off in points after the first tier of RBs. If you look at the projected points of all of your RBs you'll likely notice that it drops off much more sharply than QBs. This is probably due to several reasons. One of which is the increased number of teams employing a "Running Back By Committee" approach in which a team uses 2 or more RBs. That is why it is usually a sound strategy to grab RBs early. I've found that creating a graph to show this dropoff can be very helpful to mapping out a strategy for draft day.

There had to be some other way to compare a RB to WR to a QB and determine which one is more "valuable". After some google searches, I found my answer: "Value Based Drafting".

Value Based Drafting (VBD) gives you a way to do exactly that: Determine a players value regardless of the position they play.

This discovery was, by far, the best thing that happened to my draft prep. That year I won 2 leagues and came in 2nd in the other (not a bad year at all). The year after I came in 2nd in one league and 3rd in the other 2. Yes that is a drop-off from the previous year's results, but I made the playoffs with all 6 of my teams over those 2 seasons... I can't complain one bit.

The best thing of all is that the people in my leagues are now absolutely terrified of me!
I will be writing more about VBD in a future post. In the meantime if you would like to find out more, type "Value Based Drafting" in the Fantasy Football Draft Tip Search in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Stay Tuned:
I have touched very briefly on some of the strategies I have employed over the years.
In up coming posts I will go more into detail on these individual strategies.
I've also been incorporating some new concepts this year, that I will be writing about as well.
So stay tuned... there is more to come.

So... I decided to create a blog based on my fantasy football experiences and methodologies.

Let me start by saying, that I am not selling anything. I am not promising that by following any particular methodology that you will dominate your league year in and year out. All of those sites that promise such things are out for one thing... your money. This, instead, is more of a brain dump of my thoughts on various strategies I have employed or those I've chosen not to employ. My hope is that the strategies I have discovered/developed over the years will help anyone reading this (except anyone playing in my leagues... let's hope they aren't reading). Truth of the matter is that no one strategy will work all the time. Let's face it, there is a luck factor as well. The strategies I talk about in this blog will help minimize that luck factor and give you as good of a chance as possible.

I also hope to gain insight from all of you as well! If you have used a particular methodology that worked for you, let me know. I'd love to research it, and maybe include it in my draft prep as well!

If you have suggestions for adding to or improving any of my methods let me know that too. I am all ears!