Fantasy Football Draft Geek

My final drafts are in the books. No major occurrences in either so I wont recount the details. After all.... 99.9% of the drafts are done at this point and it's time to look forward to the start of the season!

The biggest question for all of us, now that the drafts are over, is "Who do I start week 1?"

The answer to this is really no different than the decisions we had to make while organizing our drafts. The two essential parts of ranking players, whether for the season or week by week are:

1. Projections
2. Scoring System

Any online league worth its weight should have a set of projections and should automatically apply your leagues scoring to those projections. Your works is done... right? Well it is if you trust those projections. All of my leagues use yahoo, which I believe is a very good league manager. That being said, I don't necessarily trust Yahoo enough to be my sole source. After all, the rest of the players in my league have the same data. Where is my edge?

Because of this, I use Yahoo's projections (and my gut) as a starting point.
I then turn to yet another of my spreadsheets. I update this spreadsheet with weekly player projections, as well as a "Settings" worksheet that contains all of my leagues scoring systems.
In this settings tab, I have a select list that contains the names of all of my leagues.
This can be done by going to data/data validation and using the following settings


The Source which is "=Leagues" is a named range I have that contains the different leagues.
Below this select list I have the scoring rules. The first column uses a HLOOKUP on the leagues and settings to retrieve the settings for the selected league:


Now that we have the current settings it is a simple matter to apply them to the projections.

With this extra set of projections I have multiple sources to consider when setting my lineup.

I realize that this post may be a little late for those of you who have already drafted. For those of you who have not this post may have come just in time!

In my opinion, the single most important thing you need to know going into your fantasy football draft is the impact of your leagues scoring system. As part of my research I typically compile projection for all “draftable” players. How I do this is another conversation, but it is what I do with those projections from league to league is what I’d like to focus on.

There are any number of variations that can be defined in a league's setting. Each commissioner has his or her own preferences and it is important you understand the impact of those going into your draft. Not only does this affect the order of player rankings, but it affects where you draft a position in general. The best way to drive this point home is a real world example using two leagues I am in this year.

Here are the basic scoring systems for the two leagues:


Based on the above, we can guess that League A rewards Wide Receivers and receiving Running Backs more based on the PPR and lower Receiving Yards Per Point. League B rewards Quarterbacks more based on the lower Passing Yards Per Point and higher Passing TD value. While all this is true, it is hard to really get a sense for the magnitude of this difference based solely on the numbers. The magic happens when you apply these numbers to your projections and graph it out. Yes, there is something about a graph that makes everything so clear! So, here are the above leagues graphed out against identical player projections.




To say that League B favors Quarterbacks is an understatement. There is a much greater point dropoff after the top QBs are gone. League A (my favorite league by the way), does a great job of really evening out the positions, making for a much more interesting draft.
If you graph out your projections against your leagues scoring you are very likely to pick out an anomaly in your leagues scoring system that other drafters may not be aware of. That edge could be enough to push your team to the next level!