Fantasy Football Draft Geek

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!