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.

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!