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!

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.

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!