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!

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!)

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!

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.