True Positional Value: Perfecting Value-Based Drafting
Since the creation of Fantasy Football, people have considered Value Based Drafting the best way to figure out which positions should be valued higher than others. However, the current method of VBD is outdated, over-idealistic and unsuitable for the current fantasy community.
We have relied on this strategy to tell us which positions are more important and by how much. In review, Value Based Drafting according to Footballguys.com is this:
“The value of a player is determined not by the number of points he scores, but by how much he outscores his peers at his particular position”
This has typically been done by looking at the last few years of results and saying, “In a 12 man league where you start 2 RB’s and 2 WR's, how much did the #1 RB outscore the #24 RB, and how much did the #1 WR outscore the #24 WR. Now let’s compare the two! Whichever position had the biggest difference must be the most important!" The results from this have usually determined that RB’s are more valuable.
The problem is that this is missing a big part of the process of Fantasy Football, WHERE YOU DRAFT THE PLAYERS.
If we were a perfect fantasy community and could look into the future and know which RB’s or WR’s would finish with each amount of points, then this would be a great strategy. But we can’t. We are a flawed community that will never be perfect, nor be able to predict injuries, suspensions, or most of the shenanigans that cause players to score more or less points. We try our best, and many are fairly good at it, but no one is good enough to a point that VBD should be used as frequently as it is. My point is that we should not be using an overly idealistic strategy if we cannot be nearly as accurate as it requires in order to be effective.
For example, who honestly predicted Devonta Freeman would finish as the #1 RB in 2015?! I’m gonna go with no one, otherwise his ADP would not have been after the first round, let alone the 8th. This is just one example of many as to why the system we have touted as our draft bible is incorrect.
Now you can be that guy who will claim his fantasy projections are so much better than the rest of the community or “ADP”, but please don’t be, because there is a very high chance you aren’t. It is proven that the community as as whole produce better rankings and projections then just one individual analyst. This has been proven over the last couple of years by FantasyFootballanalytics.net.
So what should we be looking at?!
A much better way of figuring out True Positional Value starts with looking historically at how good we are as a community. It is much more telling to look at how ADP stacks up against reality. How many points do RB’s picked in the first round actually score? How many points does the average 7th round WR score? It is questions like this that will help us understand the true value of a position.
So to figure out what the average score of each position for every round was I looked at the last 6 years of ADP (Fantasyfootballcalculator.com) and matched that up with the total PPR fantasy points each player had at the end of the year (Footballdb.com). After a lot of data mining, I came up with this Pivot chart.
This data clearly shows that WR’s score more points than RB’s in EVERY round. But that isn’t really news as many fantasy players already knew this. So lets look a little deeper.
If we apply similar concepts of Value-Based Drafting to a more realistic set of data, we get results that should change many player’s strategies when it comes to drafting.
I took the average 1st round score and then subtracted it by the average score of a later round to get the “distribution” or value.
With the exception of the 2nd round (narrow 8 points), the 5th round (random lull of RB scoring), and the the 7th (9 points), WR’s have a HIGHER distribution! This would mean that according to how we find value, WRs are more valuable and it is more important to take on early.
A narrative that attempts to combat this is, “well I can find great late round WR’s because they score more points than late round RB’s.” Sure that is true, but this distribution shows you are LOSING more points by waiting on a WR then waiting on a RB.
Lets review so far. WR’s drafted early score more points than the RB position by a good amount. (Over 110 points in the first 2 rounds combined). There is also a greater distribution between an early round WR and late round WR, compared to RBs.
To add onto this and further reiterate the distribution of WR’s and RB’s I used excels correlation feature to see which position is more correlated to the points scored in their round.
A perfect correlation is 1 (or -1 in this case). Looking at this you can see that a WR’s points scored are more perfectly correlated to the round they are drafted in. This means that WR’s are more predictable in terms of season long points and are almost guaranteed to score less points in later rounds. Running backs are less correlated meaning two things, you can find players later who will score more points randomly, and more players drafted higher who could underperform.
In other words, DRAFTING WIDE RECIEVERS EARLY IS THE WAY TO GO.
If you want to look at this data and go, “meh the sample size is too small it is only 6 years of data” Refer to Rich Hribar’s (@lordreebs) recent piece about the changes in WR scoring versus RB scoring and how this trend is going to continue: http://www.rotoworld.com/articles/nfl/63609/71/drafting-wr-heavy-isnt-a-fad?ls=roto:nfl:gnav
I also can’t take any claim for this thought of going WR Heavy to begin drafts, because people like Shawn Siegele (@FF_Contrarian) have not only written about it, but executed it on the biggest stages of Fantasy Football. This article will probably not surprise people like him because he has already been executing a Zero-RB strategy and going WR Heavy in high-stakes drafts (If you didn’t know, he took home first a few years back as well as over $200,000)
The best part is, Shawn executes this strategy for many reasons beyond what these statistics show, which he explains HERE
At the moment I am only recommending this strategy in redraft season-long PPR leagues ,but you really have no excuses now people. WR Heavy is the way to go.
This will be the first part of a series of articles on this topic. I will dive into TE’s, QB’s as well as the Ultimate Draft strategy which will go in-depth round-by round on not only what position you should pick, but what player.
