Draft Day Organization

Be ready when your draft arrives. Finalize your cheatsheet the night before the draft, or on draft day if you have the time. Bring a writing utensil, your cheatsheet and a draft tracker to the event. Even if someone else is keeping track of the picks, you need to as well.

Organize your draft tracker vertically by position and horizontally by team (in draft order). Three spots for QB, five for RB and WR, two for TE and Defense, one for K. When a pick is made, mark off the player on your cheatsheet and transfer the name into the first available slot on the tracker. This does a couple of things. First, you keep track of the players that have been picked. Second, since the teams are in draft order you can see at a glance what the teams in front and behind you need to still pick.

For example, assume that you have a serpentine draft. You are fourth pick in the first round. It is now round four. You have two RB and one WR. Teams one through three each have one QB. The best player left on your sheet is a QB. Do you draft him?

No. You can see that the teams following you already have QB's on your tracker. It is very unlikely that they will take a QB in the next 6 picks. You can use this knowledge to look elsewhere and squeeze more value from your QB pick. Take a 2nd WR, or whatever you think is the next most valuable. With your 5th pick you can still get your QB but you've beaten teams one through three to a good player at a position of need.

So remember; writing utensil, cheatsheet, draft tracker.

Cheerleader of the Month, April

Renee Herlocker, Denver Broncos. 

If Dynamic Drafting Seems Too Easy

Remember when I said that top fantasy football players have degrees in statistics and the like? I wasn't lying. If you're one of those guys that have a college degree in mathmatics or statistics, here's your chance to use some of it. I'm not going to go into it because I'd need to take an asprin first. I am just going to provide you with the link.

Warning: this may cause your brain to implode.

http://www.footballguys.com/zarzycki_zvbd.htm

If you check it out, you'll realize that it's well thought out. I just think that it's too hard to put into practice for most people. If you plan on playing in the World Championship of Fantasy Football, remember there are a lot of guys that prepare like this.

Dynamic Drafting

If you're really into this draft strategy stuff, you may want to think about dynamic value based drafting.

What you do for this system is adjust your X numbers (see value based drafting) based on your need for each position. It basically starts devaluing positions as you add more of that position to your roster.

Beware, this adds math functions that you may have to carry out during your draft. You might bring a laptop with a spreadsheet program, or at least a calculator. Either that or you can create a really big cheatsheet with all the math already done. I'd lean towards the former if you are good with spreadsheets and don't mind looking like the worlds biggest dork. The latter would be a good choice as long as you bring a big fat marker to the draft.

Back to the lecture at hand. Your X number gets multiplied by your need factor after each pick. If you pick a QB, you would then recalculate all your QB X numbers. This will lower the value of quarterbacks versus all the remaining positions.

This makes sense because if you can only start one QB, you shouldn't draft three in a row, even if their X numbers would suggest it.

Joe Bryant and David Dodds of Footballguys.com suggest this basic formula to adjust your numbers:

Have/ Start1_____ 2_____ 3_____ 4
0_______1.0____1.0____1.0____1.0
1_______0.8____1.0____1.0____1.0
2_______0.6____0.8____1.0____1.0
3_______0.4____0.6____0.8____1.0
4_______0.2____0.4____0.6____0.8

Multiply your X numbers by the given decimal to get your new dynamic X number. Or if you're taking the giant cheatsheet route, do it beforehand and list all the dynamic X numbers in different columns. After you draft a player mark off that whole column. That way you keep looking at the new numbers.

Making Your Own Rankings

Yeah, ranking players is easy. You need to make your rankings based on more than gut feeling though. Here are my suggestions.

1) Make your ranking lists by position. Remember to adjust based on the players current opportunity for success.
2) Note the ranking of all players from last year at each position.
3) Cross out guys that aren't draftable due to age, injury, lack of opportunity, etc.
4) With the remaining players, average their final ranking over the last three years.
5) If you have ranked a player much higher or lower than his average ranking, challenge your ranking. Do you have an irrational like or dislike of the player? Why does your ranking differ from his average?
6) Resolve discrepancies by adjusting your ranking list.
7) Slot rookies after established players. Tweak rankings of guys you think might break out after all players are slotted, but don't go crazy with it.

There you have it. Simple rules to rank by.

Average Draft Position

What is Average Draft Position? It tells you where players are being drafted in mock drafts. Antsports.com runs mock drafts leading up to the season, then averages all the data for you. It's a great way to see how most people value players. Even though your league may use different scoring rules, most people will still draft about the same.

Why is this? I think it's because most people listen to the "experts", the professional fantasy writers. They're good, don't get me wrong, but they make mistakes just like the rest of us. In 2004 everybody and their brother had Kevan Barlow ranked highly. He ended up underperforming all the experts predictions.

The real problem with blindly trusting pros is that they tend to follow each other as well. If one guy starts ranking a player highly, they all will. Why? Maybe they feel like if they don't agree with that assessment, but they turn out to be wrong, the average player will stop trusting them. If that happens, they'll be out of a job. So, it's better for them to agree with each other. If they are all wrong, it looks like it's the players fault.

This is why you need to do your own research. The pros aren't necessarily better at grading players and drafting. You have the same players to rank and draft as the pros do. It's not like a pro writer can choose from Tomlinson, Portis and Holmes while you only get to pick from Thomas Jones, Warrick Dunn and Tyrone Wheatley. The player pool is fixed. So all you need to get better at is ranking players.

Bottom line is that the pros will have players all ranked in the same area. Owners will follow these rankings. That's why you can trust Antsports.com to have average draft position data that your draft will follow (approximately). Pay attention not only to the average position, but also the highest and lowest pick for each player.

Leverage this knowledge of average draft position by selecting a player as late as possible to create value. If you have Javon Walker ranked in the third round, but his average draft position is in the fifth round, you can select another player now and likely get Walker coming back. Always remember, try to get value for each pick.

Average Value Theory

Let's talk about another way to refine your drafting. Average value theory is based on the fact that your projections will always be wrong (or if you want a nicer way to say it, your projections will contain a margin of error). This information from Chris Annunziata and Wade Iuele goes into greater detail.

"With every subjective decision you make in developing a projection, there is a possibility of error; and the greater the number of variables on which you base your projections, the greater the number of potential errors. Therefore, creating player projections might not be the best way to quantify player values for use with a VBD system. Each time you make a subjective decision regarding numerical values, variables, and calculations, you expose yourself to a potential for error.

AVT assumes that over a course of time, actual FP scored by each position remain fairly constant, independent of the player who scored them. While historical data is not a perfect predictor of future performance, over the past few seasons the data shows that the number of FP scored remains fairly consistent.

It is always possible for players at a position to explode, and wreck the curve. However, AVT postulates that, more than likely, the distribution of FP will follow previous years’ distributions. This helps you limit the subjectivity of the projection process solely to the ranking of players. The Average Value Theory values will probably be incorrect. Not all of the players on your VBD list will achieve the exact number of FP that AVT assigns to them. Some will achieve more, and some less. However, the closer you come in ranking your players according to their relative output at the end of the season (i.e., you ranked Ahman Green #3 RB and he finished as the #3 RB) the closer your initial AVT VBD values should approximate actual results."

So what does this mean for us? It means that since we are are going to screw something up, we should limit the chances we give ourselves to do just that.

Here is a basic way to apply this theory; 1) Average the fantasy points scored by each player at each position over three years. Average the top RB score for three years, the second highest RB score for three years, and so on through all the positions that you feel will be drafted. Based on your league's number of starters you might have twenty QB, thirty RB, forty WR scores, and so on.

2) When you have all the average scores for each position, set them aside. Now go rank your players without looking at the average scores. Just write down the names in order you think they'll finish the season.

3) Plug the names back into your average scores, and calculate X numbers from there.

This process really helps you take some of the subjective feelings out of your projections, and frees you from the time consuming nature of making the projections in the first place. You can then concentrate on getting the players into their proper ranking.

Value Based Drafting

I started reading this from Joe Bryant, back when he had cheatsheets.net (now footballguys.com)

He says this,

"Value Based Drafting in it's simplest form says 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...

We are NOT trying to assemble a group of the highest scoring players with no regard to position. If that were the case, the best team would be full of quarterbacks and kickers. We are bound by our starting lineups as to the positions we must fill. Our team, consisting of a specified number of players from the specified positions will compete against the other teams consisting of the same number of players from the same positions. Think of it in terms of individual matchups pitting your team against another team, position by position...

In order for the Value System to work, it requires a firm set of projected stats for every player in your draft pool. Don't give me grumbling about how unpredictable football players are or the whining that usually follows player projection discussion...

Now you must run these raw stats through your scoring system and come up with a projected number of fantasy points you expect each player to produce...

[Now] what we need is a way to measure each player against his peers. We do that by setting a "baseline" player to serve as a measuring point. Each position player will be either better or worse than this position's baseline player. The simplest way to set a baseline is to use the worst starter at each position...

Here's how to get the X number. If the #12 QB on my list is my baseline and he is expected to post 75 points, I would subtract 75 points from each QB on the list. That would give the worst starter (#12) a value of zero. All QB's who are not expected to start would have a negative value. This number will be called your "X Number" or X #. Do this for every position so that the worst starter at each position has a value of zero...

[Now] it's a very simple matter of throwing all the players (and their X #s) in one heap and ranking by the X Number. And there you have it. All the players ranked by their X number which means they're ranked by their value. A key point is to understand what the list is telling you. It's ranking the players by their value, or where they deserve to be drafted."

Really, this is the first step on the way to doing things right. But there are other things you can do to help you on your way to winning your league. Let's talk about those next. Thanks Joe, for your input.