Come draft day you know you’re not supposed to just start drafting the players with the highest fantasy point projections. If we did everyone would take a quarterback in the first round. Instead everybody wants a running back. And the reason for this is because we all base a players value on how many points he should earn within the context of his position.
The thing is, most of us don’t specifically know how valuable a player is by his position. We just let the cheatsheet we downloaded do all the thinking for us. But not today! Today we look at Value Based Drafting, or VBD, to see how the real analysts determine how players stack up.
Ranking players using Value Based Drafting is just a simple way to determine how players relate to each other across positions. You know that Chris Johnson getting 300 fantasy points this season is awesome, but how much more awesome is it than Aaron Rodgers getting 320? And what are you really getting over the rest of your league if you take Larry Fitzgerald instead DeAngelo Williams? Let’s see for ourselves.
Alright, doing VBD takes a little math, but nothing you didn’t learn by the third grade. What we want is to take our players' fantasy point projections and adjust that number to tell us how valuable that player is when we account for the position he plays (i.e. if we miss out on him how valuable would somebody else be that we could we get later). In this article we’re only going to consider starters, so let’s assume you’re in an ESPN standard league. That means you’ll have 10 starting QBs, 25 RBs, 25 WRs, 10 TEs, and 10 Ks. We’ll ignore D/ST because they’re hopelessly unpredictable. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we have 25 RBs and WRs because of the flex position where you can put either, so I’ve simply split them.
We need to get a list of our starters. Let’s start with quarterbacks. Sticking with ESPN, here’s their projected ten best:
Now we need to determine a baseline, an amount to subtract from the player's fantasy point projections, if each position has the same relative baseline then we can compare them all evenly. Get it? But for our baseline, do we want to use the average starting guy at that position, or do we want to use the worst starting guy at that position? Let’s do both! We’ll start with the “average guy” baseline, which I’ll call Avg-VBD for short.
To do Avg-VBD we need to find the median player in the list, in this case we’ll take the sixth best starter Philip Rivers as our man. He’s the baseline, 260 points. Every point your quarterback earns you over that is how much better you’re doing that the average of your league.
Here’s how it works out:
Now we’ve given all our quarterbacks an Avg-VBD value. A standardized score telling us how they really stack up against the rest of the available starters at their position. Now we just have to do that for every position. Here you go!
So what we're seeing here is how well a player does over the average of the rest of the field. Basically, how much better does this guy make my team over the average team in my league?
If you add up all your starters Avg-VBD points you can see how your team is doing overall. However, when you do this, there are more points to gain from having awesome starters than there are to lose from having poor starters. The advantage of gain over loss adds up to about 60 points per team in a ten team league. What you want is a team that scores more than 60 Avg-VBD points.
So what value does this have? Well, the thing is when you draft a fantasy football team it’s easy to start thinking in terms of how good your players really are. You might have Philip Rivers at quarterback, and he’s a really great quarterback. And then you have DeAngelo Williams, Ryan Grant, and Jamaal Charles as your running backs. All those guys are awesome running backs; if they were all on a real team together you wouldn’t know who to hand the ball off to. And then you get Greg Jennings and Sydney Rice as your wide-receivers, both top guys on pass loving teams. Then for tight end you land the very talented Jason Witten and then kickers don’t matter that much so you grab Jay Feely. Can you imagine a real NFL team made of all these guys? With a decent O-line and even a middling defense they'd be automatic Super Bowl contenders. And yet, this team scores a measly 35 Avg-VBD points when the average team in your league will get 60. Unless these guys all significantly over-perform, this team is weak.
What Avg-VBD is good for is reminding you that you are playing fantasy football. You are taking a team of all-stars and pitting them against 9 other guy’s teams of all-stars. Everybody has a team full of great players. How do you stack up against that level of competition?
I personally like how this metric has negative points for players who fall beneath the average guy. That clearly shows how much you’re losing when you wait on drafting a certain position, and how those bad picks drag down your good picks. Drafting Andre Johnson gives you a 55 point advantage, but if you take that other WR slot for granted and stick Steve Breaston there you’ve only managed to break even. Bad players drag you down, and they do so obviously with this stat.
So the Avg-VBD is good for telling you how valuable a player is for getting you wins over opponents. And that’s a good way to compare players, but it’s not perfect. It certainly isn't a direct guide on who to draft next because it alone doesn't take into account all the different things you need to consider when drafting.
Last-VBD
Alright let's change and examine a slightly more general way to compare players across positions. To do this we’ll change our baseline player when calculating VBD. Instead of using the median guy, we’ll use the last guy. And call it Last-VBD. This metric will tell us how many points a player is worth when we take into account how many points his position would get any decent guy.
With QBs it works like this:
So while Aaron Rodgers might get an impressive 320 points this year, the worst guy will still get 240. Really he’s earning you 80 valuable points.
Okay, let’s do this for everybody!
Now we can see players by their real value to you when you account for how much you’d lose if you at least were able to take the worst guy. Notice how much more valuable wide receivers seem to be using this stat. Not many people will take Roddy White over Rashard Mendenhall, but Last-VBD says that maybe you should.
In fact, let’s look at how people make selections in snake drafts and figure out how they are actually doing according to our Last-VBD rankings. I’ll use ESPN’s live draft rankings, which show how people are actually drafting this year, to guide us.
Now if you luck out you can get the first pick in a draft. Everybody knows having the first pick is a hugely unfair advantage—Or is it?!? It is. Let’s see why… With my first pick I can take Chris Johnson (130 pts). Now I have to wait for the 20th and 21st picks. Is there going to be a lot of top value left by that point in the draft?
Looking at the ESPN draft records, I see that the players most often taken in those spots are Tom Brady (40), Brandon Marshall (60), and Shonn Greene (15). There’s a steep drop off in QB value after Brady, so I’ll take him for 40 more points. Shonn Greene is a good running back, but value-wise he’s only getting me 15 points. Even if he does better than ESPN thinks this year, he’s got a long ways to go before he becomes worth it. So instead, I’m not forgetting Brandon Marshall, who adds 60 points to my VBD score. And if Brady or Marshall were already taken, according to the draft records Roddy White (50), Calvin Johnson (55), and Miles Austin (50) should still be there.
Chris Johnson (130), Tom Brady (40), and Brandon Marshall (60) gives me a grand value total of 230 points. That’s got to be good. But to see how good let’s compare a few other draft spots.
Instead of the first spot, let’s say I get the fifth. And let’s also say that I don’t know too much about VBD and am just drafting with the going trends. With the 5th pick I can still get a really good running back in Steven Jackson (65). Then with the 16th pick I could round out my running corps with Rashard Mendenhall (45). And finally the 25th pick gets me DeSean Jackson (50). That totals 160 Last-VBD points. That’s pretty good, but still a lot fewer than 230 with the first pick.
But what if I get stuck at the end of the draft. What then? Well if I’m drafting like a normal ESPN user, I would get Aaron Rodgers (75) and then Randy Moss (80) with my 10th and 11th picks. Then I have to wait all the way to the end of the third round before I get my next guy, Ryan Mathews (20). That totals 175—whoops—that’s better than the guy with the fifth pick. Why? Because instead of doing the usual thing and valuing running backs, even if they’re 2nd and 3rd tier running backs, I ended getting way more value by choosing a top QB and WR. And what's more I'm taking way less of a risk choosing a QB and WR because they are a lot more reliable to project.
That’s the reason why having the tenth pick is often as good as having the third pick. With running backs being over-valued so much, you’re likely to get a top QB and WR every year. When you look at Last-VBD for our players in 2010 you’re snagging the 6th and 7th best guys available in the whole draft with Moss and Rodgers. Two top ten players, when everybody else is likely to only get one.
Alright, finally, let’s just rank all our top players according to our Avg-VBD and Last-VBD values. These tables show the top 30 picks:
You might have noticed that the Last-VBD chart shows kicker Nate Kaeding ahead of Ryan Grant by one spot. Or you’re even more likely to have noticed the Avg-VBD chart shows Nate Kaeding ahead of DeAngelo Williams, Roddy White, Miles Austin, DeSean Jackson, Ryan Grant, and Tont Gonzalez. And that the last three spots are more kickers! BLASPHEMY! What can I say, numbers don’t lie. (Actually they do. All the time.) The fact is if the projections hold out Nate Kaeding is just really, really good.
Let's focus more on the Last-VBD, it provides a better value for draft ranking. It’s probably a little different than your cheatsheet is. For starters Andre Johnson, Randy Moss, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees drop kick Steven Jackson, Frank Gore, and Michael Turner right back behind them. As they should be. And Brandon Marshall and Larry Fitzgerald both move up to be possible top 10 picks. This is partly because running backs don't bottom out so deeply at the lowest rungs. The worst starting runners are still aiming at 160 points, compared to 130 for the worst wide outs.
So how can Last-VBD help us? Well, come draft day it’s easy to see Michael Turner at 215 points and say to yourself, “That’s a lot of points! I’m going to spend my first pick/$50 auction dollars to get him because he scores so many points.” And then miss out on the fact that his value is being artificially inflated because running backs score more overall than wide receivers. Or alternatively people see Drew Brees at 310, and say to themselves “Well quarterbacks all score a lot of points so his value is being over-inflated by that, I’m going to get a running back instead.” You're under-accounting for how much inflation running backs get and over inflating how many points quarterbacks get, because you're not quantifying their actual value.
Even by this day and age, you will see expert mock drafts where they chide members for taking a quarterback in the first round. It's foolish for them to criticize this. And since nobody really listens to their often bad advice anyway, don't expect to be in any drafts where you can get Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees after the first round. The math is obvious. If your QB Aaron Rodgers outscores your opponents QB by 5 points, but his RB Michael Turner outscores your RB by 3 points, all other things being equal, you win. And all other things won't be equal if you take a top wide receiver like Randy Moss, Brandon Marshall, or Miles Austin instead of some third tier running back in the 2nd or 3rd round.
Now do you really need to draft the top kicker in the third round? Of course not. Mostly because nobody else will. But you might understand why some people will reach to take a top kicker in the 11th round, given how much winning value he could provide their team over the rest of the league if he actually pans out, instead of taking some scrub sleeper who has less chance of paying off than a Pick 4 lottery ticket. And more importantly you can see why it can be worth spending a 4th or 5th round pick on an elite tight end, or why you might want to get two top receivers in the first three or four rounds. You're getting a lot of value with these guys which will add up come game time.
Also, to those who say kickers are unreliable to project, I would point out that last year 3 of the top five kickers finished in the top five, and one finished 6th. For quarterbacks 3 of the top five finished in the top five, but of the two who missed neither finished sixth. Kickers were just a little more reliable than quarterbacks. And a whole heck of a lot more reliable than runners. They aren't this good every year, and I don't at all recommend you put off getting a popular sleeper just to have the #1 kicker, but people should get real.
Okay, that’s it for now. ESPN also did an article about VBD which you can
check out. The guy there uses a last player baseline to do his calculations, but he then spends most of the article twisting the numbers back around until they more closely resemble the ESPN cheatsheet he started with. Here’s the thing, stuff like VBD is there to show you something you don’t already know, it’s not there so you can twist around the numbers until they tell you what you’re already thinking. So until next time, get out there, and good luck!
