Fantasy Draft Prep Part I - The Perception of Value
(Posted August 16, 2021)
With preseason games underway and NFL training camps in full swing, we have quickly gotten to the point where the sheer volume of fantasy news and analysis that hits our inboxes, twitter feeds, podcasting airwaves, and other news and social media feeds every day is completely overwhelming. It’s on, folks. The competition for our eyeballs and eardrums is ferocious and relentless. From now until Labor Day, anyone who is serious about being fully prepared for his or her fantasy draft will be drinking from a firehose.
So please, let us add to the barrage of information and advice. Why not? What’s one more source, and hopefully, a trusted one? But here at the Pigskin Papers we are going to focus less on who to draft, and more on preparation and drafting tips and strategies. There are sites that are much better equipped to keep you informed with news and notes, and to provide you with updated cheatsheets and fantasy rankings. We aren’t going to do that. This series will aim to provide some helpful tips regarding draft prep, and draft execution. And we will try to serve this up in bite-sized nuggets. We know your fantasy bandwidth is being stretched.
So let’s start by talking about player rankings, the concept of value, and how to think about both. Ultimately, almost everyone who sits down for a fantasy draft has one primary tool to rely on: a position-by-position listing of players, often using tiers, ranked from the #1 player at each position to some appropriate level of depth. How do these lists get created? Fantasy football is a HUGE industry. You can find dozens and dozens of reputable and professional sources that provide regularly updated fantasy rankings and cheatsheets, and beyond that, there are sites that amalgamate multiple rankings and provide averages across multiple “leading” sites, resulting in expert consensus rankings (ECR). So for someone who wants to do the least possible amount of draft prep, you could just procure one site’s rankings (examples - ESPN, Yahoo, CBS Sportsline) or an ECR, execute your draft using those rankings, and be done with it. More on this later.
Rankings are not operating alone. Alongside rankings, as mock drafts and real drafts take place, multiple sites publish lists of average draft position, or ADP. So while rankings aim to provide projections of performance, ADP is meant to tell us when we can expect each player to come off the board. Both are useful data points. In the end, most ECR and ADP listings end up being somewhat similar, and what emerges from the vast multitude of rankings, ECRs and ADPs being published and pored over is an overall consensus of player values. That consensus immediately becomes a perception of values, and that common perception then becomes thought of as actual player values. It is basic human psychology and it happens that easily. But it shouldn’t. Because as that perception sinks in, biases about absolute and relative player values are created and cemented. This is the same thing that happens with the players at the NFL draft - and as a result, when either an NFL team or a fantasy owner grabs a player for more draft capital than the “consensus” of perceived value, people start laughing and they call it a “reach”, and when the opposite happens, everyone nods their head in admiration at the amazing “steal” they’ve just witnessed. But at that point, nobody knows with any degree of certainty whether or not the player just selected will end up returning performance commensurate with the draft slot or price. The snap judgment of whether a pick is a good value or a bad one is based on a collective creation of value, and is something we all need to keep in perspective.
But here is the thing - a fantasy draft is a lot like the sale of a bunch of houses. At the end of the day the true value of a house on the market is whatever the highest bidder is willing to pay for it, not the listing or appraisal price. Yes, ADPs and ECRs are good information to have, and a good place to start in terms of not only creating your own assessment of draft value for each player, but also the amount of quality and depth at each position. But ultimately each owner has to use his own judgments, analysis and thought processes, and his knowledge of his own league, its rules and the historical behavior of its owners, to assign the pre-draft values and rankings that he or she believes are appropriate for each player. Just because the consensus is that Jonathan Taylor is a mid-to-late first rounder this year, doesn't mean that I have to value him there.
In my mind, the best way to combat the groupthink of perceived value is to take the time to create your own rankings, using tiers, at every position. Yes, this takes time and research. But doing so will force you to think for at least a few seconds about every player and to start the process of separating the guys you really want, vs. the guys you are fine ending up with, vs. the guys that you don’t want at all, not to mention identifying the upside guys who you especially want to take a flyer on. Moreover, doing so will also force you to factor in your own league’s scoring rules, and the typical way in which players tend to come off the board in your league. Commercially available rankings and ECRs are rarely all that sophisticated in their customization. If you are in a league that awards bonuses for long touchdowns or for hitting certain yardages in a game, gives six points for passing TDs, or a quarter of a point per reception, or any number of other minor adjustments and customizations to more “standard” scoring systems, then your rankings should take that into consideration in a way that ECRs and ADPs will not.
The overall advice here is to be aware of the dangers of groupthink when it comes to player values. Use your own judgment and your own fantasy analysis. Be wary of becoming overly biased by the perception of pre-draft value. Be prepared to tune out anyone who questions or criticizes your picks. Let other owners go through the entire draft based wholly on perceived player values. In all likelihood, they’ll be laughing at you once or twice at the draft, but they won’t have the last laugh.
