Fantasy Draft Prep Part II - Don’t Get Owned by Site Rankings
(Posted August 17, 2021)
Welcome back, fantasy footballers. The NFL season kicks off in 23 days! Are you prepped and ready? Don’t worry, nobody is. But it is definitely time to start studying.
In Part I of this series, we talked about how the wide dissemination of expert consensus rankings (ECR) and average draft position (ADP) creates a perceived value of players, how those perceived values can morph into broadly held beliefs about actual values, and how to avoid giving too much deference to those values. This piece is also going to talk about rankings, and another overlooked influence that they can have on unwary drafters. The culprit this time is the site rankings that are presented to owners during an online draft, and which can overtake an owner’s own assessment of value. Once again, the issue is human psychology and the biases that naturally take hold when we are given somebody else’s “expert” version of player rankings as a drafting tool.
Even before COVID-19 was upon us, online drafts were becoming more popular. While many leagues try very hard to hold drafts in person (and for good reason - draft nights are spectacularly fun annual events), online drafts offer leagues the ability to easily bring people together from all over the place, whenever the league chooses. The online setup is simple, and the biggest drafting sites (ESPN and Yahoo, among others) offer draft software that basically does all the work and is straightforward and easy to use. A central (and needed) feature of the online drafting interface is a constantly updated listing of available players, and drafters can toggle between an overall listing of available players and listings by each position. When it is an owner’s turn to draft, he or she can make a pick by selecting a player from these lists, and then clicking on the player name again to draft them. It’s that easy. These drafting lists are not neutral (such as, an alphabetical listing). Rather, players are presented at all times in ranked order from best player available to worst player available, with the best players right at the top. So who decides on these player values that are presented this way? The answer is simple: They reflect the site’s own player rankings, and therein lies the danger.
In the heat of a fantasy football draft, few owners have a strong concept of how the site rankings are created - for example, is it a consensus of experts or just one expert? What assumptions and basic settings went into the site’s rankings? How accurate are those assumptions in relation to the league’s positional requirements, scoring structure, other settings, and miscellaneous idiosyncrasies that are unique to each league? And last but certainly not least, how much do they as an owner agree or disagree with the site rankings? But in a fast moving draft, these questions and any related critical thinking about the site rankings usually go out the window, and there is a strong tendency of owners simply to start thinking of the site rankings as the best measure of player values. Why? Because each owner has a limited amount of time to make draft choices, because it’s an easy and authoritative looking tool that purports to show some sort of expert ranking that’s right there for you to use for the entire duration of the draft, and because that’s how human brains work. It is easy to see why drafters start to form biases in favor of a natural reliance on these rankings over anything else that they prepared, and why people tend to start to get owned by the site rankings as a draft progresses. This is especially true because no matter what you think of the quality of the site rankings, it is without question a useful and handy tool that is always going to be correctly updated to remove players already taken and show owners who is available, not to mention that an owner knows that his or her league mates are looking at the same thing on their screens, which is a powerful factor in creating a group-wide value dynamic.
So how can owners avoid becoming servants to the site rankings that are in their face for the entirety of an online draft? Not surprisingly, the answer is the same one that was provided in Part I of this series. The Pigskin Papers advises owners to take the time to create their own player rankings (using a variety of sources and their own research and analyses, judgments, experience, understandings, etc.), organized using tiers (we will explore tiers in a later piece), and to work off of those rankings as their primary “draft board” during the draft. It is nearly impossible to avoid using the online ranking tool to some extent - especially since you select players from it (and note - you can type in a player’s name to make a selection as well), and maybe you want to periodically use the rankings as a reality check to see if the site rankings vary significantly from your own rankings and values. But if you remember to be wary of heavy reliance on these rankings, and to rely primarily on your own work, you’ll likely end up with a better team for your particular situation.
And think of it this way - if you never looked at the site’s draft rankings before the draft, and don’t really understand the assumptions that went into their creation, why would you suddenly start relying on them for your selections? Let other owners fall prey to outsized reliance on a mysterious set of site rankings, while you rely on your own hard work, assessments and expertise, tailored to your league and your own team-building style and beliefs.
Coming soon: Why we use tiers, and bad NFL teams that are good, and bad, for fantasy.
