In all honesty, I wrote this back in 2015. I didn’t use VBD in 2016 and was solidly beat in all my leagues. I did use it in 2015 and placed 2nd in my two leagues that year.
2 out of 3 ain’t bad
Getting ready to draft? Never done it or an old pro? I don’t think I could call myself a pro, but I have won my league 2 out of the 3 years that I’ve played in a 16 team league. The first year I won, the next year I placed 10th and then I won it again the third year.
I tell you this because you need to know that a lot of it is just plain old luck. No matter how well you draft, if you lose your first round draft pick to injury, (like I did in the season I placed 10th) you are screwed. So don’t get too discouraged if you don’t win it all the first time around.
VBD
I do, however, want to share with you a statistical system that I feel has done well in helping me select my team each year. It’s called Value Based Drafting or VBD. The idea is to assign a value to each player based upon how much better he is than the average player in that position. It is helpful when drafting because it gives you a way to measure a quarter back (QB) against a running back (RB) or tight end (TE) that is based upon the amount of value they can bring to your team over the next best player.
I hope that all makes sense. If not just take my word for it, most people can tell you that Aaron Rodgers is a great QB. What they can’t do is tell you how much better or worse he is than Demarco Murray. VBD is here to help you figure it out.
THE CATCH
No one can see the future. Unfortunately that means that no matter what, we can’t arrive at a 100% accurate forecast for the number of points each player will deliver. However, we have lots of talking heads and sports casters that love to tell us what we don’t know and didn’t ask.
MY APPROACH
Take the mean, not the mode or median! ESPN, Yahoo, the NFL and FantasyPros.com can all give you player rankings. They can vary widely or slightly depending upon a talking head’s point of view. With an average we can mitigate some of the risk. It also becomes helpful when we get down to the 14th round pick to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
BOOM! SCIENCE-BASED STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF FOOTBALL
Excuse my french, but lets take a look at Aaron Rodgers in the screen capture below.
I’ve circled in blue the VBD number for Aaron Rodgers (121). In the screen shot, I took the lowest draftable player for the position to create the baseline in yellow. This year we only have 12 teams. We start 1 QB and normally people draft an extra one to cover the bye week or injury. One or two might get picked up as a sleeper*, which is why we have 26. You can set your baseline however you like, this is just how I do mine.
You do this for all the positions you wish to consider. I usually just have QB, WR, RB and TE in my VBD rankings. I view the defense and kicker as match-up specific players that can be added or dropped as needed. They also don’t tend to have much of a VBD separation, so I exclude them.
For ease, here are the top 12 VBD players on my draft board (as of 3 weeks ago):
Player VBD
Eddie Lacy 163
Jamaal Charles 162
Adrian Peterson 161
Le’Veon Bell 155
Marshawn Lynch 151
C.J. Anderson 140
Matt Forte 139
LeSean McCoy 128
Jeremy Hill 127
DeMarco Murray 126
Antonio Brown 124
Aaron Rodgers 121
As you can see, while Aaron Rodgers might end up being the number one QB in the league for fantasy points, he doesn’t bring the most value when considered against the worst player at the position. RB’s tend to dominate a VBD, because the drop off in point production is so steep from the best to even a middle of the road RB.
DIFFICULT CHOICES
Even knowing all that, and assuming you agree with the concept of VBD, it can be difficult to draft based upon VBD. Most people don’t draft entire teams based off of VBD. They use some hybrid of needed positions still open and gut feeling to draft. Sticking to even the first 3 rounds based purely off of VBD can be gut wrenching.
Hope that helps and best of luck this season!
*A sleeper is a player that has the potential for a huge year relative to where he is picked in drafts. Usually an unknown or rookie player.
