It’s that time of the yearwhen fantasy football fans take to making their draft picks.
The goal was to guess the weight of an ox.
“Eight hundred people tried their luck.
They were a diverse lot.
…
“[Galton] turned the competition into an impromptu experiment.
That number represented, you could say, the collective wisdom of the Plymouth crowd.
…
“Galton undoubtedly thought the average guess of the group would be way off the mark.
But Galton was wrong.
The crowd guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed, would weigh 1,197 pounds.
After it had been slaughtered and dressed, the ox weighed 1,198 pounds.
In other words, the crowd’s judgment was essentially perfect.”
Here we’ll talk about using the wisdom of crowds when drafting your fantasy football team.
But it’s also substantially less work.
No need to examine A.J.
Green’s redzone target conversion percentage to see how it stacks up against Dez Bryant.
No more tiers or formulas.
Instead, you’ll be able to feel confident about your draft with 20 minutes of preparation.
Utilizing the wisdom of crowds doesnotmean polling thousands of people on every player in the NFL.
Instead, we have effectively the same thing in results from thousands of actual fantasy drafts.
The key metric is each player’saverage draft position(ADP).
The lower a player’s ADP, the more valuable fantasy owners collectively view him.
We can view ADP as a consensus on many factors, e.g.
It’s all priced in.
The hypothesis: ranking players according to their ADP gives us a cheatsheet that’ll rival any expert.
So in the table below, last year Berry had Andrew Luck as the 12th best QB.
The “crowd” had him at 9 (i.e.
he was the 9th QB drafted on average) for a difference of 12 9 = 3.
The larger the difference, the more the crowd valued a player relative to Berry.
If ESPN minus ADP is associated withfewerpoints, then Berry wins.
We can find this relationship using a simple linear regression.
So what’s the verdict?
Not bad for a strategy that takes a fraction of the time to implement.
Want to check out the analysis yourself?
you’re free to download the data and codehere.
These were the only ones tested.
We would be willing to bet however, that many expert rankings would fare similarly.
It’s more accurate, takes less time to implement, and is free.
With that, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of implementation.
Get the Average Draft Position Data
The first step is getting our ADP data.
There are a few options here.
Enter in your league parameters in the drop down boxes at the top.
The crowd will adjust accordingly, but we need to verify we’re using the most recent drafts.
League Size:Most leagues onMyFantasyLeague.comhave 12 owners.
Luckily, this doesn’t matter as much.
Now you’ve got yourcheatsheet.
This is how you find value.
In general, ADP works better in selecting playerswithina given position (e.g.
picking one RB over another) rather than selecting playersbetweenpositions (e.g.
picking some RB vs some other WR).
The reasons for this are twofold:
First, ADP can change for certain positions depending on league parameters.
Just as importantly, the value of a given positionto youchanges with the flow of the draft.
Like everything, there are exceptions.
Finally, the wisdom of crowds is not meant to turn you into a fantasy robot.
Think a straight check-list is boring?
Even if you’re completely sold on ADP, there’s still room for some flexibility.
Often, ADP’s are very close (e.g.
Giovani Bernard’s 17.81 and Montee Ball’s 17.91).
This assures us of an above average draft; now we just have to keep the momentum rolling.
Things inevitably change once the season starts.
Some players do better than expected, some worse.
Unfortunately, that also means our ADP pre-draft rankings inevitably get out of date.
Ideally, leagues would havenewdrafts after every single week.
That way we could update our weekly in-season rankings using the wisdom of crowds.
Since this isn’t likely to happen any time soon, let me offer a next best alternative.
- Bayesian Fantasy Footballis specifically designed for this very in-season problem[ed.
their service is not free and requires a subscription fee].
As we’ve seen, that part requires very little time and absolutely no money.
Image adapted fromotsill(Shutterstock) andkentoh(Shutterstock).
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