Value Based Drafting

I discovered Football Guys a couple of years ago and consider it a better site than the corporate offerings. One of the site's claims to fame is its promotion of a concept called Value Based Drafting, VBD.

Maurile Tremblay sums it up nicely:

Consider, for simplicity, a two-team fantasy league with a universe of four eligible players: WR Roy Williams, WR Terry Glenn, TE Antonio Gates, and TE Jason Witten. Each team must start one wide receiver and one tight end, and the league championship is determined by total points.

The four players scored the following numbers of fantasy points last year based on their 2006 stats:

* WR Roy Williams - 255
* TE Antonio Gates - 217
* WR Terry Glenn - 212
* TE Jason Witten - 145

If you had the first pick in the draft last year, knowing ahead of time how many fantasy points each player would score, whom would you have selected?

The correct answer is not Roy Williams, but Antonio Gates. Even though Williams scored more points, Gates was more valuable. In fact, whichever team had Gates was guaranteed to win the league. Gates plus either wide receiver outscored the opposing WR-TE pair. The reason is that Gates outscored Witten by a greater amount than Williams outscored Glenn.

I've tried using their application for creating a VBD list, but in the end, I reasoned that seasoned fantasy footballers generally do this by instinct. You're not really going to take Maurice Jones Drew in the second round if Peyton Manning is still on the board, are you? Yeah, yeah, Stud RB Theory, but Rudi Johnson, Peyton Manning and Marion Barber is tons better than Rudi Johnson, Jones-Drew and Matt Hasselbeck (why do I pick on him so much?)

The monkey wrench is what the other players in your league do. I have a shiny new Becket Fantasy Football magazine and their mock draft had Tom Brady available in the fourth round. In the redrafts I have played in, there always seems to be a run on the top four or five QBs starting as soon as someone takes Manning. I don't see Brady in round four in that case this year.

Who was it that said no plan survives contact with the enemy?

There is value in considering the premises of VBD, however. For example, I started taking risks on TEs as early as the third round in the last few years because while I was sure I could get a 1000 yard receiver in round 4 and probably off the wire during the season, there are only a handful of elite TEs. Having one sets you apart.

The Golden Geezer has a series of draft strategy articles that he should start posting soon. I'm looking forward to them.