Draft season is officially in full swing, with the majority of managers drafting in in the next 3 weeks. As we get ready to draft our hopefully league dominating rosters, we have a multitude of options for draft strategies: positional focus (eg robust RB, zero-RB/robust WR), true value-based drafting via value over replacement, pure rank, or average draft position value.
Although each of these draft strategies could be potentially successful, they often lead to a lot of fear if something "goes wrong" in the draft. For example, you are planning on going robust RB, with a focus on drafting RBs in the first 2 rounds, but you see that 9 RBs go off the board before your pick. Do you stick to your strategy or take an elite WR? This dilemma then throws off your plan for the rest of the draft, and you scramble in fear to reset your drafting strategy. In another example you see the running back that you are so excited about is available with 2 picks to go, you'll get "your guy" and WIN THE ENTIRE LEAGUE! (results not guaranteed) But then this player gets drafted immediately before you, and you scramble to reach for the next best RB or get value another position. In yet another example, in the middle rounds there is a run on WRs, should you join in on the run so you don't miss out on a talented WR or jump on another position?
Although each of these draft strategies could be potentially successful, they often lead to a lot of fear if something "goes wrong" in the draft. For example, you are planning on going robust RB, with a focus on drafting RBs in the first 2 rounds, but you see that 9 RBs go off the board before your pick. Do you stick to your strategy or take an elite WR? This dilemma then throws off your plan for the rest of the draft, and you scramble in fear to reset your drafting strategy. In another example you see the running back that you are so excited about is available with 2 picks to go, you'll get "your guy" and WIN THE ENTIRE LEAGUE! (results not guaranteed) But then this player gets drafted immediately before you, and you scramble to reach for the next best RB or get value another position. In yet another example, in the middle rounds there is a run on WRs, should you join in on the run so you don't miss out on a talented WR or jump on another position?
These fears are what we try to avoid by using a value-based tier drafting system. The gist of this strategy is that ALL players fall into respective positional tiers, where players within a tier should be similar to each other in performance. You can still use this system to focus on RBs, WRs, getting a top tier QB or TE, but it overall takes some of the stress off when "your player" is drafted, a positional run starts, or something else unexpected happens.
Without getting into it too much, these tiers are generated from fantasypros.com data which aggregates expert consensus tiers. By selecting the top 10 most accurate experts we can then apply a clustering algorithm (K-means clustering) to find "tiers" within the data. Notice these are statistically defined clusters/tiers and are not based on tiers from the experts themselves.
This might make a little more sense if we go ahead and look at the tiers. These tiers allow us to visually compare the different tiers very quickly, and we can see where the available players lie in terms of value. Using these tiers I was able to make quick decisions about who to draft, and at what value even with AT&T trying to ruin my draft via dropped connections. You can treat players within a tier as equals, so if a player falls into the same tier you would need to make a decision based on external factors (your gut, matchups, injury, etc).
These tiers are also useful during the season weekly, and I will likely be posting some of those (at the very least I use them myself).
To close out this article, here is the original Tears for Fears: Everybody wants to rule the world. Rock on!
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