EA Fantasy Football

How to take your draft to the next level using Value Based Drafting (VBD).


It's draft day. The day you've been looking forward to for the last three months. It's the day that you start your march towards a fantasy football championship. You are determined to come out of the draft with the best team, so you go armed with a set of rankings from your favorite fantasy magazine or website. Before you know it, you find yourself in the middle of the third round. You've already drafted a running back and a top wide receiver. You are now faced with a very tough and critical decision and know how much the wrong choice could cost you. But what is the right choice? Do you draft your second starting running back even though there have already been 17 or 18 of them drafted and you'd be looking at Cedric Benson or Cadillac Williams? Or, should you take your quarterback now and grab Carson Palmer while you still can? Then again, Antonio Gates is still there and probably won't be by the time the draft gets back around to you in the fourth round. By now, you're sweating like a fat man chasing a runaway M&M. The clock is running down and you need to make a decision fast. So, you do what most people do. You trust the ol' gut. Then you spend the next ten minutes wondering if it was the right move.

Many fantasy leaguers find themselves in situations like this every year. Often times they face these tough decisions many times in the same draft. If this situation sounds all too familiar to you and you're often wondering if there's a better way (or at least something to give you a better guide), I'm here to tell you that there is! Say hello to your new best friend, Value Based Drafting.

I first learned about Value Based Drafting (VBD) in the late '90s. I've used the idea with great success and am a firm believer in its principle ideas. In this article, I'm not just going to describe VBD, I'm going to tell you what I like about the method, how I use it and how the method can help you prepare for your fantasy drafts. These principles apply to almost any fantasy game, but it is up to you to decide which parts fit your personal draft philosophy the best.

So what is VBD? It is essentially a technique for assigning draft values to each player so that you can compare the values of players across different positions. For example, it will help you determine whether there's more value in the next running back available versus the next wide receiver.

The key idea of VBD is this - the value of a player is not determined by his overall points scored, but by the number of points he can outscore players from his position.

Let's take a simple example. Assume you are in a league with one other person and you start one QB and one RB each. Then assume that you are psychic and you know exactly how many points the players are going to score during the season. These are the available players and the fantasy points they will score:

QB
Manning, 300
Palmer, 275
Brady, 265

RB
Tomlinson, 290
Alexander, 250
Jackson, 240

You have the first overall pick in your two-team, two-pick draft. Your opponent has the second and third picks. Finally, you have the last pick. At first glance, you might think the natural draft order should be Manning, Tomlinson, Palmer, and then Alexander. After all, that's how they would rank in overall points. However, look a little more closely and put a bit more thought into it. If you take Tomlinson first, you are getting a 40 point advantage over the next best RB. Whereas drafting Manning first only gives you a 25 point advantage over the next best QB. So, taking Tomlinson first, the rest of the draft would play out with your opponent taking Manning and Alexander, leaving Palmer to you with the fourth and final pick. If we look at these two draft scenarios, you can quickly see which method is better. In the first, you end up with Manning (300) and Alexander (250) for a total of 550 points. In the second scenario, you end up with Tomlinson (290) and Palmer (275) for a total of 565 points! So you end up with more overall points in the end even though you passed on the highest scoring player in the draft. And THAT, my friend, is Value Based Drafting!

Now that you are sold on the idea of VBD, you need to know how to apply the technique to a real league with more teams, more starting positions, and more players. I'm about to tell you how to do that. I'm warning you though; it takes a little bit of work. If you are handy with a spreadsheet application, you should have no problems.

The first steps in putting together your VBD draft board are projecting stats and calculating fantasy points based on those stats. This much you should already be doing anyway. After all, how can you go by a set of rankings that doesn't take your scoring system into account? Most of you are probably like me and don't have the time to project stats for every player in your league. I recommend that you do what I do - grab a set of projections from the web and then tweak them to your liking. Then take those projections and apply your scoring rules to calculate projected fantasy points for each player. Many critics of VBD will stop you right here and say that this is one of the biggest flaws with the system. After all, nobody can see the future and accurately predict how many yards and TDs any given player will get in a season, much less do it for every player in the league. These critics are right. A VBD-draft is only as good as the projections behind it. But my answer to that is, "It's the best we've got." When it comes down to it, everybody is trying to rank players based on how well they think they'll perform throughout the season. Projections are nothing more than a more detailed version of player rankings. It's rankings, but with a little more thought put into it.

The next step in the VBD method is to determine a baseline. The baseline is what you measure players against in any given position in order to determine Draft Values. There are a lot of ways you could determine a baseline. A lot of times, I'll just use the Last Starter Method. It's the easiest and most basic method, yet it will work effectively for most people. Here's an example. Say your league has 12 teams and you start 1 QB, 2 RBs, and 3 WRs. The QB baseline would be the 12th overall QB, the RB baseline would be the 24th overall RB, and the WR baseline would be the 36th overall WR.

The fourth step is to calculate each player's Draft Value. The Draft Value is the difference between the current player's projected points and that of the baseline player's points. Again, the best way to describe this is with an example. In a league with 12 teams and one starting QB for each team, here's an example Draft Value calculation.

	Player	Points	Draft Value
1	Manning	350	92
2	Palmer	310	52
3	Brady	302	44
4	Bulger	290	32
5	Brees	283	25
6	Kitna	268	10
7	Young	265	7
8	Romo	264	6
9	Cutler	262	4
10	McNabb	260	2
11	Leinart	259	1
12	Hasselback	258	0
13	Favre	255	-3
14	Rivers	253	-5
15	Vick	251	-7

Based on these specific league rules and by using the worst starter baseline, Hasselback is the baseline in the above example. Each player's Draft value equals their projected points minus Hasselback's projected points.

The final step in the VBD process is to put all of the players into a single list, along with their projected points and Draft Values, and then sort them by Draft Value. This will give you a master draft list to use as a guide during your draft.

Look at that! You are now ready for your draft, armed with a master VBD list to guide you. But you need to remember, the VBD list is a guide. It's not written in stone. If you are sitting there in round 6 and the VBD list is suggesting that you take a fourth running back, please don't, unless your league uses that many starting running backs. Take the next highest valued player in a position that you still need filled. Another thing to remember is that your VBD list is only as good as your projections. So just because you are using VBD doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to win your league. But it's definitely better than just using rankings. There are other things to consider too if you really want to get fancy, but we'll leave that for another article. Just remember to use your VBD list, but at the same time, use your brain a bit too.

Good luck! And happy drafting!





Keith is a Software Engineer on Tiburon's Central Technology Group and has focused the majority of his time on the studio's football titles for two years. He began playing fantasy football in 1993.

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