A Better Look at ADP
Perry Van Hook, FantasyFootball.com
http://fantasyfootball.com/a-better-look-at-adp/
No, not the Minnesota running back – what’s not to like there? I am talking about Average Draft Position – what it is and why/when it is important.
I see many articles and posts about how important a player’s rank is on an Average Draft Position list, but while there is a point to be made there, and tendencies to be gleaned (especially if YOU don’t do a lot of mock drafts yourself), there are three important factors I see generally ignored.
1) Average of WHICH drafts?
ADP data from fourteen team leagues has ZERO value if you are in a twelve team league. Data from WCOFF scoring mocks doesn’t have much relevance if you are trying to work on your draft prep for the FFPC.
2) WHO drafted these leagues?
Again, there is ZERO value from drafts where several of the drafters were bots or where any of the drafters picked for the first half of the draft and then put their team on auto-pilot for the rest of the draft while they went to lunch.
3) WHEN were these leagues drafted?
There is a huge difference in players drafted – and where from leagues done in May or early June versus early August (and btw, some of that is good and some may be detrimental. Once training camps open, little injuries get blown out of proportion and most are ameliorated after a few pre-season games. OTOH, in May we all thought Michael Crabtree would be signed, in camp, and preparing to be a starting WR for the 49ers).
So what can you do to get the best ADP information you can…..and then how do you use it to your advantage?
First of all you would strongly prefer to have REAL drafts as the basis for the numbers. This is not so easy to find, BUT if you are headed for one of the high dollar, national FF contests (and I have upcoming articles and information on all of these – WCOFF, NFFC, FFPC and FFOC…..and they ALL still have room if you haven’t already signed up) – it really behooves you to enter one of their “satellite” leagues because then you will not only have the experience and draft data from the league YOU drafted in, BUT you will have access to all the other leagues in their contests that are drafted early. Spending an additional $125 for the REAL draft experience AND the ADP data for your particular contest is a small additional investment in research when your entry is well over a thousand dollars.
If you can’t do that, and you want better ADP data, go directly to Mock Draft Central.com and after signing up, you can SELECT the particular drafts you want the information for. With all the differences, you can’t use NFFC ADP if you are preparing for WCOFF – it’s just not good information (league size, 3RR in one not the other, differences in scoring rules, etc). The same is true if you get your stats from MFL – tailor it to the size league you are prepping for, and if you can, the same scoring rules.
Next, remember what the data is…………….averaged draft slots from all these different drafts. So if the current listing says Matt Forte was second and Maurice Jones-Drew was third, that is really not very important and not why YOU want to look at these numbers. You are far more interested in what ROUND, not position in a round, certain players go for.
Let’s say you think Dallas running back Felix Jones is really going to get enough touches to be valuable as a flex player (RB3), or a running back drafted late enough for you to pick him up with a couple of other backs, one of whom will be your RB2 starter most weeks (RB2BC…but that is another article). What is the range of where Felix has been drafted? In recent WCOFF (twelve team, PPR, 2RB, 3WR + Flex starters) ADP data, he was not among the first 72 players drafted which would mean you should NOT draft him in the 4th round because you really like him….you can easily wait until the sixth round and perhaps beyond. As we get closer to draft day these things will change, so you want to stay on top of it, but the value is knowing not to jump on a player several rounds too early. (In more recent WCOFF style drafts from MDC, Jones has an average of #73, again seventh round, BUT the early pick was #56/6th round and the latest was #93/8th round)
Conversely, if you are not interested in spending an early pick on your quarterback, first my congratulations on having the correct thought process, but you do want to know where the second tier quarterbacks (Warner, Rodgers, McNabb, Rivers, Schaub and perhaps Romo) are being drafted, and which of the third tier quarterbacks is being drafted first (Cutler) and where (on average #74, but the spread is early of 63/6th round, and late of 91/8th round).
If you haven’t done any drafts yet in 2009, you may be shocked by some things you have read about drafts and draft positions. You are in a twelve team league and your league has historically drafted running backs well into the second round. If the league uses PPR (point per reception), you know that some of the best wide receivers will be scoring as many points as many of the running backs selected in the first round. Still while Larry Fitzgerald has gone as high as 1.03 in some REAL drafts and probably has an ADP of 1.07 or 1.08, a large part of that is because many RB1s have some questions at this point, either health concerns or usage concerns, so Brian Westbrook and LaDainian Tomlinson in particular have gone far LATER in early drafts than they actually will in September when people sit down with their cash on the line and it is Really their turn to draft.
In my next ADP article, we will look at some specific data from one of the high stakes leagues to give you more insight. The reason I like information from those drafts is that it is far more important what your competitors think than what you see from Industry Drafts (commonly referred to as Expert Drafts, but some of those writers and analysts have never won a dime in $$ FF leagues and DON’T invest their own money in the big competitions and seriously if a guy has been starting his draft by going RB/RB/RB for ten years, he is likely way out of touch with what happens in YOUR leagues).
Just one final thought on ADP which I repeat at the end of every segment on the subject. No matter what I write or Lou Tranquilli or Matthew Berry or David Dodds (or any other writer or analyst, no matter how good) write this month, it does not mean that if you draft against one of us next month you know who we are going to draft. It just doesn’t. When you are finally at the draft ADP is again just a running back that will go in the first few picks.