What happens when there's way too many choices to make in your draft?
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Welcome to the most innovative fantasy football treatise, continuously adapting to changing NFL trends since 2000: The Best Damn Draft Method, or as it has affectionately come to be known to its many diehard adherents-- the BDDM.
This Fantasy
Forecast® will deal with a question that is becoming more and
more relevant these days. With the explosion of Individual Defensive Player
(IDP) leagues, many owners are confused as to the appropriate time to draft a
defensive player. Should Patrick Willis be taken ahead of Antonio Gates? Should Julius Peppers be grabbed ahead of your WR2? Ahead of your WR3? Heck, where should any position be drafted as compared to any
other position?
To answer that question, we'll draw on one of our
industry innovations: Consistency Rankings. Let's take a look at how consistent every position player is (excluding kickers and defensive teams, since many studies have proven that kickers should be drafted last and defensive teams next-to-last), the range of their scoring and their relative value. In order to gauge the relative value of positions, for this data sample we've chosen to look only at "draftable" players (those who started at least eight games), so we're essentially looking at players who would likely be chosen in the early-to-middle rounds of most fantasy drafts:
Consistency Ratings (“CR”) by Year and
Position
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Pos
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2003
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2004
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2005
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2006
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2007
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DB
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30.24
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30.59
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28.24
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29.40
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25.89
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DL
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35.93
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37.86
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35.25
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36.56
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37.16
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LB
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35.59
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35.22
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35.57
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33.33
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33.61
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QB
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34.46
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35.07
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31.02
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33.56
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40.08
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RB
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80.82
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71.35
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69.62
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74.28
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75.09
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TE
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67.68
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81.71
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77.18
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67.88
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61.72
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WR
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43.33
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39.37
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42.72
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40.19
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45.35
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(The lower the CR, the more consistent the position)
The first thing that jumps out of these numbers is the fact that the two most "stable" positions in 2007 were QB (offense) and DB (defense) while the least stable is RB. Interesting! The fact that RB was again the least consistent position in 2007 makes intuitive sense, given the growing number of running back by committee (RBBC) situations in the NFL.
