Value Based Drafting (VBD), has been around for a long time. I believe Joe Bryant, co-owner of FootballGuys, was the first to write about it as a fantasy football drafting strategy back in 2001.
VBD tells you to draft players that give you an advantage over the other teams in your league. No duh, right? Well, the complication is that each player’s value is dynamic based on your opponents actions (and predicted actions). Here’s an example:
Which player should you draft first?
Andre Johnson, WR -or- Jimmy Graham, TE -or- Marshawn Lynch, RB
The right answer is, it depends. Here are a few questions you might want to think about before making a choice:
- How many fantasy points do you project each player to score?
- How much higher are these projections compared to players you can grab later in the draft?
- Which players/positions are likely to be drafted between now and your next pick?
A sound VBD strategy attempts to answer these questions. It rejects the “best player available” strategy, which suggests that you should always draft the player with the highest projected fantasy points. Truth is that most of us subconsciously do a little value based drafting already; we don’t draft kickers early even though they score a ton of fantasy points. This is because the kicker position doesn’t give us a significant edge over our competitors. The last team in the league to draft a kicker is probably not doomed for the season.
I won’t go into detail on the theory behind the strategy, so if you’d like a little more meat than what’s here, check out this explanation from Advanced NFL Stats. I should also note that a lot of different acronyms get thrown around as labels for value based drafting. I use “VBD” to describe the overall concept, and VORP and VONA (explained below) to delineate between the two metrics we provide in our Cheat Sheet Wizard.
VORP (Value Over Replacement Player)
VORP was made popular by MLB stat heads (think Moneyball). It states that a player’s true value to his team should be based on his contribution relative to the readily available replacement player in the league. In other words, if I can easily replace you with someone just as good, you have no value to me (I think a former girlfriend told me that once). For fantasy football, this translates to, “How much better is this guy compared to someone I can grab off the waivers at the same position?” Some VBD drafters use value over the last starter (i.e. if your league starts 2 RBs and there are 12 teams in the league, the replacement player would be the 24th best RB). We prefer comparing to players you can actually pick up, but the underlying VORP principle is the same.
VONA (Value Over Next Available)
VONA attempts to further optimize your decisions by looking at relative player values on a round by round basis. If you’re trying to decide whether to draft Cam Newton or a WR, a lot depends on who will be available for you to grab with your next pick, not just who will be available on the waivers after the draft. If you know there’s going to be a run on QBs right after your current pick, the pickings may be slim at the QB position by the time things come back around to you. A player’s VONA depends on the options you’ll have on your next turn, and is greatly impacted by the number of picks between your turns.
If you’re still with me, you may have picked up on the fact that successful VBD drafting is just as much about making sound predictions as it is about getting the math right. In fact, the only math required is addition and subtraction. The problem is, most of us can’t do all of the required predictions and calculations while we’re on the clock. You’re already thinking about bye week conflicts, injury status, team needs, etc. so it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s a bit like trying to make the right poker decision; there are a gazillion things to consider and calculate before deciding what to do, and what you decide can make or break you (my Ocho over Gronk pick last year pretty much ruined my season).
THE WIZARD (VBD Made Easy)
This is where our secret weapon, the Cheat Sheet Wizard comes into play. The Wizard provides VONA and VORP values on the fly during your draft (oh yeah, for some sites we even synch live so that taken players are automatically recorded). The Wizard simplifies everything into simple point values for each player that will help you make tough cross-positional decisions during your draft. It bakes in:
- Expected fantasy points based on your cheat sheet.
- Which players are likely to be taken in the next XX picks before your next turn.
- Which players are likely to be taken in your entire draft.
Here’s a screen shot of where the VONA and VORP show up. We’ve designed the Wizard in a way that makes everything simple and clean. The last thing you want during your draft is cumbersome or complicated software!
Through our Pick Predictor, we’re able to determine which players will likely be taken in between your picks and for the full draft. We run multiple ADP sources and the largest database of expert cheat sheets on the web through draft simulations to get to pick odds for each player. This lets us get much more granular than “he’s usually drafted in round 5, according to ADP.” We get down to the level of, “there’s a 63% chance he’ll be taken before your next turn, which is coming in 14 picks.”
In addition to helping with VONA and VORP modeling, we provide the Pick Predictor data in its raw form (shown in the screenshot below) to help you know when to grab your sleepers and players you’re targeting. It helps you squeeze out more value by not reaching for your sleepers too early and not waiting too long to snatch them up (nothing’s worse than having to belt out, “Urgh! You took my sleeper!”).
Give the Cheat Sheet Wizard a test run. Check out the VONA and VORP advice and our Pick Predictor and let us know what you think. We hope it helps with your drafts!