Assuming draft position is out of the control of individual owners, I don't see any value in studying it...
What % of fantasy leagues allow you to pick your draft spot on the basis of the final standings in the previous year ala fantasy football index? I guess in that case it would be useful...but I don't really think any scientific results would correlate to anything when you consider no two drafts are the same..there are way too many variable parts ..you can win from anywhere..
If there's one thing I can't stand its people who enter a draft room, online or in person, and start bitching about how they got shafted in the draft order. Man up and make the best picks throughout and you win.
Eh it's incredibly lame to have the last pick in a 14 + team league. It takes so long for you to get your third round pick. I hate having to wait that long and watch everyone I want taken.
I assume you are looking at "re-draft" leagues. I think there would have to be a lot of variables you'd need to control for to do this study correctly. No two owners are the same, many times you have newbies or inactive owners competing against veteran and active owners. You will need an awful lot of sample points to get rid of the noise, something that I doubt you could get from this thread. If you had access to every single Yahoo standard 5x5, 12 team league last year and could enter all the data into a database, perhaps you could find something. But you won't from 10 to 20 data points. Also, the draft is only makes up a portion of how well your team will do. There are also free agent pickups, trades and decisions on which players to start on a daily basis. Also, the distribution of players and their talents are different from year to year. You'd need to go back atleast 10 years and look at all the empirical data from then too. I don't think you should be looking for final standings, as your correlation between that and draft position should be close to zero. You will probably find more correlation between draft position and expected end of year standings based off of projections (with no free agent pickups, trades etc...). You may find some correlation there, but my guess is you won't find much. vr, Xei
You would have to get your hands on 1000's of points of data for this to really be meaningful given all the variables involved. I think a better bet is to take roto authority's player value, pick them 'in order' and see what value each team ends up with.
xeifrank wrote:I assume you are looking at "re-draft" leagues. I think there would have to be a lot of variables you'd need to control for to do this study correctly. No two owners are the same, many times you have newbies or inactive owners competing against veteran and active owners. You will need an awful lot of sample points to get rid of the noise, something that I doubt you could get from this thread. If you had access to every single Yahoo standard 5x5, 12 team league last year and could enter all the data into a database, perhaps you could find something. But you won't from 10 to 20 data points. Also, the draft is only makes up a portion of how well your team will do. There are also free agent pickups, trades and decisions on which players to start on a daily basis. Also, the distribution of players and their talents are different from year to year. You'd need to go back atleast 10 years and look at all the empirical data from then too. I don't think you should be looking for final standings, as your correlation between that and draft position should be close to zero. You will probably find more correlation between draft position and expected end of year standings based off of projections (with no free agent pickups, trades etc...). You may find some correlation there, but my guess is you won't find much. vr, Xei
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by kingmike74 » Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:01 pm 
