The Draftologist

Posts Tagged ‘ADP’

A few years back I did a study on the Running Back Rule of Thumb (stay away from RBs when they hit 30) that was published on Footballguys.com. My base conclusion was that out of the top 24 running-backs in any given year, you can expect between 20-21 to fall between the ages of 23-30 and having 6 or fewer years of experience; between 12-13 are aged 24-27 with 2-6 years of experience.

Let’s examine the current ADP for RBs from FFToolbox.com:

‘Sweet Spot’ RBs on the list include C. Johnson, Adrian Peterson, MJD, Gore,  Williams,  Greene, Grant,  Thomas, Benson, Forte & Addai. That’s 11- close to what I’d expect to see. Jackson and Turner are entering their 7th campaign and are thus a little more risky now. And note there are no 29 or 30 year-olds- the market appears to be afraid of older RBs!

Tomorrow we’ll apply equalized value to the list, weed out the less predictable situations, and recommend the RBs to build your team around.

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Welcome to Draftologist.com. We’ll begin the foray into real fantasy football drafting analysis by setting the baseline for QB ADP.

First- a quick primer on ‘ADP’ and what it really represents. ADP is an acronym for ‘average draft position’. Any statistician will tell you that ADP is statistically invalid, since ranks should not be averaged- they would argue that you use a median value. No matter- they do work in this context since we get an idea of the market valuation of a given NFL Player from his ADP position.

ADP sets the market; let’s take a look at the top 24 QB, as listed at FFToolbox.com today:

From my experience, I’ve found that it is exceedingly rare for a QB younger than 24 to finish in the top 12, and no rookies at all have done it in the past dozen years or so. Further, you want to try to get an QB aged between 25-30 and entering between his 2^nd and 8^th year. Why? Annually, you can expect to see between 8-9 of the top 12 QBs in this group. Would you rather try to find one of those guys, or try to pick the 3 or 4 guys that fall out of that group?

With this in mind, let’s examine the current market to see if they fit the profile. Rodgers, Romo, Rivers, Schaub, Cutler, Kolb, Ryan, Flacco and Eli Manning all fit the bill- that’s 9. The other three- Brees, Peyton Manning & Brady sound about right. The market fits what I’d expect- but how do we know if those are really the right guys to spend a high pick on? We’ll examine that in the next post.

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