Wait, its still August

For some reason, we’re hosting the draft a bit early this year (stop going on vacation Jeff). NFL teams are in the thick of training camp giving beat reporters plenty of fuel to stoke deprived fans’ optimism. For example, Travis Hunter looks like a legit dual threat, DJ Moore’s looking good with snaps at RB, JJ McCarthy is throwing well, and Aaron Rodgers … thinks he looks stupid in his new helmet? Though its early, returning to fantasy means catching up on web scraping and spending two hours learning Selenium’s new syntax and two additional hours figuring out how to scrape ESPN’s new HTML tags.

I mostly repeated last year’s analyses, so for details and a bit more nuance than I’ll offer here, refer back to last year’s article.

Here is the sacred grid: What order players finished (weeks 1-17) against what order they were drafted. Axes are log2 scaled since drafting the WR1 at WR10 is much better than drafting the WR31 at WR40. The dashed line follows x=y so players above the line “exceeded” expectations and finished better than the order they were drafted.

A few things to note: The eventual champion Zach only drafted 3 players above expectation (Jayden Daniels QB12 - QB5, Derrick Henry RB14 - RB4, and Rico Dowdle RB38 - RB23). Dave was really good at drafting QBs at value (Baker QB19 - QB4, Bo Nix QB21 - QB7, and Darnold QB34 - QB9), while I was really good at drafting WRs (Chase WR4 - WR1, London WR12 - WR6, Terry WR33 - WR8, and Ladd WR50 - WR14). Also note that one point on Emily’s graph. That would be a bug in Alan’s code listing Mike Williams as the WR1 (visualize your data kids).

Team Players above expectation
Dave 9
Alan 8
Cody M. 8
Emily 7
Mike 7
Steve 7
Taylor 7
Jeff 6
Jeremy 6
Max 5
Cody C. 4
Zach 3

I hold as a personal belief the most important goal of the draft is to “hit” on your first 4 picks. Lets see who had the highest average finish among their first 4 picks:

Team Name Average finish of top 4 picks
Cody M. 6
Alan 6.5
Dave 8.25
Zach 9.75
Jeff 13.2
Mike 14
Taylor 17.2
Jeremy 21
Max 26
Cody C. 28.8
Steve 32.2
Emily 41.8

Zach did a lot better with these early picks. As most failed fantasy seasons, Emily’s average finishes were driven down by an early Brandon Aiyuk injury (WR14 - WR106), though drafting Mahomes at QB2 and finishing at QB11 didn’t help. Similarly, Steve was bit by Anthony Richardson (QB8 - QB25) and Olave (WR13 - WR95).

Now that the web scraping is up and running, I’ll be going back to some of our league’s historical results throughout the year. Let me know if you have any ideas or questions you’re curious about, but for now, I need to start mock drafting.

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