Some Fantasy Football Analysis

Several weeks ago, my dad asked how many "elite" players there were at each position. This conversation led to an attempt to identify the "elite" players at each position. Now that the season has ended, here's what I came up with:

The first step was recording the scores of all the starting players - a starter in this case is any player that should have been started based on his points for the season. So, for example, there are 12 teams and one QB spot, so the top 12 QBs should have been started. Similarly, there are 12 teams and two RBs spots, so the top 24 RBs should have been started. We also start 2 WRs and just 1 TE, D/ST, Kicker, and a Flex.

Once I had all that information in excel it was pretty easy to analyze the data. I started off by setting my arbitrary "elite" line at 80% of the #1 player's point total. This worked well for RBs, WRs and TEs, but not so well for QBs (the top 7 QBs were considered "elite" with a cut-off of 80%). When I hiked the limit up to 90% for QBs, just 3 were considered elite. The final tallies for "elite" players by position were:

QB: 3
RB: 5
WR: 4
TE: 2
D/ST: 3
K: 3

General drafting strategies tell you not to draft a defense or kicker until much later in the draft so that leaves us with 14 "elite" players in the beginning of the draft. RBs tend to go off the board quickly in the first round while TEs rarely do so, so it certainly seems possible to end up with two "elite" players regardless of where you draft in the first round. Which positions should you target, though?

This is what I found most interesting about the numbers:

If you look at the difference between what the #1 player at each position scored and what the last startable player scored, the numbers make sense and are what I would have guessed ahead of time. The smallest difference is between the #1 and #12 QB; the largest difference is between the #1 RB and the #24 RB. However, the thing that surprised me is that if you look at that difference as a percentage of what the #1 scored (so, in effect, the percentage of points you lose if you were to get the last player instead of the first). RBs, WRs, and TEs were all around 50% (58.7, 47.2, 51.3, respectively). Quarterbacks, though, came in at 24.9% which is more in line with where Kickers (20.95%) and Defenses fell (28.5%).

So what does that mean?

It means that you should focus on drafting RBs, WRs, and getting a top TE early on and wait on QB. The difference between the #1 qb and #12 was just 5.5 points, where the difference between the #1 rb and #24 rb was 10.8!!