It’s a different year in the Daily Football League. Meeting online via Zoom to select players, we didn’t use an auction. Instead, we simply drafted players for the first time in 25 years. That caused me to stumble onto a new way to measure the value of the different draft positions and formats.
Going with a draft rather than an auction, we needed to decide how to assign free agents during the season. A common method is to give each team a $100 payroll to bid on free agents during the season. (Each team would submit player requests on players; having to decide whether to spend money now are wait for a more promising option later in the year.)
But the owners in our league preferred our existing system, with waivers tied to player contracts. That way, if your star player is lost for the season with an injury, you at least pick up the consolation prize of having more salary cap space to work with, improving your ability to turn thing around by latching onto some key free agents.
With a draft, of course, players don’t have auction values. So we instead assigned player salaries (with the first player chosen having the largest salary, and the bottom 30 or so having salaries of $1). We’ve got a power nerd in our league, Mike, who carefully tracks the auction results each year. He averaged the last few years’ worth of results, then rounded the results for each of the 192 players to the nearest dollar.
Where this gets cool is you can then use those dollars to measure the value of each of the draft positions. While those aren’t directly tied to NFL stats, they’re an accurate reflection of what people think they’re worth – determined by what the market bears. You can look at the overall worth of each of the 12 teams, based on where they picked.
There are some quirky rules in this league. We draft only 16 players, and many teams don’t even draft that many (we allow teams to carry fewer than 16 if they run out of money). And it’s a TD-only league. But I have duplicated the study for the Fanex Auction League. It’s 20 teams competing in a PPR format, with each team spending $200 on 20 players. I used six years’ worth of auction results.
I spread some extra pennies onto the players to account for the trend that about $15-$30 each year (out of $2,400) goes unspent, with some teams being left holding some money at the end. I wanted each team to spend the full amount, so at the end, we could look back conclude that a $200.00 team is right at the average.
In the Fanex Auction, the most expensive five players, averaged $52.89, $51.37, $49.85, $48.34 and $46.32. An average of 66 players each year went for the $1 minimum.
We take those numbers and plug them into a regular snake draft, and you then see the advantage of having an early draft pick. The teams holding the first two picks end up having teams that are worth over $205. The bottom three teams ending having rosters that fall $4 short of the $200 average.
Again, this isn’t based on what players do or how things turned out. It’s built on what the franchise owners THINK players are worth. It’s based on the free-market approach of the auction.
| SNAKE DRAFT TEAM VALUES | |
|---|---|
| Pk position | Worth |
| Draft pick #1 | $207.11 |
| Draft pick #2 | $205.25 |
| Draft pick #3 | $203.57 |
| Draft pick #4 | $202.56 |
| Draft pick #5 | $200.36 |
| Draft pick #6 | $199.01 |
| Draft pick #7 | $199.35 |
| Draft pick #8 | $197.50 |
| Draft pick #9 | $196.83 |
| Draft pick #10 | $195.99 |
| Draft pick #11 | $196.15 |
| Draft pick #12 | $196.32 |
There’s also the “Third-Round Reversal” draft system. That format is the same as a Snake, but after the second round every pick is reversed. That is, the 12th pick instead of picking last in that round, moves back up to first for the third round (and for all remaining odd-numbered rounds, while moving to last in all remaining even-numbered rounds).
You may have heard some argue that the 3RR is a better way to draft than a standard snake. Here we can see that represented by the merging of this Fanex Auction data. Using those prices, all 12 teams are within $1.60 of the $200.00 mark.
With the standard snake, the majority of the teams (7 of 12) are more than $3 away from the $200 average. With the 3RR, all 12 teams are within $1.60. The top two spots still grade out as the best, but everything is a lot tighter.
| THIRD-ROUND REVERSAL TEAM VALUES | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pk position | Worth | Difference |
| Draft pick #1 | $201.55 | -$5.56 |
| Draft pick #2 | $201.21 | -$4.04 |
| Draft pick #3 | $199.86 | -$3.71 |
| Draft pick #4 | $199.18 | -$3.37 |
| Draft pick #5 | $198.85 | -$1.52 |
| Draft pick #6 | $199.52 | $0.51 |
| Draft pick #7 | $198.85 | -$0.51 |
| Draft pick #8 | $199.02 | $1.52 |
| Draft pick #9 | $200.20 | $3.37 |
| Draft pick #10 | $199.69 | $3.71 |
| Draft pick #11 | $200.20 | $4.04 |
| Draft pick #12 | $201.88 | $5.56 |
If we wanted to make the perfect draft order, we could take an even larger set of auction figures, then player around with a few more later-round picks, shifting some pennies around to get everyone as close as possible to $200. But I think the 3RR gets things close enough.
Props to Mike of the DFL. He sent me down this rabbit holes, and the results, I think, are interesting.