Dominate Your Fantasy Football Draft With Excel

Using the Value Based Drafting strategy and Excel spreadsheets, you can create a straightforward cheatsheet that’ll help you dominate your fantasy football draft.

NFL training camps are in full swing, and the regular season is only a month away. This is an exciting time for fantasy football players getting ready to draft their teams. If you own a fantasy football team and are looking to dominate your draft, creating a simple spreadsheet using Value Based Drafting (VBD) strategies can give you the championship edge. Fire up Microsoft MCTS Training Excel (or your spreadsheet of choice) and give it a try.

The ABCs of VBD
VBD is a strategy that goes beyond simply drafting the best player available and digs deeper to help you draft players that will give you the most value at their position. “It’s tempting to look at standard-scoring leagues and say, ‘Oh, clearly quarterbacks score the most points, so I should make sure and get one of those first,'” said Christopher Harris, fantasy analyst for ESPN.com in an e-mail to me. “But if all QBs score a lot of points, scarcity isn’t an issue, and you can potentially afford to wait.”

For instance, say you’re in a 10-team league that starts 1 QB and 2 Running Backs (RB) per game. If there isn’t much difference in quality among the top 10 QBs, but there’s huge gap in production when you get beyond the top 5 RBs, you’re better off drafting one of the top five RBs before the top five QBs even if those QBs score more fantasy points. As Footballguys.com writer Joe Bryant, the guy credited with coming up with the VBD concept, puts it, “The value of a player is determined not by the number of points he scores, but by how much he outscores his peers at his particular position.”
View Slideshow See all (8) slides
Step One: Determine Your Baseline
Step Two: Setup Stats
Step Three: Project Stats
Step Four: Sort Players by Fantasy Points

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Another big advantage of using a VBD cheatsheet is you can tailor your cheatsheet specifically to your league settings and scoring system. “Gone are the days of counting touchdowns and field goals. Now yardage, receptions, bonuses for TD length, performance bonuses, etc., are all standard fare,” said David Dodds of Footballguys.com in an e-mail, “So it is natural that people want projections (and cheatsheets) that match up closely to their scoring system.”

Your VBD Cheatsheet
Creating your own VBD cheatsheet is fairly straightforward once you know the formulas involved in applying VBD principles, and have a good spreadsheet program like Excel. The first, and most time-consuming, step is projecting stats for the players to be drafted. You can do this by looking at each player’s stats from the past few years and factoring in their current playing situation to estimate this year’s stats.

To create my VBD spreadsheet I decided to trust the projected stats found on ESPN.com and CBSsports.com and my own intuition to estimate how well each player in my league draft pool will perform. Next, I used those stats to determine how many fantasy points each player would score and ranked them from the highest scorer to the lowest.

Ranking Potential Draftees
The critical step in determining players’ value is creating a baseline you can use to gauge other players at that position. The easiest way to do this is the Worst Starter method. With this method, you use the projected fantasy points of the worst starting player at a position as your baseline. So if you’re in a 10-team league that starts 3 Wide receivers (WR), your baseline for WRs would be the 30th WR in your rankings.

While this method works fine, Microsoft MCITP Certification I prefer to use Chris Harris’ method of counting how many players at each position are likely to be drafted in the first 10 rounds. This is harder to determine, but I feel like it gives me a more precise ranking. So if 28 RBs are drafted in the first 10-rounds of a draft, the 28th ranked RB will serve as my baseline player in determining the VBD values for other RBs. You can find a good estimation of what players are taken in the first 10 rounds of most drafts at FantasyFootballCalculator.com.

From there you determine each player’s VBD value by subtracting the projected fantasy points of your baseline player from the projected fantasy points of each player at that position. Finally, you rank all players of every position by their VBD value to determine each player’s overall value.

Go With Your Gut
As with anything in fantasy football, VBD isn’t absolute. There are times where you can afford to, or even should, deviate from the VBD concept. “I think of VBD as a way to normalize positions, so I can have a better sense of breaking points: where does it make sense for me to get my starting quarterback, or my flex player, or my starting tight end?” said Harris. “I’ll also factor in stuff like keepers, ADP(Average Draft Position), and what I know about the knuckleheads in my league (e.g., what positions they like, what players they tend to overdraft, etc.).”

Step-by-Step VBD
For the actual nuts and bolts of creating a spreadsheet using Excel, I called Todd Beckstead of FantasyStrategies.com, and he walked me through the process of creating a VBD spreadsheet of my own. Check out the slideshow to see how to create your own VBD spreadsheet.

If this seems like too much work, Beckstead and Dodd offer applications that can do all the heavy lifting of VBD for you. FantasyStrategies.com uses a Web-based application to generate a cheatsheet tailored to your league’s settings. FootballGuys.com’s Draft Dominator is an awesome standalone app that goes in-depth using dynamic VBD strategies that constantly change priorities based on needs/wants of the other teams and many other factors. The free versions work great, but you’ll want to pay for the premium versions ($4.95 for the premium Fantasystrategies.com draft guide, and $27.95 for the premium Draft Dominator) to get the most up-to-date projections.

Personally, however, I enjoy putting together my own VBD spreadsheet; it really helps you understand the nuts and bolts of your fantasy football league and it’s one of the best ways I’ve ever found to dig into NFL stats. And, as any sports fan worth his or her salt knows, the stats are half the fun. If you’re serious about fantasy football, give VBD a try—you’ll be glad you did.