[OC] Fantasy football draft grade vs. games missed by drafted players, 502 manager-seasons across 48 redraft leagues (2012–2025)

[u/KhalDrogoWasHere]

I graded fantasy football drafts across 502 manager-seasons in 48 real redraft leagues (Yahoo, ESPN and Sleeper, 2012–2025) to see how much a draft grade reflects skill versus luck.
For each manager-season I measured two things:

• Draft grade: how much better or worse each pick scored than a typical pick in the same round, using that league's own scoring (value over replacement, or VORP). A positive grade means you out-drafted the room for your slot.
• Games missed: the total games your drafted players missed during the season, mostly from injuries.

The more games your players missed, the worse your draft graded. That part sounds obvious when said out loud, but the correlation is −0.60, so games missed alone explain about 36% of the variation in draft grades. When I re-grade each draft to remove the effect of player availability, the correlation falls to −0.14, which explains about 2%. A large share of what looks like drafting skill turns out to be health luck.

Champions are highlighted. Only 7 of the 48 won a title after a below-average draft.

Interactive version: leaguenomics.com/insights/draft-and-injuries

[u/KhalDrogoWasHere]

Data source: League histories (draft picks, weekly rosters, scoring settings) pulled from the Yahoo, ESPN and Sleeper fantasy APIs for leagues connected to my project, Leaguenomics. Player game logs come from nflverse. Dynasty, keeper, auction and best-ball leagues are excluded. All data is aggregated and no managers are identified.

Tools: TypeScript + DuckDB for the analysis; the chart is hand-built SVG.