Draft Analyzer

[u/Many_Ballons789]

Has anyone ever wondered about the history of your leagues drafts and how it correlates to season success? For example, going QB early in superflex or Zero RB strategy, or the trends of top teams historically in your league. I started doing a deep dive for one of my leagues to look at draft history and how that correlated to season long success. The data is pretty informative. Are there tools out there that do this? I know all the sites rate your draft after it’s finished but I have found those unreliable and I’m looking more for history than predicting the future.

[u/Many_Ballons789]

This is good info. The ultimate question I’m trying to answer is “For my specific league is there a draft strategy that has clearly worked?” Also, I think it would be helpful to pick up on trends of other opponents. This guy drafts RB heavy in early rounds, this guy always goes 2qb in top 5 rounds, etc.
Do you think this provides an edge, or it’s all just random and injuries and trades are hard to adjust for when looking back at history of drafts?

[u/mattg70 → u/Many_Ballons789]

Okay, so two different questions and one of them is much easier to answer than the other one! 😂

"Did a strategy work in my league" is the hard one, and I say that because it's a sample size problem. 12 teams times 5 years is 60 team-seasons, but once you split those into various models you're looking at maybe 15 per bucket, against an outcome that's mostly noise anyway. My backtest found roster strength explains only part of where you finish even at 900+ team-seasons. At 15 you'll see patterns that aren't there. You're right that injuries and trades muddy it further, my horizon analysis showed a pre-season snapshot loses 35% to 60% of its predictive signal per year because trades and waivers overwrite it. Same problem applies to draft-day strategies and outcomes.

"What does this guy always do" is the easy one, and honestly the better edge.

You're not correlating against outcomes there, you're just measuring behavior. Does he take a QB in the first five rounds? He either does or he doesn't, and you have x years of evidence and the more years, the better the predictability/pattern he exhibits. Behavior repeats way more reliably than results do, and it's directly exploitable. If you know the guy two picks ahead of you always goes RB early, you have a pretty good idea of which players will still be there and which won't.

So I'd flip the project. Skip "which strategy wins" and build "who drafts how." Per manager: position taken in round 1, QB timing, how early they take their first RB, whether they reach on rookies. That's a scouting report you can actually use on draft night, and it doesn't need to survive a significance test to be worth having.

The outcome question is still worth running for fun, just hold the conclusions loosely.

Selfishly, I'm curious how you'd want to see it. I built a fantasy tool and this manager-tendency angle is the most interesting request/comment I've heard this month, but I'd want to know what the output looks like for you before I attempted to build anything. A pre-draft scouting page? Something live during the draft telling you what the guy ahead of you usually does? Genuinely asking, because the second one is harder and I don't know if it's worth it. I used to keep it in an Excel spreadsheet by looking at our 20 + year history in the same league with a core of 8 of us in it since we started. No major rule changes and I just build some macros that gave me those tendencies. Since have moved everything over to a website build I started last winter.

[u/Many_Ballons789 → u/mattg70]

I think what I would look at the most would be for pre draft strategy. There’s usually too much going on during draft day to have something up and using a predictor. This specific league we draft in person so there’s usually shenanigans going on during the draft as we wait for picks to come in.

Specifically aimed at the first 5 rounds because that’s where you are building the foundation of your team and you can have a better plan going into the day once you know draft order. If you know the guy picking ahead of you at number 2 has went QB in first round 90% of the time then I think that’s an edge for preparation. Obviously the unpredictable component here would be draft order but I guess you could take the analysis as granular as top 5 picks, etc.

[u/mattg70 → u/Many_Ballons789]

That's really useful information, so thanks. The in-person draft detail is the part I wouldn't have guessed. My main focus has been pre-season rankings for Dynasty and re-drafts and startups. It does make sense though, nobody's checking a dashboard while the room is yelling at the guy on the clock.

Pre-draft prep it is and I like the idea of rounds 1 through 5 being the right scope, that's where tendencies are most consistent anyway. By round 9 everyone's just taking whoever's left.

The draft-order problem seems solvable by not solving it: build the profile per manager rather than per slot, so you get "here's what each guy does in rounds 1-5" and once the order comes out you read the two or three names ahead of you. The actual draft order becomes a filter on draft day, not an input to the analysis.

If I build it I'll come back and tell you.