Draft Evaluation

Now that I have an expected value for each pick in the draft, I can check those expected values against how well each player actually did. I don’t want to over-engineer this metric, as I feel fairly good about the existing best-fit curves that I’ve created. I’m going to run through the draft_df data frame and add in two new columns. The first column will be called “Points Expected (Log)”, which will be the total points expected from our logarithmic curve given the draft position. The second will be a column that for now I will call “Delta,” which will represent the total differential between points scored and points expected. Higher values will be a good thing (where you got an incredible value based on the draft position), and lower values will be a bad thing. A “Delta” of 0 would represent a pick that panned out exactly as well as it should. I’m eager to get into this, so I’ll run the below code and get into the draft evaluations.

Code chunk for adding the additional columns, “Expected Points (Log)” and “Delta”, to my pandas data frame

Perfect! I am all set to check out the Deltas for every pick in the draft. There’s just one thing that I’d like to check in order to see whether our logarithmic curve has an issue. I want to make sure that the extremities of the curve don’t introduce much bias: that is, I want to make sure that the earlier and later picks of the draft don’t show a bunch of consistent high or low “Deltas”. If there’s not an issue, I should see a relatively random distribution of positive and negative numbers when I view all the “Deltas” by draft position.

Checking for a cluster of high or low deltas at the beginning and end of this graph is a simple way of seeing whether the extremities of the logarithmic curve don’t fit the data well.

I’m already getting excited. Not only does it look like the curve fits our extremities fairly well, I am also seeing some interesting data points pop! There’s a little bit less volatility in the final few rounds of the draft, but this is generally to be expected. When you get to the 12th round of a draft, there’s likely not to be any of the very best players available (which would produce very high “Deltas”) and there’s also lower point expectations from those draft picks (eliminating any “Deltas” that are significantly negative). Interestingly, the very worst pick of the draft came from the latter half of the draft, where we should generally expect less volatility. I am REALLY eager to see the best and worst picks here. I’m also interested in that first pick overall…Time for a reveal!

• Best Overall Pick

  Josh Jacobs, selected 50th overall by Bob’s Buttfumbles

  Expected Points: 164.9, Actual Points: 328.3, Delta: 163.4

• Worst Overall Pick

  Trey Lance, selected 119th overall by CHADS, Presented by Kroger

  Expected Points: 226.6, Actual Points: 12.5, Delta: -214.1

• First Overall Pick

  Jonathan Taylor, selected 1st overall by TUA the TOP

  Expected Points: 319.2, Actual Points: 146.4, Delta: -172.8

Luckily for me, my team (Bob’s Buttfumbles) had the best overall pick! Though it didn’t win me a championship, I knew all season that I got lucky with that one. Not surprisingly, the worst overall pick was the byproduct of an early injury to Trey Lance. And the first pick in our draft, Jonathan Taylor, was probably one of the most unfortunate picks across all ESPN Fantasy leagues. A consensus #1 or #2 pick, he also missed much of the season due to injury. I can’t blame “TUA the TOP” for that pick, that’s just an exemplification of the luck element of Fantasy Football.

But with each team making 16 picks, I should be able to get a sense of which teams drafted consistently better or worse than others. Easy enough to get the totals, I just need to sum the “Delta” column by team, and I can see the total draft results!

All ten teams in my league, sorted by best overall draft performance to worst

By a rather overwhelming margin, “The Sun God” absolutely dominated our draft. Though I was proud to take second, I happen to know (due to the above) that my result was almost exclusively the result of Josh Jacobs. The most interesting result to me was the relatively poor placement of our eventual champion, Easy Breecy Covergirl. He must have had a few good waiver wire pickups, because it certainly doesn’t look like he got started off on the right foot! And I feel like I have to give a shout-out to Bone Heads Rick for being almost EXACTLY a single point up against expected points. That is a miraculously “whelming” draft.